A headshot of Karl Ruff
Throughout his 16 years teaching at Roosevelt High School, Karl Ruff has established the engineering department as a popular elective choice among students.
Ruff brings a history of experience in the work field to the classroom, and many students spend multiple semesters in Room 217, taking a variety of classes. However, he wasn’t always the teacher known today.
Before he began teaching, Ruff worked at the aerospace company Boeing for 16 years, but he always intended on becoming a teacher, “I got my four year degree at Western to be a shop teacher. When I graduated in the ‘80s, there weren’t any jobs. They were closing down the shops.”
Ruff’s first teaching experience was with adults at Boeing. He remarks on the difference between teaching adults and children, “At any time, when you’re teaching a room full of adults, they could get up and just walk out because they have something else to do.”
When he entered the high school classroom, his experience teaching adults paid off. “Most of the time, what high school students want is they want to be treated like adults,” he says.
With this in mind, Ruff tries to prioritize student leadership. “I want to be unimportant and redundant,” he says. Instead of being very involved with students, he sets them up with the tools they need, and takes a back seat. Ruff states, “You have the material, you have examples, you have the videos that I made of all that stuff, you’re working together, and you just get it done.”
Ruff prioritizes uplifting student voices in his classroom. At the end of every semester, his students gather in a circle to discuss what went well and what went wrong, with the goal of improving the classroom environment.
“One of my leadership teachers had that, and it was very effective, and it just blew me away, because usually a professor doesn’t let their guard down.”
Throughout his tenure at Roosevelt, Ruff has created his own culture in the engineering room. However, engineering wasn’t always structured this way. “When I first got this job, they were year-long courses,” he explains. Ruff found this structure to be ineffective, as he noticed student enrollment dropped greatly after the semester change. When the idea of multiple small classes in one room, with each small class having 4-10 students, was proposed, he never thought it would work. “Well, I can’t do that. Nobody ever does that. That’s not high school,” he says. However, the unusual format has become Ruff’s common practice.
By offering an interesting variety of classes and offering a different perspective on life and teaching, Ruff provides a unique experience.
