This year’s teacher of the year has been announced earlier last year. Mark Anderson teaches AP Calculus AB and AP Calculus BC, along with AP Computer Science Principles. We interviewed Mr. Anderson to find out more about 2022-2023’s teacher of the year. 

Q: What is your educational background?

I went to Rowan University, I graduated in 2009. I have a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and a minor in philosophy. I’ve taught here at Kingsway for 13 years. 

Q: What made you decide to be a teacher? 

The primary reason was because of a few really good teachers that I had in high school that had inspired me to go down in that direction. At one time, I wanted to be an engineer, but I realized that I prefer to be in a job where I dealt with people more. And so teaching kind of filled that role for me. 

Q: How do you like teaching at Kingsway? 

I love teaching at Kingsway. Like I’ve said, I’ve been here for 13 years, I’ve had positive experiences, the kids here are fantastic, I enjoy what I teach a lot, so I’ve had only positive experiences. 

Q: What has been the best part? Memory? 

It’s always cool years down the line when kids that you’ve had in class, and they come back either to teach or just to visit and talk about all the cool stuff that they are doing now, the accomplishments they’ve made, the jobs they have now. So, I would say just the collection of those. You kind of see down the line what a kid was able to do. 

Q: What made you want to teach Computer Science because you were originally just math?

Math is my main thing. I’m always up for trying new things, I don’t like to do the same thing all the time. It was definitely just to kind of challenge myself. I was always interested in programming. I never made it a career because I guess when I was thinking about being a teacher, especially at the time, it wasn’t very common for high schools to have like a Computer Science teacher. It was often just a teacher who did something else and also taught Computer Science. So, when the opportunity kind of became available, I volunteered because it was always an interest of mine, and it was something different, keep the day interesting. 

Q: Any future plans for your teaching career?

Not that I can think of. If anything comes up, I’ll always think about it. But I’m pretty happy with what I do on a regular basis.