Mr. Smith went from serving in the military to becoming the first African-American male science teacher at Centennial High school.
He’s been teaching for six years total, but he has been at Centennial for two years. He teaches regular and AP chemistry classes but does it differently from other teachers.
Mr. Smith goes out of his way to make sure his students are truly learning.
“I don’t put my students in a box, I just teach my students since not everyone is on the same level,” Chemistry teacher, Clyde Smith said.
By doing this he’s able to connect with his students and make sure everyone is understanding the material. Many students need this, chemistry is a difficult subject to learn and comprehend.
“I go by the expression on your guys faces so if I feel like you guys didn’t get it I’ll go home, readjust some things and come back and reteach it but try to adjust a few things to fill in the gaps,” Smith said.
Mr. Smith will go home and research more on the topic to help out his students. He researches other chemistry teachers and strategies to see how they are teaching students, and he tries those methods with his students to help.
“I feel that I do a lot more research than the average teacher,” Smith said.
Many of his former students come back to him and tell him that he has had an impact. These students have felt he had helped when it came to learning chemistry.
“His ability to teach such a hard course while making it easy to understand for his students, and he always tells us that he’ll never fail or make us feel left behind in the curriculum. He encourages us to ask questions throughout the class, it helps him understand what lessons he needs to emphasize in class for his students to get a better understanding,” AP student, Maddison Kellahan said.
Some students might wonder how to get the best help when not understanding something in the class. Researching things might be a good way to get help.
“Study as much as possible, seek other outside resources if you don’t understand something, Youtube university. That’s what I did when I was in college, my professors were Ukrainian so they were hard. So if I didn’t understand something they were teaching I went to youtube and I found professors or teachers that explained it better,” Smith said.