Connect Tell us why you became a teacher

Teaching was never my original plan, but that was before I had realized it was what I was put on this earth to do. Teaching is not just my livelihood, it is my entire life and I genuinely cannot imagine doing anything else. As a former MMA fighter, I teach my students more than math — I teach them to fight through adversity, to fight their own self-doubts, and to fight for their right to be whatever and whoever they want to be.

Tell us about your most memorable teaching experience

There is no single experience that can overpower the experience of changing a students mindset about math and education in general. One of the first thing I emphasize every trimester is that students need only one thing to pass my class — “ganas”, or desire. If they have the ganas, the knowledge will come naturally and the work ethic will follow. The moment a student first finds the ganas for success is tangible, and seeing those moments makes my job better than any in the world.

What would you do with the $25,000?

I have explicit plans if this were to happen. $5,000 will go to my schools Family Outreach Program to assist our families that suffer emergencies. $10,000 will go to our Math department to improve academic resources for our students. $1,000 will be used towards my infamous classroom snack bin. The remaining $9,000 will go to my school to help get through these hard budget times. My school has made me the teacher I am and I would not feel comfortable taking any for myself.