October, 2023
By Everett Saldaña, Staff Reporter
Mathematics teacher and Robotics coach Halden Jensen is beloved by many students, who describe him as upbeat and motivational. He has a strong passion for math and loves to help students succeed. The Cardinal post decided to interview him for anyone who is interested in learning more about him.
Where were you born? What was it like growing up for you?
“I was born in Salem, Oregon, the capital city of Oregon, on the west coast in between California and Washington, in the middle of a valley. So there’s like mountains on either side. So you can get hiking, scenery, all that stuff if you want. But there’s lots of farmland and stuff there. As far as what it was like growing up, I grew up with my grandparents. For the first chunk of my life, I think I was seven or eight when my family stopped living with my grandparents. So they’ve had a really big influence on my life, more than, like normal grandparents do.”
How did you know teaching was what you wanted to do and when did you start?
“Ah, that’s a great question. My grandpa, going back to my grandparents, my grandpa actually was a professor at the College in- not my hometown, but like the town I grew up in, it’s called Monmouth. He taught at a school called Western Oregon University. And so when I was little, I would get to like, go watch him teach. And I always thought it was so much fun to watch, just because he had a ton of fun in the class and loved teaching. And you could tell it was like, clearly a passion for him. And so it just built that passion in teaching for me.”
What’s it like being a teacher at KAC? What are some of the positives and negatives?
“Yeah absolutely! Being a teacher at KAC’s great, I really enjoy it. This is the second school that I’ve worked at. I worked at a small private school in Oregon for a couple of years before I moved to Texas. The community of teachers are all really focused on helping students succeed, which I think that’s just a great philosophy. Students are great, I really enjoy each and every student in class, I make a point, say it every day in class. It sounds so cheesy, but I actually genuinely mean it, like having everyone be a part of your class, makes that class unique and special. The negatives happened to be a little bit more focused around the amount of stuff that we do. Some of the negatives are, just how long our days are, 8:30 to 4: 30, while it’s shorter than last year is still a long day. And then, on the teacher’s side of things, we have a lot of stuff that we have to get done. I’m here at seven o’clock every day. So I’m here from seven, probably till close to five. Since I’m also a part of robotics on Wednesday nights, I’m actually here until around 8:30. So it just makes for a lot of hours. And it can be hard to find a good work life balance. Because when I’m at home, I’m thinking about the things that I need to be doing when I get to work. Trying to find that balance has been the biggest challenge for me.”
How has having a baby impacted your work and home life? What’s it like being a first time parent?
“Oh, man. I thought I was tired before. I’m now much more tired. She’s starting to sleep longer now, which is great. She slept through the night last night. I slept for like six hours straight. But definitely, even while I was gone, I was on maternity leave, I got two months off, which was great. And I got to spend a lot of time with my family. But like leading up to that I was like, I gotta make sure I’m getting all the things done for the materials. Making sure kids feel supported, even though they’re gonna have a sub. And then like when I got back, I was like, Okay, I got more things to do. I gotta catch up on grading. And I got to make sure that I’m getting all the things done. And that I’m like, awake and alert so I just drink an insane amount of caffeine to stay awake because I think I average like four hours of sleep a night maybe. But this year has been a lot better. Now that she’s a little bit older, she sleeps better. And then I’m always motivated to get out of here as soon as I can. If I don’t have things to do at the end of the day, I will leave right at 4: 30 so that I can spend extra time with my daughter.”
How do you spend your time after school and outside of school? How do you wish you could be spending that time?
“I’m actually really happy with how I’ve been spending my time recently. That is one thing I’ve been working on, trying to find that work life balance. So when I’m done with work, I’ve decided that I’m not going to work at home at all. So as soon as I leave here, I leave my work laptop here, I don’t have my work email or anything like that on my phone. Students can still text me and I’ll happily text back but it’s usually a quick short answer. And I’ll be like, I’ll take care of it in the morning or something like that. I just hang out with my wife, my dogs and my kids. And we go for walks, get coffee, go out to eat, read books, and play video games. Let’s see. So for video games right now, I just played through the new Legend of Zelda. It was like the last game that I completed. I also played God of war. Last year, I played a lot of Elden Ring when that came out. I tend to be into RPGs for the most part. I used to be really into competitive gaming. I don’t have enough time to play competitive games anymore, and so I just get really angry at them because I feel like I should be better. So more story based RPGs at this point in my life. So yeah, I love what I get to do.”
What are some interests and hobbies you love to talk about and want to introduce to more people?
“I have lots of interests and hobbies, I tend to just nerd out about lots of things. I play lots of music, that’s just something I do for fun. Sometimes, in addition to reading and playing video games, I’ll play music. So I enjoy talking to students, even students that don’t love math, oftentimes, it can be a lot of fun to talk about music. What kind of music they like, what kind of music they don’t like, what makes them like their music or not. It’s probably one of the hobbies that I discuss with people the most. Just anything, I’m always excited to hear what other people are excited about, and that makes me excited about the thing that they’re excited about, even if I wasn’t interested in it before.”
If you could travel to any year in a time machine, what year would you choose and why?
“I had to think about this for a little bit. There’s this famous mathematician called Archimedes. He lived in Syracuse a long time ago. His studies had the most accurate estimate of pi for like 2000 years, he’s really impressive. Archimedes lived in Syracuse. Syracuse was an island that was being invaded by the Romans in the year 2012-2013 BCE. He defended single handedly against the entire invading Roman army by himself as a 75 year old with just these crazy inventions and war machines that he had built. He built these like giant claws that would grab boats and flip them over. It was basically just like an anchor and a pulley. But he would like flip boats. He supposedly built a death ray out of a mirror. If you would shine it at the right time of day at a boat, it would catch the sail on fire and burn the boat down. And so for like two years, he just sat there and like, prevented the Romans from taking over Syracuse until eventually he got too preoccupied with a math equation, and forgot to defend, and so the Romans came and invaded while he was working on this math problem, that he was probably super focused on and then he got stabbed in the back. I don’t know that I would stop his death, I would be a little worried about the butterfly effect and causing things. But I’m definitely interested in seeing the math problem he was trying to solve, maybe I’d try to help him work on it.”
What’s a piece of advice you would give to everyone if you could?
“Advice is hard because it can be really easy to over generalize when you’re giving advice. So this one also took me a while to think about because advice that might work well for me and I might receive well might not work for you or your friend right? But ultimately, I think what I decided on is to be yourself. There’s enough of everyone else in the world. The world really only needs one of you, not to have multiple of somebody else. So you got to be yourself. Decide what that looks like. I have some friends who love trendy things but that is who they are, that’s them being their authentic selves, doing the trendy stuff, I’m all for it. Other people who are hipster that are like nah I’m not gonna do the trendy thing because I hate trendy stuff. And so you got to figure out what it is, what it’s like to be somewhere in between. Decide to be yourself not based on what’s going on around you but who you feel like you’re supposed to be.”
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