Mr Appier has taught Chemistry and Chemistry 2 Advanced-Placement at East for 19 years. He started working at East in 1995, when he moved to Kansas with his family.
How did you become a teacher?
I went to UCLA. I was a Biology major, Chemistry minor. I was going to be a physician; that was my original plan. When I was a sophomore in college, I got a job in the UCLA medical center, and realized that if I was a doctor, I’d end up working with sick people every day. So I became a teacher instead.
Which is your favorite class of the classes you teach?
I don’t even know if I can answer that. There are things that I like about Chem 2, just because it’s more of a challenge, and the level of things that we can do is a little bit higher, but I like Chem 1 , too, because it’s kind of like trying to get people excited about my discipline. There are good things about each of them.
One of the things you and the chemistry department as a whole are known for in the school is Mole Day. What is Mole Day?
Mole Day is the day that we celebrate the unit that is so important to us in chemistry: 6.022 x 10²³
. The first Mole day, the first official Mole day, was in 1995. The Mole day organization was founded in 1989 in Wisconsin, we first celebrated it here, basically, we all go together in the little theater, there was probably 50 or 60 people, and we had donut “mols” and “molk” and watched those World of Chemistry videos. It’s grown so much since.
What is your favorite thing about teaching?
Working with students, that is what keeps me going every day, because there’s a lot of stuff you have to deal with, bureaucracy and stuff you know. But working with the kids, helping them to understand something they didn’t understand before, trying to get them interested in something I’m interested in, that’s what keeps me coming back every day.
And your least favorite thing?
Honestly, getting up early in the morning. I hate getting up early in the morning, and I have to get up so early, like 5.25 a.m. It’s ridiculous.
Do you have any good stories to tell from your time at East?
So we had this teacher, he’s no longer with us, and we were making ammonia solution to use for a lab, and to do that we used this concentrated ammonia water, and ammonia’s pretty bad stuff to breathe. So he has this gallon jug of 30 percent ammonia, which is a very very high concentration, and he’s carrying it from across the hall to this room [303], and he drops it on the floor. We had to evacuate this entire wing of the school, and for two whole days we had to do all the classes from this area in a different part of the school because you couldn’t even be in here – it was that bad.
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