You spend around eight hours a day, five days a week with your teachers. You get to know their personalities well, what they like and dislike, and may hear about their home lives from time to time. What you don’t hear about very often are their backgrounds. Ranald Bleakley, one of our school’s science teachers and the only physics teacher, shared his very interesting and experienced background that contains a lot of aspects that you wouldn’t expect.

As you may have noticed, Mr. Bleakley’s voice has an accent that sounds very different from our American ones. That’s because he was born and raised in New Zealand, which is an island nation located near Australia.

“I grew up in a rural part of New Zealand, it was very remote,” he stated. “[I] like being in the country.”

Growing up in a rural area means being surrounded by farms on all sides (everyone in Weedsport is very familiar with that concept); there’s a good chance that you’d find people interested in working on those farms or maybe starting up their own. Mr Bleakley’s first degree in college wasn’t in the area of physics or chemistry, but in horticulture (which is the art or practice of garden cultivation and management). But as many of you may know, it’s quite common to have a career that diverges from whatever degree one may have received in college. So, instead of cultivating crops, he decided to start up his own construction company.

“[I was in] construction for 25 years. In the 90s, the industry depressed, so I [decided to] get a degree in biology, with a minor in chemistry and physics,” Bleakley said. He also pursued a degree in education.

Mr. Bleakley has been teaching here at Weedsport for quite a long time now, and expressed his fascination with the sciences, especially particle physics and astronomy, and how much it means to him when students show a distinct interest in them as well. Senior Gwen Catalano, a fellow physics classmate who intends on continuing into astronomy and mathematics in college, shared how her experience in Mr. Bleakley’s class has positively influenced her future goals.

“He’s very supportive, very understanding and flexible,” Catalano said. “Every time I start to doubt myself, he inspires me to go after my goals again.”

Mr. Bleakley stated that his most rewarding experiences “[have been] the connections I’ve made between students here, with researchers at Syracuse University, Cornell, and around the world.” He even had the opportunity to work at CERN during the summer of 2011. CERN is a European research organization that has the largest particle physics laboratory in the world.

Having gone through a lot of change in his life, Mr. Bleakley offered some advice to us students here in Weedsport on dealing with change. “Never be afraid to go through change,” he said. “You may never find what you like if you don’t. I ended up in a very different field than I ever thought I would be in. I love being a teacher.”

So whether you’re about to go to college, or are going to move to a new place, remember that it’s okay to experience new things, no matter how scary they may seem. You may just find exactly where you belong.