Sarver heads into final semester before retirement

After 16 years of teaching AP Economics and AP Government, history teacher Bob Sarver has decided he will call it a career at the end of the school year.

Sarver arrived at West Shore after retiring from the Brevard County Sheriff’s Department.

“Teaching was much more rewarding than law enforcement,” he said. 

Sarver did some detective work before jumping in to full-time teaching.

“In my retirement from [law enforcement], I just decided to try teaching,” he said. “One of the first things that I did, because I didn’t do anything for about a year, was substitute teaching at various schools to see what kind of grade levels of students that I like. I pretty much quickly figured out it was going to be high school students, and I got really lucky in my life for a job and here I am. Here I’ve been.”

Sarver said he’s enjoyed his time in the profession.

“I always tried to have fun in class and joke around a lot, but at the same time learn,” he said. “I think it kind of  fit in with what a lot of the students wanted to have in terms of being stuck in one place in a chair for 45 minutes or an hour and a half, at least if they could have some kind of fun, then that made [the classes] partially enjoyable.”

What did Sarver like best about teaching?

“The most fulfilling thing was to see a pretty humble quiet student who worked real hard and could run circles around a lot of the arrogant kind of pompous, entitled students and get to go to premier colleges like Yale, Cornell and Harvard, and not be in what you would think is one of those really rich upbringings,” he said.

Sarver offers advice to future students who will not have him as a teacher.

“Try to have fun is the big thing I’d like to tell them. Try to have fun, but still learn,” he said. “Everybody today thinks that they’re going to learn something from just getting answers from Google and plugging the answers in. They might get an A, but they have no idea how to use the answers that they’re getting. Knowledge isn’t worth [anything] unless you know how to use it. If you get everything that you know from Google, you absolutely know nothing.”

By Jason Dela Cruz