Behind the Bauck
You may know Mr. Bauck as a punny and always hiking math teacher, but recently we discovered there is more behind the man who writes on windows. He explained many topics that ranged over a large spectrum, starting at teaching and ending at Kermit the Frog.
Apparently, once you go Central you never go back. Following a seeming trend in teachers, he spent a year each teaching at Alpha, North, and South; Mr. Bauck has stayed at Central for 12 years. Surprisingly, Mr. Bauck doesn’t “find teenagers that stressful”. To avoid being overwhelmed, he teaches part-time with only 3 classes per semester.
Mr. Bauck does not dream of being an astronaut floating around in the abyss. Instead, he says if he wasn’t a teacher, he would want to be an engineer, computer programmer, or physiotherapist. Why physiotherapist? Because it “mixes sports and science and math”. His interest doesn’t end there, though, as he surprisingly minored in philosophy in university.
Mr. Bauck said that the best part of his job “is getting to do math problems all day for fun, and getting paid for it”. His son has a similar job: playing poker for a living in Thailand.
His passion for rock climbing has taken him up and down western North America and even Greece searching for routes.
In 2005, while descending a climb in the Bugaboos, his left leg got trapped under a boulder during a rock slide. It was his own 4-hour version of the movie “127 Hours”, though he fortunately did not suffer the same fate as James Franco. We all know that he didn’t saw off his own leg, as it is still visibly there, but it did get badly broken. Mr. Bauck made quite the fuss, as he got Search and Rescue and 3 helicopters involved. They eventually got the boulder off of him, and he was transported on a long line from the helicopter to a safer location where he could then be put inside. They bolted up his leg and at the time he thought they “might have to cut it off”. Mr. Bauck wasn’t too concerned. Mainly he was happy he “didn’t feel like [his] life was over”.
Even while dangling from the helicopter with a leg that might have to be amputated, Mr. Bauck was “checking out new climbing routes”. He concluded by agreeing that he is an optimist and said that “we might not always get what we want, but what we get will be okay.” He’s planning his next big hiking trip to Norway, where he can visit his extended family.
Mr. Bauck hopes he can impress on his students the importance of perseverance. He finds the hardest thing to teach students is to not “shut down” when faced with adversity, but to work past the problem. Mr. Bauck wants students to know that “it is okay to screw up, but it is not okay to give up”.
Bauck Bits and Bites:
glasses over contacts
if he tries to let his hair grow it looks like a patchy lawn in August
his ‘’yet to be published” book’’ is called Pi Never Sleeps and was created by a student
he “can sing like Kermit the Frog”
his “wife’s [his] best friend”
his “wife’s [his] best friend”