Many of you may know Mr. Drumm, our AP Physics teacher. We discussed what it’s like to teach physics and also some of the exciting ways he spends his free time outside of school that many of you would not expect.
Mr. Drumm elaborated on what it feels like to teach AP Physics a new subject: I’m qualified to teach it. I didn’t really like it at first. I’m starting to come around to it. Yeah, I like “maths”, but I don’t like math, you know, so that’s why I’m here in AP Physics. I’m good at it. That’s a long story short, I’m good at it. I don’t really like it.”
After hearing about Mr. Drumm’s obsession with alligators, The Blue and White had to ask why he loves them so much. He begins by saying, “I do like alligators quite a bit. I don’t know. They’re, they’re just they’re powerful but lazy. And I respect that. They are. They were the apex predator on the planet for almost two billion years and they’re physically unchanged because they didn’t need to change. They’re already perfect. Evolution has not affected them because they are biologically the perfect predator. They’re just lazy. And I think that’s so cool.”
Mr. Drumm’s connection to alligators spans beyond just his stuffed animals he enjoys getting out in nature to experience the real thing. He begins with his story of how he meets them in real life, ” Oftentimes, my friends and I will find an alligator and try to get as close as we can without scaring it off and pet it if we succeed. That’s happened a few times. Not that I recommend anybody do that, but that’s something we’ve done many times. We often ended up playing various soccer-like sports in a swamp. It’s not soccer, but I don’t want to get into it. We’ve encountered many alligators there. I actually got bitten by a baby alligator earlier this year in around March, I think maybe February. It was fine. It was a baby. So I think those were my favorite encounters. I can finally say it was bit by an alligator. It was fine. It was just a little bit of blood. No big deal.
In addition to getting bitten by baby alligators in swamps, you may not know he also spends his free time as a writer refining some of his many books as well as an assortment of hobbies.
He said: “This could be a very long list or a short list depending on how in-depth I want to go with it. Creative Writing is a huge one. I’ve written 25 books full length. I don’t mean like, oh, it’s got six chapters. No, no, I mean, like full-length books, right? So 25 of those. However lately, I’ve just been proofreading them because some of them I wrote when I was young, and they’re not very good. So I need to fix those. He continues, “My friends and I are making a card game, but I like card games in general, all the way from, competitive card games to like just straight-up gambling. Had a poker club I went to for a long time. Exercise in general, especially running and soccer-related games actually called Gator ball. We play a lot of that. So that’s a fun one. Boomerangs and 18 boomerangs throw those a lot? Some intent, invention kind of stuff. I don’t really like it as much as I used to, but I’ve made a bunch of inventions and sold those. So that kind of stuff and surfing.”
I wanted to be a writer. But the problem is realistically, you shouldn’t push yourself toward an art and expect it to work because 99% of artists do not make it as artists. That’s that’s the reality. And it’s not. It’s not even about talent. It’s about exposure, you know, so I knew that luckily, I figured that out very quickly. So I went toward engineering instead. I was like, Yeah, I’ll just be an engineer for a while until, unless like my books take off. And I can just write for my whole life. So I went to school for engineering, but I knew I wanted to be a writer. And then when I finished engineering school, I was like, You know what, I don’t want to be an engineer. So I did it for a year or two. I didn’t really like it. And then I started teaching because it gave me more free time. It’s easier.”
