Math teacher Ricky Ryan was recently named the 2018-2019 LCM High School Teacher of the Year. He was nominated and selected by his colleagues for this award.

Ryan said when he was in high school, he was good at and enjoyed math and basketball, which is why he became a teacher so that he could continue to do both. He has a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics from Stephen F. Austin State University and a Masters in Educational Supervision from Lamar University. After teaching and assisting students and teachers for 38 years, he hopes to continue teaching for another 10 years.

“The biggest challenge in my years of teaching has been how to do a better job preparing and presenting lessons so that my students can retain the knowledge with less practice,” Ryan said.

Ryan’s goal as a teacher is to positively affect the lives of the students he works with, and he wants to impart the needed mathematical knowledge to help them be successful with this phase of their lives. His goal for his students is for them to have happy, successful lives and careers.

Although Ryan has many fond memories from his 38 years of teaching, including advancing to the state championships with his girls’ basketball teams and math teams, serving on state committees, and being selected as an AP Reader, there is one moment that really sticks out for him. The day he got the school’s AP scores back and saw that all of his calculus students had all made fives, which is the highest someone can make, was a memory he really cherishes. He also has many great memories of student trips he has taken as an educator.

“I am honored,” Ryan said of being chosen for this award. “I am thankful of all those who thought highly enough of me to nominate and vote for me.”

Although Ryan has not won this award before, he has won a District Coach of the Year and an Excellence in High School Teaching award. He said for him, teaching is not a theory that can be proven or an experiment in which one follows the steps and always gets the same result.

“Teaching is not a business with an assembly line where you take a raw product, a student, and follow the procedures thus manufacturing a new product, an educated citizen,” Ryan said. “In teaching, our raw products are all different and come from different backgrounds, with different ideas and skill sets. To be a successful teacher requires the art of communication, including being able to say the same thing a different way so that different students can understand. The art of teaching derives from being able to feel what and when students understand. It also includes the ability to adjust your lesson at a moment’s notice when you realize students do not understand and being able to bridge the understanding gap.”