2009-2010 Annual Report - Wayland Academy

12
It takes a special type of person to be
a long-term Wayland teacher. The
line between work and life is thin and
sometimes non-existent. Your days
are filled with teaching, grading,
mentoring, coaching, dorm duty,
preparing to teach, more grading, and
just as the weekend arrives, you will
remember that you have weekend
duty. In a busy week, you will work
well over 80 hours. You might hit
100. You will refuse to count, if you
are smart. You will build a new
family every year. You will say
goodbye to a fourth of it, every year.
You will begin to
count the days to
summer, only to
have summer hit,
look around, and
say, where did
everyone go?
You might
complain that
summer moves
too quickly, time
itself seems
unfair, but there
will be some part
of you that is
excited for
summer to be
over. To get back
in the classroom.
To get back in
the dorm. To get
back on the court
or out on the
field. To see what
comes next.
There are many Wayland teachers for
whom we are thankful. Some still
teach here, some have moved on, and
some have retired. This article will
focus on four Wayland teachers who
still teach, coach, supervise, and
participate in the many activities that
come with the job. Mitch Disch,
Diane Alpaugh, Jim Borrud, and
Mike Schneider have worked at
Wayland for a collective total of 130
years, and they continue to help make
the school a wonderful place for
students to live and learn.
Four
Pillars
of the
Academy
Mitch Disch H`93
Mitch Disch has an excellent sense of
humor. There is no easy way to
quantify humor, but it is highly
probable that he has the best sense of
humor of any physics teacher in the
entire United States, Asia, and most
of Europe. Perhaps the world. This is
fortunate, because he takes a lot of
ribbing from the students, who like to
ask him what it was like to go
bowling with Jesus. What was Moses
really like… what it’s like to have a
dinosaur for a pet… if he first
became interested in physics while
watching the Big Bang occur, firsthand…
that type of thing.
Contrary to popular student myth,
though, Mr. Disch has only been at
Wayland since 1982. Apart from a
five year hiatus in Louisiana, Disch
has been Wayland’s physics teacher
for the past three decades. The things
that keep him here, he says, are
simple: “It’s a great school, and
we’ve got good kids and it’s fun to
work here.” Beyond that, though, is
his underlying,
genuinely
contagious
interest in his
subject matter.
He says that
physics appeals to
him because, “it’s
neat to take math
and apply it to the
real world and
find out if it
means something.
There’s no reason
it should.” He
describes it as a
genuine miracle.
Another reason
he loves teaching
physics, though,
is that he gets to
do lots of “cool
demonstrations”
that he ticks off
the way most people can list the
things they do at work. His list is
more interesting than most, though,
and includes activities such as “lying
down on a bed of nails, a rock and
roll laser light show, pounding a nail
through a one-inch board with my
hand… a variety of explosions.”
In addition to teaching, of course, his
time at the school has included all
manner of duty in the dorms, around
campus, and coaching football. Like
many long-term teachers, he’s also
been a parent whose children
eventually attended Wayland. His son