If you’ve been paying any attention to our new staff, you’ve probably heard of Mountain Lakes High School’s new biology teacher, Mr. Scancarella. Who is this bearded ex-skater boy? How do his tests manage to depress half of the student body? Why can’t he pronounce ‘water’ correctly? We recently sat down with this Mountain Lakes enigma to answer some burning questions.
How is your koi pond?
It’s wet. And has fish in it.
How many fish?
A lot…there are six koi fish in it. It’s very colorful…I don’t know what else…
What do you do to maintain the pond?
I feed them. There’s a filter, and it cleans itself.
What is the weirdest experience you’ve ever had in one of your classes?
I’m thinking of this morning…because that was probably one of the weirdest. When students creep me out and know more about my life than I do. This one time a student asked me about my koi pond.
Would you eat an agar cube (with the HCl in the middle)?
No.
Why not?
Well, in the instance of the ones we had, they were filled with a laxative. I prefer not to eat laxatives. The agar’s not the laxative…in this case it was the phenolphthalein. Comment: I thought these were going to be real questions.
Do you FaceTime your dogs between classes?
I’ve tried. But they’re too lazy to leave the window facing outside. Gunner = guard dog, overprotective and sweet Meeko = needy, affectionate dog who likes to snuggle.
What was the catalyst to you becoming a skater boy?
I AM NOT A SKATER BOY!
What music did you listen to when you were in school?
I listened to a lot of music…my favorite bands were…like, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Nirvana, the 90s grunge stuff. I snowboarded. I don’t know where the skater boy thing came from. They assumed–you make a lot of assumptions around here. And ever since that came up, every day I’m driving in the car, and that song comes on…this morning it came on. I HATE Avril Lavigne.
Do you believe in the conspiracy theory that Avril Lavigne was replaced by a clone?
I do.
What station are you listening to that plays Sk8er Boi?
They’re playing it on the Pop 2k Station. It came out in 2002, I think…and they never played it before until you guys brought that stuff up.
Why do you hate the Backstreet Boys?
They were popular when I was first coming into my own appreciation for music. (Editor’s Note: He does not think that ‘I Want It That Way’ slaps). In my opinion, those are fake, designer bands. I can appreciate Justin Timberlake from NSYNC because he went off and became his own musician. But these were not self-made bands; producers and record labels designed these bands and told them what to sing, and produced their own music for them, and that was it. And they made money.
Have you ever been mistaken for a student? If so, describe the instance.
I wasn’t mistaken for a specific student. In my last district, I was walking down a hallway in the middle of a period and a teacher came up from behind me to reprimand me for being out of class without a hall pass. And when I turned around she realized her mistake.
Say water
WUDDR
What’s your blood type?
No comment. [Editor’s Note: coward.] I’d like some things to remain a mystery around here.
How do you pronounce your name?
SCAN-car-ella
How do you respond when students say that you ruin their GPA/life/dreams?
In my mind, it’s a class that really challenges your ability to apply yourself. It’s a course that requires a sincere interest because….the more interested you are in the topic, the more you will persevere through the difficulty of the information. So when students don’t have the interest–the ability to persevere through the difficulty–the content may not be something that’s for them.
There is nothing that I can change about a situation like that, unfortunately. I have to push my top students in an AP course to perform at their absolute best. The objective is to make it a challenging course that is going to enable students who are interested in becoming doctors or things like that, to make them more competitive for college, and to eventually enter into a medical profession that is really going to test their limits. I can’t feel bad if students aren’t performing the way that they would like to, although I want everybody to perform well. I feel bad, because I’ve had students come up to me and say, you’ve crushed my dreams of being a doctor.
And it’s like, you were going to figure this out now, or you were going to figure this out in college, sometime, when you realize that it’s even more work. This is just a taste of what you’re going to be doing for the next, literally, 6 years in college. This is just a little bit of what you’re going to be doing 6 years down the road. You gotta really have a knack for it, and you gotta really have an interest in it.
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