Ever since I paired a striped shirt with a frilly polka-dot skirt, school was like second nature to me. I would fly off the bus at 3:28 exactly from school only to eat a quick snack to hold me over until dinner time and then it was back to the books. My homework was finished before anything else got done. But I hadn’t found something that I was passionate about. However, I made progress towards this idea during those awkward middle school years.

I was going to be a sixth grader, which meant I was climbing to the top of the ladder. I had graduated to the title of “Big Kid.” This was the time when my parents and teachers primed me for high school with “You need to figure out what you want to do and what you want to be.” Thankfully, my entertaining, invested, and creative science teacher, Mr. Hogan, answered that question for me.

Walking into his class for the first I could feel my head throbbing with worry. I had never met this teacher before — I didn’t know what to expect. At first glance, he was intimidating to a petite sixth grader. He marched into class, ducking his head down to prevent it from getting knocked by the door frame. His voice belted in a deep tone as he introduced himself. At this point, I wasn’t to sure if I was going to enjoy this class..

As soon as Mr. Hogan began teaching, his intimidating features faded away, and not long after we all resembled dogs begging for more. Eventually, Mr. Hogan let us meet his “associates” France and Lance, who were characters he pretended to be. He marched into the room speaking in a deep, raspy french accent — he voiced that he was France. France strolled throughout the tightly woven desks and the more spacious lab stations explaining to us the anatomy of the luscious moss colored bull frog. He motioned out to the hall for his associate Lance. Walking back into the silent room, he speaks with a slightly higher accent than France had — he was now Lance. He lead us back to the lab stations, showing us how to dissect the frogs with his laughable accent.

Mr. Hogan incorporated things like Lance and France into his everyday teaching. His students never left his class without laughing at least once. Even if you didn’t enjoy science, in Mr. Hogan’s class, you did.

I can vividly recall learning about binomial nomenclature. I couldn’t tell you what we learned about it, but I will never forget that word. We were sitting in our desks intently listening to him and he flips to the next slide. Spelled across it is binomial nomenclature. When he says the two words, he elongates the word and fluctuates the tone in his voice, sounding something like this — Biiiiinomial nooomenclature. He proceeds to walk up to the student closest to him and demands that he say it just as he previously did. Mr. Hogan walked around the whole class until everyone had said binomial nomenclature, however, if you didn’t say it to his liking you had to say it again.

That day, I know that no one left his class without laughing. Everyday in his class there was something new, whether it was a dissection, an exciting word, or a game, we were always having a blast. But Mr. Hogan wasn’t just a teacher, he was a person to me. Most students think teachers are there just yell at them and give them homework to keep them busy. However, Mr. Hogan did more than that. There were many times where I stayed after school to talk about things with Mr. Hogan, ranging from homework questions to softball stories.     

Mr. Hogan was a fun loving teacher who actually go this students interested in what he was teaching. To me and many others, he was more than just a teacher.