At the end of my sophomore year, my math teacher told me to take integrated math instead of functions because of my poor performance in her class.  I went against her advice and continued on to functions, which is where Mr. Leoni awaited his students.  Going into functions was the greatest act of defiance I had ever participated in. 

Mr. Leoni is around 6 feet tall and dresses in sweaters and khakis in the winter and cold months. During the warmer months, he would come wearing a pair of khakis and a quarter-button up dress shirt.  He has an authoritative voice which he needs teaching juniors and seniors high school functions and pre-calculus math classes. 
Mr. Leoni is like a teenage guy without the immaturity.  He can be super friendly and at other times, he just wants you to get work done.  He went from, “Hey Noah, how’s it going?” to “This is the easiest concept in the world, how do you not understand?” pretty quickly.  I personally admired the fact that he could make me feel like I needed to understand what was going on. This caused me to work.  Truthfully, Mr. Leoni seemed like more of a friend than a teacher.  He was just a friend that knew a lot about math.  Every day I thought to myself, I need to understand this otherwise I will upset Mr. Leoni or I won’t succeed.
There was one unit in functions that almost daily Mr. Leoni would say, “You guys need to learn the unit circle or you will really struggle in the units to come and in future math classes.”  Everyone in the class did what normal teenagers do: they brushed it off.  So when the next unit came and hardly anyone knew the unit circle, they started to think hmmm…maybe we should’ve listened to this guy. He knows what we need to know.  The rest of the year was a lot different because students learned the unit circle and started to do well.  Instead of struggling on the next quiz or test, the students did better and it was clear Mr. Leoni was proud.  
Mr. Leoni always wants his students to succeed whether we knew it or not based on how he was talking, but I always knew because he would have this little smile on his face.  Sometimes even the littlest thing such as him calling on a student that he didn’t think was paying attention and they would get the correct answer.  As a student, he made it known that he had that sense of accomplishment and pride in everything we as students did.  It is weird to think that every memory I have from math that year and of Mr. Leoni was because I went against my past teacher's advice.