Mr. Varrelmann

An educator of the year should be a person who is funny, nice, and not to mention, a good teacher. All of these qualities represent my autos teacher, Mr. Varrelmann.
During class selection, sophomore year, I was incredibly excited. I was finally eligible to take an automotive class. I remembered walking up to North campus and touring all of the tech ed classes. I was blown away by the auto shop. It was full of cars, tools, and equipment and I wanted to learn what all of it did.
We all sat down and the autos teacher came up to the desk and introduced himself as Mr. Varrelmann and told us all about the classes that are offered for autos. Then, he showed us a demonstration about engine compression. He took a cylinder, with a hole for a spark plug at the bottom, sprayed some lighter fluid into it to represent gasoline, and squeezed a racket ball into the hole at the top. He gave the spark plug a spark and it shot the ball flying in the air with a lot of force. I was sold. I was taking an autos class When I got my sign up sheet, I made sure the one thing I didn’t forget was autos.
Junior year came and I was nervous, since I have never been good at tech classes. Mr. Varrelmann started class by introducing himself and mentioned that we are allowed to call him Mr. V. After that, he started talking about what the class is and what we were going to be doing all semester, all while cracking some cheesy, but funny jokes. I knew I would enjoy this class, not only because I am excited to learn about cars, but also because I know Mr. V will make it enjoyable.
When learning, he wouldn’t just give us information. He would use examples and tell interesting stories. He had stories for everything and he would talk about it in a way that we could all understand. When lab came, where we had hands-on practice of things we learned, he wouldn’t just set us free to screw up whatever we touched. Instead, he walked around and not just supervised, but he helped. If we needed to fix something that wasn’t on the job sheet, he would allow us to work on it and gives us extra points for it. There was a limit, though. Some things are better to work on when you’ve taken a higher level class.
After the semester ended, I was sad, since I didn’t sign up for a second semester autos class. But, I was assigned to have study hall in the autos classroom. I was the only one there, for three-fourths of the semester. During that time, I was able to refresh the knowledge from the previous semester with Mr. V and also bring my car to work on while he was prepping for the next day of classes. If I had a problem, he would still help me out.
Senior year came and I had taken another autos class and it was once again taught by Mr. V. It was refreshing to hear his cheesy jokes. Senior year was more advanced and more fun. When Mr. V is teaching, I can tell he really enjoys spreading knowledge of things he loves.
He is a pretty laid-back teacher and doesn’t concentrate too much on following a schedule. But, he still gets everything done and he still manages to make it fun for everyone.