By Jordan Perryman
Most of you know Mr. Flores as the cool down to Earth math teacher, but he is so much more, Mr. Florez is 30 and happily married with no kids and 2 amazing dogs. Along with teaching math 1 & 2 he coaches the Eisenhower girls basketball team. He loves coaching the girls and says it’s a lot of fun to do. Something you probably didn’t know is he taught badminton because they needed a coach. He attended Cal State San Bernardino, which he went there to get his bachelors, but started at Chaffey Community College. College life was very busy for Mr. Flores but he managed through it, During college he always had a full time job, and from the beginning to the end of the week he only had time for school, home, and the gym, that was his routine, that he completed, everyday. On weekends he would hang out with family and friends. He said that his overall college experience was “cool”, as Mr. Flores put it. The most important thing that kept him as organized during college was his set schedule that he didn’t stray away from.
He has 9 years of teaching under his belt, other than teaching at Ike for 5 years, he was a tutor at option4youth in San bernadino for 4 years and a student teacher at Ontario High, so it would be correct to say that he is well rounded. His inspiration to become a teacher came from tutoring people in college, he also loves the community he's working in, and always wanted to help out. When I asked him why he likes to teach math he said “Numbers have always made sense to me.” He also mentioned that it changes each year, one year he will be teaching math 3, and another he might be teaching math 1. I think you should know teaching isn’t always what he wanted to do and only found that it was his passion during tutoring, at first he wanted to be an architect, he wanted to design and build buildings. As a kid he didn’t want to be either, instead he wanted to be a basketball player. As a teacher Mr. Flores values his students and the relationships he has with them, just as much as they adore him, if you ever have him or visit his class you will see a wall right behind his desk with pictures of graduated students that come back and visit him. When asked, he says that the worst part of his job is that there is always something to do, it’s very stressful and it’s forever changing, something that might be normal this year might change in the next.
Something he wants all students to know, and remember is “Always work hard no matter what you do or what it is, life is always about what you make of it.” That might have stemmed from what type of student he was in highschool, let’s talk about it. Mr. Flores wasn’t a scholar, he was lazy and didn’t like doing his work, liked being a class clown at the time, and described himself as the teacher's worst student. Because of his laziness he wasn’t interested or involved in any type of school clubs or activities. We had a conversation about class clowns and he agreed he was too interested about what others were doing, or what they thought about him instead of what he really came to school to do. During highschool, he didn’t really watch t.v. and his favorite music genre is rap, with his favorite artist being Lil Wayne. Just because Mr. Flores was off track doesn’t mean he didn’t hop right back on, and now he is one of the most popular and liked teachers at Eisenhower.