According to math teacher Robert Otto, teachers previously committed to the unicycling initiative are slowly dropping out because of possible injuries and lack of commitment.

Otto said once his fellow teachers saw him fall on the unicycle, they re-thought their actions in participating in the activity.

“I was working on going straight across the hallway, and I was picking up a lot of speed, and I tried to slow down and the unicycle shot out from underneath my body,” Otto said. “A lot of the teachers saw me fall and they got nervous that they themselves would get hurt.”

Otto said many of the teachers were not fully committed in the first place but joined to show support to the cause — to show students if they work hard at something, they can achieve success.

“The idea came from me and (Meredith) Webster and we went with it before confirming it with other teachers,” Otto said. “It wasn’t their idea or their intention to go through with it to begin with, they kind of got thrown into it. If they’re not doing it now it wasn’t in their mindset to do it in the first place.”

Senior Sofia Jacobbson said she thinks motivating students through unicycling is a good idea.

“I like the idea. I think the concept is really awesome. I can see how it might get hard to find a right time to do it,” Jacobbson said. “I think it’s really equal especially for kids who have a really hard time doing math, but it’s really nice to see somebody else struggle with something else.”

Math teacher Kari Taylor said she thinks the main idea behind unicycling was reinforcing the concept of trying again after failing.

“I think the whole point of it was to show that we’re trying to learn something new and we’re struggling with learning something new just like sometimes (students) struggle to learn any subject like math,” Taylor said.

Junior Sam Anthagarcia said she understands why some teachers dropped out and can compare it to how some students struggle with math.

“It’s like math, some people don’t like it and if you really don’t have an interest in it, it’s gonna be harder to focus and actually do it,” Anthagarcia said.

Otto said he enjoys watching the remaining teachers continue to practice after their failures.

“Those who are riding successfully show that the commitment does pay off, which is the point of math,” Otto said. “Those who are still struggling have been practicing for five months and they’ve failed over and over again and they’re still trying.”

According to Otto, five out of the 10 teachers are still unicycling, and he said he still believes the message of the activity remains.

“The idea we were trying to get at that everyone needs to be committed to math to succeed,” Otto said.  “So I think the message is still there, the commitment wasn’t there for all teachers and it shows.”