Meet Robert Nelson

Robert Nelson

By Zoey Patterson

Robert Nelson is a new Humanities teacher at Athenian. He’s teaching ninth graders this year, which might be conducive to developing relationships with students for him in particular.

“It takes people a while to get me,” Nelson said. “People kind of think I’m...grumpy or aloof, and kind of distanced, but honestly, if you talk to students who have been with me and had me for multiple years as a teacher, you [will] find that we have a really close, trusting relationship.”

Nelson added that these relationships, which often last beyond graduation, make his job particularly special.

“They’ll still send me emails and tell me about their college courses and ask my advice on this and that,” Nelson said. “I think that’s the best thing about being a high school teacher…[getting to] watch as students get older, and play a part in that, but also keep in touch after they’ve gone on and done awesome things.”

Nelson is also looking forward to interacting with the Athenian community.

“[I love] the feeling that you get when you’re in the right place and the people around you share your values and share your ideas about what education should be,” Nelson said. “When people genuinely believe in the power of education, you come together around it.”

Even so, the community is only one of the nice things at Athenian.

“One of the things that is very appealing about Athenian is just the physical location of it, being right near Mount Diablo,” Nelson said. “I’m very much an outdoors person, so I can totally relate to that.”

The aesthetic side of the outdoors is not the only thing about it that Nelson appreciates, however. He also enjoys “just you being outside” and interacting with the outdoors.
“I like throwing a ball around, whatever type of ball it is,” Nelson said. “In high school, I played baseball, football, and ran track.”

These things have also helped Nelson interact with other people.

“You’re part of a team, and you automatically have this community set up for you,” Nelson said. “They want to welcome you in and make you a part of their team.”

This was particularly important to Nelson as a child because he moved around frequently.

“Being a person who sort of has to adapt to new places and has to get used to new communities, it gives you a sort of perspective on people wherever you go,” Nelson said. “There are people who are very likely to find differences in comparing people from one place to another, but I like to think of it more like similarities, like looking for human nature and what makes us all very the same, in a way.”

This is part of the reason Nelson ended up teaching history.

“I’d always wanted to explore more things about the history that was around me...the differences between peoples and towns and landscapes always interested me, so I just wanted to know more,” Nelson said.

Nelson has an interesting personal history as well.

"My mother is from Iceland, and there are a lot of cool things about being descended from a small group of people,” Nelson said. “There’s only about 250,000 to 300,000 of them in the country right now, and they have a really well-documented history, so if I actually did my genealogy...it would go back over 1,400 to 1,500 years.”

The variety in Nelson’s backstory gives him an interesting way to explain who he is.

“I like it when people ask me where I’m from,” Nelson said, “because I never have a good answer.”