Taking Terrace to heart

Nalin Sood has been going to Mountlake Terrace High School for nearly a quarter of a century.

Sood, who graduated from Terrace in 1987, is now 38 and a business technology teacher at the school. Between graduating and starting to teach, he was a coach and educational assistant at Terrace.

Some may wonder what drives a person to return to their old high school for work. Running into old teachers and that trash can one was stuffed into as a freshman might scare off some.

But not Sood, who enjoys teaching high school as much as he enjoyed being a student there.

First, he remembers what it was like to be a student and tries to make learning fun, he said. Last week, he addressed the topic of ethics in his business law class by asking students to think of a time they did something wrong and felt queasy about it.

Ears perked up at students’ tales of stealing their mother’s van and paint-balling a friend’s car. Sood shared the sick feeling he had when he failed to defend a friend against criticism at a party.

“Do you remember Ferris Bueller?” he asked this reporter earlier this week. There’s a teacher in the movie who addresses a bored, silent class with the monotone question “Anyone? Anyone?”

“I don’t want to be like that,” Sood said.

He’s tried saying “Anyone? Anyone?” in class as a joke, but the students are too young to get the reference.

While he tries to make things lively, Sood’s teaching style is also serious. His voice booms, and when he points his finger at a student to make a point, there’s a sense of authority — even though he’s wearing jeans and sneakers.

Sood’s high school career was a happy one. He played basketball, was in track and field and had many friends — some of whom he still sees a few times a month.

“I didn’t want it to end,” he said. “I was the type of guy in high school who liked to have fun.”

That hurt his grades.

“I took sports serious, but not school serious,” Sood said. “My attitude was: I’m not gonna spend all my time studying for an ‘A’ when I could get a ‘B’ or a ‘C’.”

That all changed in college. Sood earned a degree in “marketing and management” from Central Washington University through Edmonds Community College’s branch campus.

The problem was, he didn’t know what to do with the degree.

“There’s no specific thing you do,” he said of the major.

Even through college, Sood didn’t leave Terrace — he coached there while he earned his degree. Roger Ottmar, basketball coach and teacher, told Sood that if he liked working with kids, he should consider teaching.

So he spent over a year at the school as an educational assistant to see if teaching was right for him. He remembers the teachers around him as joyful.

He recalls Larry Lank, history teacher, standing at the top of the stairs one day talking and laughing heartily.

“I thought, ‘If I could be that happy…’” Sood said.

So he earned his teaching degree and was hired at Terrace at age 26.

There was a comfort level in returning to the same school. What was a little less than comfortable was encountering former teachers — now peers.

In Sood’s first week back, he found himself in the same room as Barbara Carlson, his former English teacher.

“Someone came in and said, ‘Hey, Babs,’” Sood said. “I was like, I’ll never be able to call her ‘Babs.’”

Some former teachers expressed disbelief to see him back in the new role.

“Sood, of all the people who’d be a teacher, I can’t believe it’s you!” Lank, the history teacher, told him.

After some initial awkwardness, Sood became good friends with his fellow teachers. Nowadays, people ask him in the fall if he’s ready to go back to school.

“I say, ‘Yes, I’m ready to go back and see my friends, and work with kids,’” he said.

Terrace is a unique place, with great people, and he has a good life, Sood said. Everyone knows people who work in an office and after eight hours look dead, he said.

“How can you be miserable for eight hours and then go home and be happy?” he said.

Teaching is more stressful than most people think, but he still looks forward to going to work every day, he said. He’s 38, but feels like he’s in his 20s, partly because of the job, he said.

“I’ll always stay in touch with what youth are like ‘cause that’s my clientele,” Sood said.