By Aiden Lupian
There are many teachers on the Redwood Campus who put a lot of effort into making their classroom feel comfortable and welcoming. Some take a different route and choose to make their room unique and one that their students will definitely remember.
One of these teachers is Mr. Woodbury. Mr. Woodbury is a biology teacher who can play the clarinet and thinks that making mistakes is an important part of learning and growing. When asked about teaching Mr. Woodbury says, “[He] survived being a teacher for a couple years, so [he] thinks [he’ll] stick around, so long as [his] students don’t make [him] tear out the left side of [his] hair.”
His classroom is filled with many bizarre, but interesting, items and it truly makes for an experience when walking through the room for the first time.
One of the first things you might notice when you walk in is a little goat creature inside of a glass case known as “a what’s it” this creature is a mix of goat, eagle, and unicorn. Woodbury says that he “likes the goat aesthetic because a lot of students say that [he] is the goat.” and “this is [his] spirit animal.”
Mr. Woodbury also notes that it’s a good reference for when he talks about adaptations that organisms have, he says, “this goat has a horn, so it can fight off predators and maybe even hunt down prey with it” and, “it has wings, so it can travel”. He also adds that, “it has a very attractive goat beard, so it can attract all the mates”.
Another interesting item in Woodbury’s room is a baby looking down through a hole in the ceiling. It’s a pretty odd sight but you’ll find that it’s very hard to look away. Woodbury says,” We had some water damage earlier this year.” The water damage broke the ceiling panels, but the district didn’t fix the ceiling, they only fixed the water damage. Woodbury had a clever way of putting the hole in the ceiling to use. He says, “[He] went to the halloween store and just got the most demonic baby [he] could find, [he] just put it up there and tried to see how long it would take for students to find it.”
Mr. Woodbury does have a favorite item in his room, it’s simple, but it’s really neat to just take a moment to look at it. Woodbury’s favorite item is a poster with the tree of life, Woodbury says, “It’s showing us that if we keep going back and back through time, we all share a common ancestor and so we have a universal ancestor from a single cell organism.”
Mr. Woodbury has a room filled with wonders and it just shows how much he cares about making his room one to remember.
Aiden Lupian
Aiden Lupian (´25) is a second year writer for the Gigantea who loves to tell a good arts story and really looks forward to all the stories he can write, and people to connect with
Tags: arts, arts and entertainment, biology teacher, redwood gigantea, redwood high school