Raegan Ford

Holding a bucket of materials in one hand and a roll of tape in another, anatomy and biology teacher Tyler Terry prepares for a lab. Terry said his proudest moments are when his students are happy to see him. “When I take my wife to a football game or something and a bunch of students want to say hi to me or they like to smile and wave and it just makes me feel good that the students are really kind and supportive of me,” Terry said. “[I’m also] proud when I see students perform really well in their extracurriculars because I can see how hard they’re working in my classes, [so] when I see that they’re also working so hard in other things. Like they’re winning band competitions or they’re getting awards for their theater productions, or I see them put on their choir shows, that’s like, wow, you guys are incredible.”

Known to his students as some form of Mister Brother Professor Tyler Kent Terry the First, anatomy and biology teacher, Tyler Terry, is currently fulfilling his dream. 

Terry didn’t always know what career path he would take, but he knew he always wanted to have a career where he could share his knowledge. After graduating high school, Terry attended Brigham Young University for one semester as a biology major. During that first semester, Terry decided to serve a mission for his church. Following this two-year mission, Terry chose to major in nutrition because it would give him a wide variety of health-related coursework. 

“I knew in high school that I wanted to have some sort of a healthcare-related profession, but I didn’t know exactly what,” Terry said. “I did healthcare classes in my high school and I really liked it. So I kind of went to college not knowing exactly where that would take me.”

 Terry ended up graduating with a degree in dietetics, which is an applied nutrition profession that is similar to nursing, but with a focus on the nutritional status of patients.

“I still didn’t really know what profession that I wanted with a healthcare career,” Terry said. “One thing that I knew I wanted was whatever career that I did, I wanted to eventually teach others. I wanted to become a teacher after I did my healthcare career.”

Terry’s desire to teach was inspired by part-time work he’d done that involved working with youth. Some of these jobs included mentoring an elementary school student who was behind in reading and working as a coordinator for a special needs respite care program where he worked with youth to teach them how to care for children with special needs.

“So all of these various jobs, odd jobs that I did here and there really showed me that I wanted to teach whatever it was that I was interested in.,” Terry said. “[And] the courses that I was most interested in were science courses. So my goal was [to] eventually [become] a teacher. But I didn’t think that was necessarily a primary career I could pursue.”

While in college, Terry met his wife, Katherine, who wanted a full-time career in public administration.

“When I realized that she was really serious about wanting to work full-time and not to be like a stay-at-home mom, that kind of opened up some opportunities for me in a weird way,” Terry said. “I kind of realized that if I have the support of another income in my household, then I probably could afford to go after my dream career first, which is teaching.”

After Terry graduated, he worked in the field of nutrition for a while to put his wife through graduate school. Once she graduated, she worked to put him through graduate school at Texas State University. From there, he did student teaching with biology teacher Adam Babich. Right now Terry teaches anatomy and biology.

“Looking back, I don’t know what I thought I expected from teaching,” Terry said. “I would say that in a lot of ways it’s even more rewarding than I thought it could be because of all the various opportunities for student engagement that I had no idea I’d be able to take part of. Here, at least, there’s a really big culture of involvement and teachers participating in all sorts of different events and going to support students in different extracurriculars.”

As a teacher, Terry said his proudest moments are when his students are happy to see him.

“When I take my wife to a football game or something and a bunch of students want to say hi to me or they like to smile and wave and it just makes me feel good that the students are really kind and supportive of me,” Terry said. “[I’m also] proud when I see students perform really well in their extracurriculars because I can see how hard they’re working in my classes, [so] when I see that they’re also working so hard in other things. Like they’re winning band competitions or they’re getting awards for their theater productions, or I see them put on their choir shows, that’s like, wow, you guys are incredible.”