I know we have more than a helping of Stuy grads.
Mr. Geller, beloved and feared Math teacher of 29 years, Math Team coach, and genuine teaching hero, passed away yesterday from complications related to cancer. There’s a memorial at the school on Friday.
Have any good stories?
Quick bump for the am crowd.
I am absolutely horrible at math – a cause of much weeping and gnashing of teeth in high school – but Mr. Geller’s Calculus class was the first math class I genuinely enjoyed and fully comprehended. Who can forget how he would take a problem, admire the student’s answer, then solve it a different way while shouting “Math is AMAZING!!!”
Or how he would teach on Halloween in a full on chef’s costume, without even cracking a smile or acting like anything was different than usual.
Or how he would let you cut twice in the semester, no questions asked, no impact on your grade. Cut three times and you fail the course, no quarter given. That was Mr. Geller for you. He would give an inch but NO WAY could you take a mile.
He ALWAYS had time to help students who were struggling. He wasn’t one of those teachers who thought that math would just come easy for everyone. As long as you wanted to elarn, and wanted to try, he would always be there to help, and never made you feel like you were stupid, or that the students for whom the work came more naturally were the “better” or more worthy students.
Oh no. 
That’s awful to hear. I remember a friend of mine singing his praises – and some others who cursed him, too, but fondly. From the sound of it, he was probably the only teacher in the school who could have made me actually try at math, if I had him (never happened).
It was obvious that he was really passionate about his subject and genuinely cared about his students. He was one of the good ones. Stuy will feel his loss.
there is a memorial on friday, but the memorial at the school is next wednesday.