By MORGAN ROMEY
Student contributor
For Rick Thompson, a new edition to the Poly Upper School Math Department, Poly is a familiar place. Thompson, who attended Poly from the 10th to 12th grades after going to the Chandler School for elementary and middle school, returns to his alma mater to teach senior Calculus BC and sophomore Functions, Trigonometry and Advanced Algebra.
Because he was a new Poly student in 10th grade, Thompson was known as “the new guy” for most of high school, and he remarks that walking around his once new campus a decade later, he still feels that way. He has had to learn to call the building he teaches in “Fullerton” as opposed to “the new building,” as it was known during his years at Poly.
After attending Poly, Thompson went on to Columbia University for his undergraduate degree and attended New York University for law school. He came back to Southern California to work as a property litigator at a law firm in Century City, but ultimately decided to embark on a different career path: teaching. He took a one-year teaching position at Loyola High School, where he also coached soccer and baseball, before finally coming back to teach at Poly, where he plans to coach as well.
Thompson says that the best part of coming back to the West Coast is that “movie theaters carry Red Vines instead of Twizzlers” and that in New York it was “tough to get good fruit, and even bad fruit was expensive.” He has even gotten a chance to work with some of his old teachers. Mr. Fletcher, Ms. Williams and Ms. Ulmer all taught Thompson when he was still known as “Ricky.” When asked for the main difference between Poly a decade ago and Poly today, he says that the students seem more well-rounded, and that they’re not completely focused on just grades and AP’s, but also on sports and extracurriculars.
Leave a Reply