“I’ve realized smaller schools were more my thing. Charter has been really great and I like it.” said Frank Krar, a new calculus teacher at CSCS.
Teaching may not have been his first passion, but he has been teaching for many years and has now brought his knowledge to CSCS.
Starting at the beginning, Krar was working at the National Institute of Mental Health as a research fellow.
“We were studying monkeys, not human primates. I came from the behavioral side and we studied memory.”
After working at the National Institute of Mental Health, he was looking to further his education, but a different career path that he wasn’t expecting showed up in front of him.
After jumping around from job to job and doing freelance work, he ended up with an unexpected position.
“I ended up with a job at Palm Beach County and worked with kids who had gotten kicked out of school or had dropped out for some reason. It was my goal to get the kids across the finish line and get them to graduate.”
He then continued teaching and moved to various schools such as Lyons Creek where he taught for 4 years.
“I didn’t know anything about managing a classroom. How do you handle a 13-year-old who isn’t all that interested in learning math? And it took some time like any teacher, it takes a while to learn those things.”
Furthermore, he found himself at the school that affected his life the most, which was the longest school of his career. Krar started to work at Marjory Stoneman Douglas, where he worked for 13 years.
“Since the shooting at Douglas, things have never been the same over there so I wasn’t as happy with that spot. School has just been changing and that whole event was a big burden on staff.”
The experience was such a struggle for him that he ended up quitting teaching for 6 months, up until this year.
“My name came up in conversation since my wife already works here and I’ve known people here for a while. Since Ms. Green and Mr. Griffith were leaving, a spot opened up for me.”
Arriving at Charter had become just the challenge that Krar was looking for.
“So, being offered the challenge to take on AP classes at a high level really appealed to me. Plus the advantage is working with my wife and my daughter’s coming here next year so we’ll all be here.”
As Krar has restarted teaching, he is once again met with obstacles.
“I’m jumping into a situation where the math program has a little bit of turmoil with Mr. Griffith suddenly leaving and teaching remotely. I know that students made the best of it and Mr. Griffith did as good a job as was available, but that’s not sustainable.”
Despite facing this, Krar has managed to keep an open mind and strives to be better for the students at Charter.
“I’m hoping to build the program up, and help current pre-calculus students make the calculus program bigger next year. I want to improve the pass rate. I want to build the upper level math program as something significant.”
