“Whooo, Good morning ladies and gents! I’m getting a sweet aroma of a summer beach mixed in with puberty in this corner and over here I smell some type of Axe body spray and sweaty gym socks.” These are the words of the one and only, Mr. Freeburg. Mr. Freeburg is without doubt not your normal English teacher. Picture a Sci-Fi nerd that skateboards, and also is taking a graduate English class. Not your normal English teacher. He is the type of teacher that thinks 400 miles outside of the box.
Mr. Freeburg may sound weird but he’s the type of weird that makes his class a student favorite. Every semester, his English class is the first one full. By the first week into the class, it instantly became my favorite class of the day. The 40 minutes flew by and Freeburg’s lectures about how Streetcar named Desire is a classic (STELLLAAA!), what happened to him in his night college English classes, and his outrageous back in the day stories just made every student in the room not want to leave. His class was never boring. His stories taught me that you will find your calling in life in the weirdest places at the most bizarre times.
Freeburg and I may not have had a close personal relationship where he taught me life stories or helped me achieve an A in his class but he made sure every single person in his class was entertained and knew the material. He made teaching seem like effortless and he made reading and understanding a 500 page book even more effortless. For the first time in years, I actually didn’t mind reading. The discussions we had in class the next day, you would be a fool not to read and be a part of the discussion. Without even realizing it, he showed me reading wasn’t as bad as I thought.

Freeburg is an out of the box thinker and an unusual, unpredictable English teacher. This is why I am nominating him for Educator the Year.