You may know him as the guy with the ponytail in the Social Studies commons, or maybe as “that teacher married to Ms. Meyer.” Tucked away at the end of the hallway, John Meyer is everyone’s favorite AP Government & Comparative Politics or Microeconomics teacher. (He may be the only one, but you get the point). Even while growing up in a small town in Indiana, studying business at Indiana University and working as a lawyer, teaching was always where he was meant to be.
“I had wanted to be a teacher for maybe 10 years,” Meyer said. “I think I recognized that it was a profession that had interested me, but I hadn’t put myself in a position to accomplish that academically; I studied other things.”
While still practicing employment law and on a road trip to their favorite river, Mrs. Meyer said that now was the time that he just “had to do it.” It’s never too late to start something new and meaningful in life, which is what Meyer had to come to realize.
“It’s been ten years and I do look back at that moment,” Meyer said. “I think about how young I was and how flexible we can be with the direction of our lives if it’s important to us to manifest the life that we want. So I quit my job the next day.”
Now settled into being a teacher, Meyer has found that with all of the ups and downs of school, with some exciting days and some that may seem like they could have been spent better, everyone, teachers and students alike, is on the same team.
“Almost every student is happy for the opportunity to go to school,” Meyer said. “And we’re on the same side of this. The students’ goals align with my goals, and I get to come to school every day in a non-adversarial setting, and work towards the shared goal of helping young people grow towards their goals.”
These goals also have to be adjusted slightly for an AP teacher like Meyer. There’s so much content to cover and only a certain amount of class periods to fill. So instead of trying to complicate things further, taking his classes one day at a time is much more important.
“Sometimes I think more about class as a sport, that it’s about learning a finite number of things,” Meyer said. “If you’re coaching, really what you’re trying to do is get people to understand a fairly complex game and to try to get a little tiny bit better every day.”
Within this intricate game of school, each teacher has their own strategy. Maybe it’s because he’s also an assistant basketball coach, but Meyer’s perspective is one that makes him and his students as successful as they are.
“The thing from my schooling that I try to incorporate the most into my teaching are just some of the tendencies of the people that I think of as being the best teachers I was ever with,” Meyer said. “I think that in my own mind, those people rose to that level for a number of different reasons.”
Teaching AP classes, you might think that Meyer has the sole goal of jamming every piece of pre-written curriculum into his students’ minds in time for the exam in May. However, scores on a standardized test are not what’s on the forefront of his mind.
“My favorite thing about teaching Gov is it’s almost the responsibility of that particular course to address social science issues that are going to come to dominate post-secondary education,” Meyer said. “For a lot of students who are juniors in high school, a Gov class is kind of the first major departure from a history class. A lot of it is a different way of thinking, and the content that we cover is very different. It’s almost entirely relevant to our lives, whether you’re 14 or 16.”
Along with teaching Government, Meyer’s AP Microeconomics class is arguably his pride and joy. It’s unlike any other class offered at Central, and it combines the unlikely pair of subjects Meyer enjoyed as a high schooler.
“I enjoyed having social studies classes and I loved going to math class, and I think Econ is where I started to see those things merging for the first time,” Meyer said. “In a way it made analytical thinking very real-world, and formed it in a way that I really liked.”
Whether it’s Government or Econ, Meyer has one collective goal for all of his students: to gain something positive from their day at school. It can be a burden-some task to walk in the doors every day, but having a teacher who’s always on your side can make all the difference.
“I hope that they walk out thinking that they thought about something that they had never thought about before, at a high level, and enjoyed the 90 minutes,” Meyer said. “That every day, they come into class, and it’s an enjoyable experience that’s going to make them view learning and education differently than if it feels like a chore to come in.”
Meyer is also unique in that he gets to work with a Physics teacher who is very special to him. He and Ms. Meyer get to go from parenting a five- and two-year-old to corralling a hundred teenagers every day, and they get to do it together.
“One of the best things about being a teacher is when your students accomplish something and they think, ‘I had a good day. I did this,’” Meyer said. “And it’s really nice having someone who you can come home after a day at work and you can say, ‘this person did this’. There are billions of people in the world and there aren’t that many who would understand when I say that, and she’s one of them.”
Meyer also recognizes the insane amount of stress that everyone in this building faces from day to day. Whether it’s the stress of raising two young kids or applying to college, school can be an unexpected safe haven for many people.
“I think that by and large, teaching at school isn’t something I need to escape when times are stressful,” Meyer said. “I think it’s something that brings me back. Sometimes school isn’t as complicated as we’d like to make it. And it can be a place where we support each other or not, and it seems like the former is the better option.”
