Drew Junkins “I’m like, “How is this kindergartner cussing me out?”
What’s your job?
I’m a math teacher at U32… I’m also the department facilitator…I am also the math team coach, and… a building rep at the school. [That is to] help support teachers in the school. When they have … questions about their contract and things like that.
I am the JV [football] head coach and then the varsity defensive backs and wide receivers coach.
I was the middle school head coach for… a while, but then I got sick of that… And [now] I really love being a high school coach. It’s more fun because [in] middle school… you’re playing a game, and then the games don’t count towards anything. You get to… see their growth from not knowing to like knowing something. But at high school, you get to see them for a longer period, and you get to see him grow so fast, and it’s great.
Why are you doing so many things?
I am doing so many things because when I was younger, I was a yes man, and when people asked me to do things, I’d be like, “Yeah, I can do it”.
And I enjoy all them too. They’re good.
Where are you from and where did you go to school?
I’m from New Haven, Vermont… I went to high school at Mount Abe.
My first year [of college] I went to West Virginia, and then some family health issues popped up during that time of my dad getting cancer, and then my mom got a chronic illness that same year. So then I decided to come back to Vermont to go to UVM
I loved West Virginia. It was great. The sports were great, and I made a lot of good friends there in my one year…. [But] the atmosphere of UVM matched more of my personality, so I enjoyed UVM more than West Virginia.
Do you play sports right now? Or did you, I should say?
In high school, for organized sports, I played football… but I would also just play pickup sports with my friends… One thing that caused me probably… not to play more organized sports is [that] I struggled in seeing the ball… because I didn’t have very good vision… Senior year I got contacts, and then football was like,” oh, I can see.” I skied in high school too, but I wasn’t on a team.
Now for sports and active activities, I ski, I run, and I play basketball.
Running is more individual for me… I run on a lot of woods trails… I live in Richmond, which has a lot of outdoor trails around it.
Very fun, skiing. Where do you ski? I don’t ski. I don’t know how to ask about skiing.
I ski all over the place, mostly at Bolton, because it’s right near where I live. I didn’t buy a season pass this year. Since 2021, I’ve done way more skiing than I ever have, because I climb up the mountain with my skis. I tour up.
That’s sick.
(It turns out, for the past three years he’s co-run the backcountry skiing J-term with Geoff Green. This year with Anna Gerretson as well.)
How are you liking the classes you’re teaching this year?
The students this year are really enjoyable and fun and kind. There’s been some years it’s been struggling. Some years it hasn’t. This year is one… of the years that it’s like, oh, this community is a really nice community and… usually that comes out… and that’s why I’ve stayed here, because the community here is awesome. I’m teaching algebra and geometry…. And it’s just nice. And I like that I get to see them four times a week.
Do you miss pre calc?
I do. I miss it a lot.
How long had you taught pre calc?
I taught [AP pre calc] for two years… and I taught pre calculus probably four or so years before that, off and on. I really liked that, because it’s a different grouping of students than the algebra and geometry. I like algebra and geometry because you get everybody from the school… and I like the students in pre-calculus [because they] are really interested in learning about math, and you’re able to do some activities that can be tough sometimes when students are nervous about jumping in.
Why did you become a teacher?
I didn’t know what I wanted to do coming out of high school. I didn’t even know what I wanted to major in. I picked math. Math was fine. I didn’t love math. I was just good at it. And I was like, “Oh, I can make money with math,” because that was the focus of my young teenage brain.
So I picked math. I majored in it, and it was not what I thought it would be. The first couple years was what I thought it would be, it’d be solving problems and all that stuff. But then the two years after was writing papers about proofs. And I didn’t think that that’s what math was about, but it was, and that was a surprise. And it was a challenge, but also I began to like it later on.
I looked into some jobs that involved math, and I did some interning opportunities at some places, and I just didn’t like the desk jobs… But I was a camp counselor at a camp that was able to provide a service to families that were kind of underprivileged and all that. It was the most affordable camp in the area. It was a day camp… where a lot of students went that struggled with being able to get necessary things they need,… that struggled in school with emotional stuff and emotional trauma, and that had a tough time being successful in school.
I worked there since I was 15 or 16 and I was enjoying it.
My mom was a teacher in the school… in the same area as that camp, and she was a teacher for students with trauma. She would pull them out… [to] learn social skills. Then the goal would be to mainstream those students back into school after they learn how to handle their emotions. And a lot of these kids have a lot of things outside of school that affects their emotions that are very awful and very tough to go through. So she worked with them for a long time.
So the people at the camp, because I was her son… [gave me] a lot of those students that she had.
It was tough in the beginning, because I wasn’t a teaching type of person. I was like, “Yeah, these kids are really tough.” And I’d get frustrated. I had a kindergartner on a slide say “fuck you” to me and tell me he doesn’t want to go inside. And that was a shocker to me. I’m like, “How is this kindergartner cussing me out?”
There was a lot of kids that would act like that there, because they experienced so much trauma and so much neglect. I asked my mom for help about how to handle that, and then she just told me some good strategies about being calm and just listening to students.
I did that and started to build connections.
That one kid that cussed me out on that slide, they grew a connection with me, and wouldn’t leave my side as the camp went on. So I saw success with that.
But the real turning point, what made me a teacher, was… going into my senior year of college.
I was working at that camp, and there was this one kid who really struggled. When he would get frustrated at games, he would punch kids and push them to the ground. He was a fifth or sixth grader at the time, so he was bigger than a lot of the kids, too. He also stabbed some counselors with some pencils. So he wasn’t allowed to go on our beach field trip that we had every week… So I talked to my mom about that, and she told me some strategies to handle with him, and then I started using those strategies.
I talked to him [and] made connections with him. He really loved to fish. I like fishing too. So I was like, “tell you what, if we can make it to these beach trips with good behavior, I’m gonna start a fishing club. Then you can help me with a fishing club, and we can go fishing at the beach,” because they didn’t do that at the beach before.
So then he made the connection with me… and he was able to go on that trip. And I remember one of the sad things on [that] day [was]… his little brother, who was in kindergarten or first grade at the time, was also having a decent week and was almost able to go on the trip, but then he flipped out. He had a meltdown on the final day, and then had to be sent home on the beach day. And that made the kid I was working with pretty sad.
But then he was like, “Well, I still earned to go to the beach and be able to fish and stuff.” So we got back on that train, and he was able to go. And the really big turning point for me was the joy of seeing him being able to do that fishing.
And then there was one time playing four square that he got frustrated because some kid told him he was out when he wasn’t actually out or whatever, I don’t care. Something happened to make him frustrated, and instead of hitting that kid, he separated himself, ran into the school and then yelled for me to go into the room with him. And then we sat in there and talked it through. And then we were able to go back out, and we avoided a physical conflict.
Drew I’m gonna cry.
And that, that was my turning point of [realizing] I like working with kids. I am successful in a topic that kids struggle with, math, and I want to make connections with kids and be able to see them succeed, because seeing them succeed makes me feel fulfilled.
This job has been able to allow that for me, and I’ve seen that a lot in this job, so it makes me pretty happy and makes it easy going to work, especially when there’s some tough things outside of teaching kids. So that’s what made me a teacher.
That’s so beautiful, and you can absolutely tell, oh my god, wow, that makes so much sense, because you’re always so calm and kind, and you make connections with people. Wow, um, do you want to talk about math team?
Math team. It’s been really cool.
When I first started coaching math team, there was about five or six people on the math team
and then it was my goal to get enough people to make it [to the meets].
Right now we have 30-something kids…and not all of them go to the meets, but now I have enough… that it’s between 12 to 17 kids [going to] a meet, which is awesome, and they’re just doing math, and they’re enjoying it.
The big thing I like about it is the social aspect of it. They get to talk to each other on the bus. They get to talk to each other while they’re waiting to take the test. When we have the callbacks in here, they’re talking to each other. They’re collaborating about math, but also they’re making connections and making friends that maybe they wouldn’t make before.
What do you like to do that’s not teaching? What I really wanted to do this interview about was you hiking the long trail with Alex and Phil, because that is just so wonderful.
The Long Trail was an amazing experience. Phil and I decided to do that one time we were on a hike… (Phil and I would go on hikes with each other about once a week)… we were hiking up Mount Abe, and we saw a bear box, and I was like, “Man, I’d really love to hike the long trail.” He was like, “Yeah, I would too.” I’m like, “do you want to do it next summer?” He was like, “Sure.”
