I would characterize junior year as a year of stress: college, the ACT and advanced classes. And with this stress, there’s an advantage to having a teacher who makes their class enjoyable to go to, but I never thought this class would be ninth hour math. With a teacher as dedicated, intelligent and witty as Mr. Martin, there’s nothing boring about his class.

Having topics like trigonometry, functions and probability aren’t exciting to teach or learn. But somehow Mr. Martin succeeds in making each class and topic enjoyable and easy. He made classes fly by at lightning speed. With probability, he used the March Madness basketball brackets to see how many ways the brackets can be filled out. For a project, we had to find the mean, median and mode of a set of data. We were allowed to chose our set of data and my partner chose and I choose Starburst to do these data sets on. We tested the yellow and the pink Starburst, which ended up being fun and creative way of making real life problems in math. March Madness problems and other problems are exciting problems that we get to solve that create an exciting learning environment.

With each review Jeopardy game for math, Mr. Martin comes up with funny lines from his favorite movie or telev skit to be title’s of his Jeopardy games. These title’s never fail to bring a smile or chuckle to me, especially when he reads them in a silly voice. On pie day, on each slide of notes, was a funny cartoon or picture that dealt with pie. Things like these help make math enjoyable.

Mr. Martin makes an effort to help all students in his class succeed. He’s at school early in mornings, and late in the afternoon to help students who didn’t understand a lesson. He never makes any of his students feel stupid for asking questions in class. He also allows one make up test a semester, but before one of his students takes the retake they have to go in and talk to him about their last test. He does this so that his students can succeed on the test, future math classes and finals. 

Mr. Martin is a husband, father, basketball enthusiast and a teacher. Mr. Martin makes each math class an enjoyable and educational time and that is why I chose him as my educator of the year.