(June 8, 2012) — Two years ago, many students would spiral into a state of anxiety and distress at the mention of a looming “DeVore test.” Now, seniors who studied with math teacher Chuck DeVore react to the mention of his name with a feeling of relief and accomplishment—even nostalgia, in some cases. Like several other teachers who retired in 2010, DeVore left a lasting impression on his students. “He had a certain quality about him that I liked,” Gayaneh Dermarkarian says about DeVore. She says that though he was strict and occasionally intimidating, he had a good sense of humor that somehow alleviated the intense environment in that class. In the end, she learned a lot. “I felt like he really wanted to motivate me to reach my full potential and do better in math,” she says. Veudy Cen and Martin Zakarian found that other teachers who left had special methods of teaching that made material more appealing and easier to understand. “She wasn’t conventional, but that’s definitely how it helped most of us learn geometry or the other maths,” Cen says about math teacher Ellen Armitstead. He says he remembers a time when he and a friend asked for help with a lesson, and it turned into a conversation about her dog being neutered. “Her methods and stories for word problems and concepts were different,” he says. “I suppose her unique way of using metaphors really helped me understand math in a different perspective.” Because Armitstead didn’t teach lessons straight from the textbook, he says he grew less reliant on it and developed his own way to study. “Armitstead definitely helped establish that concept of individuality in the learning process,” Cen says. Zakarian remembers teacher Ray Good as a teacher with a certain flair for making lessons easier to learn. “He’s one of the few math teachers that made math fun,” he says. Zakarian felt that Good’s cool, laidback nature made the course easier to handle. His experiences with now-retired English teacher Paul Burghdorf were a bit more intense, but he says it made him care more about the subject. “Burghdorf was tough, but he really cared about all of his students. He was passionate about teaching,” he says. Zakarian remembers one instance when Burghdorf showed a class how to do what he referred to as the world’s hardest pushup. “I guess he did it to inspire us.” In the end, Zakarian says, such efforts were certainly not wasted.