By Mikayla Weiss, Sports Editor
Mr. Gary Gongwer has been teaching at Moreau Catholic High School for 22 years. He teaches computer science and also serves as Moreau’s Education Technology Coordinator. Here, we get to learn a little bit more about his life with an exclusive interview.
Mikayla Weiss (MW): How long have you been teaching?
Gary Gongwer (GG): It’s my 22nd year at Moreau and I taught a couple of years before that, so 25th overall.
MW: Where did you grow up? How did you end up here?
GG: I was born in Kentucky, and then when I was nine my family moved to Illinois. I moved to Arizona where I got my college degree. I ended up in the Bay Area originally for grad school, 25 years ago.
[“Me in first grade”]
MW: What did you want to be when you were growing up?
GG: I wanted to be a deep sea diver. There was a show on TV– Jacque Cousteau and it was all about the undersea world and I was fascinated.
MW: What were your hobbies growing up?
GG: I was in the band. For activities, I did a lot of swimming and cycling. I used to collect stamps and coins when I was in middle school and high school.
[“Me at age two, with my older sister and brother, and grandma”]
MW: Do you still have the same hobbies now?
GG: I don’t collect stamps and coins anymore, but the exercise has stuck with me.
MW: What was your first job and how old were you when you first started working?
GG: I lived in Illinois and in the summer I worked in the cornfields since I was 12 or 13. It was legal to do that. Probably not anymore.
MW: What was your toughest job?
GG: When I was in high school I was a janitor in the evening, cleaning up bathrooms. That has got to be one of the toughest jobs I’ve had.
MW: What were you like as a 15-year-old?
GG: I should get my brother and sister to answer that one. I’m the youngest of three. I’m pretty sure I was a nerd. I played trombone in the band. I was in all of the math and science clubs. I was a typical math-science kind of guy.
[“This is a picture of me when I was a senior in high school from my yearbook”]
MW: What led you to becoming a teacher?
GG: Along the way, I learned I had a talent for not only math (which is where I started teaching) but explaining mathematical thinking to people. I fell into it because I kept seeing examples of me being able to help people in that way.
MW: What is the most challenging thing about computer science?
GG: Getting people to understand that they have to plan what they’re doing. They have to think about the problem they’re going to solve and how they’re going to solve it. If they just start writing things down immediately, it gets messy and doesn’t work most of the time. Getting people to realize they need to picture what they want to do, make a plan first, and then sit down and do it is the most challenging thing.
MW: What changed when you became an adult?
GG: I think the biggest thing is going from thinking about today and tomorrow and then to thinking about long-term plans. When people grow up, they have to buy houses and cars and things and so now they have to think about long-term actions. You have to start planning ahead and start thinking about longer term implications of your actions.
[“My wife and I at our wedding in 2008”]
MW: I heard a rumor that you met your wife here. Would you like to share the story on that?
GG: I was teaching math and she was an English teacher. I think maybe one of the reasons I ended up here was to meet her. We met here at Moreau eating lunch together. We’ve been married 17 years now.
[“From a vacation in Hawaii last summer”]
MW: What is something you’ve done recently that you’d like to share?
GG: I recently did a triathlon. It’s an event where you swim, and then bike, and then run. So swimming and biking has for sure stayed with me. The one I just did took me two hours. The swim was half a mile, the biking was 12.5 miles and the running was three miles. Swimming is the toughest part for most people, but I’ve been swimming since I was like five, so the running was the harder part for me.
MW: Any last words to share?
GG: It’s been great fun and very rewarding teaching here at Moreau! A source of great joy, having taught longer than all of you have been alive.
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