For today’s Teacher Feature, we talk to Mr. Karscig: English teacher, leader of the Dungeon & Dragons club and an avid guitar player.

Q: What is your favorite book/topic to teach?

A: I love teaching The Great Gatsby. There’s so much symbolism in that novel for how short it is– it could easily be 900 pages long. I like the students to learn about that, because I feel that it helps them develop as people. It’s about the way that we look at the world in the different  lenses we wear. When you come to school, you put your glasses on, these are my school glasses. When you go outside at the beach, these are my sunglasses. These are and those are the different ways that we get to see the world and look at the world. I love teaching that whole aspect of it with Gatsby, because it’s such a particular novel. It’s almost like a soap opera, but it has so many philosophical undercurrents. It’s just wonderful.

Q: What is your favorite student slang, and how do you use it?

A: I always laugh at the word rizz. In Dungeons and Dragons it means charisma, but apparently, I think it means something a little more. Because I’m an English teacher, I see language as an ever-growing thing. It’s always changing and developing and morphing into other things. I’m always amazed with what the students come up with and sometimes I ask for explanations when appropriate. Sometimes when I feel it’s not appropriate, I don’t want to know.

Q: What would you ask me about my last meal?

A: I think I would do meatloaf. My grandmother had a meatloaf recipe when my sister and I were kids. It’s an odd meatloaf. It has hard boiled eggs in it. It has carrots and a ketchup caramelized glaze.

Q: What’s your most irresponsible purchase?

A: My Gibson Les Paul guitar. I didn’t go searching for it; I found it, I bought it, I came home, my wife then told me that it was going to be our divorce guitar. So that’s my worst, most overspending. And I bought it during Covid, too.

Q: What is your favorite place you ever visited?

A: Scotland with my wife. I went two years ago and it, I hate to use an overused word, but it was majestic. Everything about it was wonderful. We were out there in the hills, in the Highlands. We visited plenty of places. We saw the train where Harry Potter went to Hogwarts. It was great. My wife and I always joked about going to Scotland. It was kind of a delayed honeymoon for us. We had the opportunity to go, it was affordable so we decided to take it, and it was wonderful. We were there for 14 days. It was fantastic. It’s interesting the way that they believe in mythology over there is the way that some people believe in religion over here. When the mist comes over the mountains, they call that the thin world and the thin world brings with its fairies, but not the nice kind, the mean kind. They believe in it wholeheartedly.

Q: What is the best concert you’ve seen?

A: Pink Floyd — Division Bell, 1994. I was a senior in high school, and my friends and I just got our licenses and were just able to go out on our own. It was just as much a freeing experience as it was anything else. It was at Three Rivers Stadium. We all bought tickets, and we all asked our parents, we had a curfew and stuff, and everybody was really responsible. We were really there for the music, just to be close to the band and to see the history of everything. I think music is the soundtrack of people’s lives and as cliche as that sounds, it really is. And for us at that time, that was where we were, and it was a perfect time to go with all of my friends.

Q: If you could have any other exotic pet, what would it be?

A: I have owned exotic pets. I do believe that all animals should be free, but if it wasn’t constraining, I would like a platypus, that would be fun. But Platypus have stingers. Did you know they have stingers on their hind claws? The venom is extremely poisonous. Yeah, so probably a giraffe. My wife and I support a giraffe in Africa, we get to track its movements. Oh my gosh, a baby giraffe would be great. I could bring him to school with me every day. When he gets bigger, he can be in the lobby.

Q: If you could meet someone dead or alive for 30 minutes, who would it be? What would you talk about?

A: Jimi Hendrix.  I just think he was so innovative for his time. He really changed the instrument of the guitar, but, moreover, he was a very humble human being. He also did time in the service. He was from the Pacific Northwest. I would like to know if he believes in Sasquatch, or if that was even around during the 50s when he lived there. I always found him to be a very humble and interesting person. People see him as being one of the best guitar players of all time, and as a matter of fact, every guitar player has been emulating him all these years, but he always pointed out other people who he thought was a better guitar player. He’s like, I make mistakes all the time. I think the great thing about that is when we accept the fact that we make mistakes all the time, we can still be great because we learn from it.

Q: What advice would you give to your younger self?

A: There’s a lot. I think when students are younger, they don’t see life as a long game, and that’s what it is. I think my advice to myself would be, it’s a long game and everything’s going to be alright. Lock in and do what you’re supposed to do.