Mr. Zachary Rieder is one of five new teachers at Brentwood High School this year. Even though he always says he is from St. Louis, he was actually born in California. His family only lived there for a few months, though, and then moved to Chicago and then St. Louis when he was 4 years old. Mr. Rieder loves playing with his dogs and making furniture during his free time. He has made half of the furniture in his house and plays with his dogs.
After high school, Mr. Rieder started college at Truman State University but ended up leaving without finishing his degree. When he was 40, he returned to school and graduated from Lindenwood. He then went on to earn his master’s degree from UMSL University.
Before he started teaching at Brentwood, he taught at Busch Middle School in St. Louis Public Schools, and before that he was at Cleveland Naval Academy, which is also a part of SLPS. When Mr. Rieder was teaching online, some of his struggles were to keep the kids connected. Most of the time they had their cameras off and muted so they could have been doing anything like playing games, sleeping, watching TV and not paying attention at all. He even had kids cooking while he was trying to teach. It was a challenging time for everybody because some kids had to babysit their younger siblings half of the time. He felt 100% that his students were less focused on Zoom.
One of the reasons that he wanted to come to Brentwood was because of the small classroom sizes. One of his favorite lessons to teach in class is how to be a critical thinker and look at things from different angles. Mr. Rieder loves writing and loves to see kids get better at reading and writing. Over all, he loves helping people find something that they’re going to enjoy. Surprisingly, his favorite subject when he was in school was math.
While the school year is only three months in, so far Mr. Rieder is loving teaching at Brentwood. He feels that the staff and students care about each other and someone new every day walks past and says, “Hey Mr. Rieder how’s your day going?”
