“I’m not an education major”. This isn’t a sentence you would expect to hear from a high school teacher, but for Robinson’s new Algebra II teacher, Charles Johnson, having an education degree wasn’t part of the plan.

Johnson didn’t major in education during his college years but instead chose to focus on economics and plans to go into education policy making, after gaining some experience as a teacher.

“I wanted to get into the legislative aspect of education policy, I wanted to write the incentive structure, the tax structure, the funding structure on how to fund schools so that we produce good quality students,” Johnson said. “Part of that was that I needed to experience what it was like to be a teacher.”

This is Johnson’s first year at Robinson but he has been a teacher for five years now and said he enjoys teaching Algebra because it is a good way to keep math principles fresh in his mind.

“A lot of my studies, math classes are very intensive and if you don’t practice them on a daily basis you forget it and so this is kind of my way of keeping that part of my brain active,” Johnson said.

Even though Johnson doesn’t have an education in teaching, his supervisor and students have shared that his teaching skills are not lacking. Robinson’s math department head, Steven Beaudoin, said Johnson seems like an experienced teacher.

“I think he approaches teaching in lots of different ways, I’m very impressed with the way he approached it,” Beaudoin said. “I think he considered his students in his lessons and I think it’s very admirable.”

So far, Johnson has proven to be a good fit for students as well.

“I think hes really cool, and he’s definitely an upgrade from my math teachers in the past and he’s been doing a really good job and I really like the way that he’s been running his class,” said Lizzy Corona (’20), one of Johnson’s students. “I feel like I’m really gonna learn something from him.”