Travis Quinn graduated from Olympic High school in 2009. Today – some five years later – he’s back at Olympic, only this time as a teacher rather than student.

Quinn, along with PineCrest Elementary first-grade teachers Kayla Thomas and Jessica Newhard, are three of the newest teachers for the district. All three are former CKSD students.

In his world history class Monday, Quinn projected a Jeopardy-like board game onto the wall of his classroom. The categories had Roman themes. Quinn read one of the questions aloud.

“Identify one factor that caused the fall of Rome,” Quinn said as he played the Jeopardy countdown tune.

Students in teams of three wrote their answers on handheld whiteboards: The empire had become divided; Invasion from Germanic tribes; Overspending on the military.

“Perfect … everybody got points there,” he told the students.

Quinn said he enjoys have the opportunity to work with a lot of great kids.

On his first day, he said, the students referred to him as “Mr. Quinn.”

“I was like, ‘Oh! Yeah, I guess it’s ‘Mr. Quinn,’ not ‘Travis’ any more.'”

“I tell them the first day that ‘I know when you guys are texting,'” Quinn said of students with cell phones. He allows the use of electronic devices in his classroom for research.

“It’s way more efficient for them to just pull out their cell phones rather than me try to come up with 30 computers. But I also tell them I know when they are on Snapchat or Instagram.”

One of the surprising aspects of the job, Quinn said, is that he’s ended up teaching the younger siblings of his high-school-era peers.

“They were little kids, and now they’re here with beards,” Quinn mused.

He said it’s been a unique experience to work with his former teachers and coaches.

“As a beginning teacher there’s still a lot left for me to learn. And in a way they’re still teaching me,” Quinn said. Basketball coach Devin Huff was Quinn’s teacher in the seventh grade, coached Quinn in basketball, and now serves as his teaching mentor.

Quinn played football for two years and ran track for three while at Olympic High School as a student. This week, Quinn was selected to be the head track coach.

When he was a student, Quinn said he had a simpler idea of what teachers were like.

“In my head, I pictured it as they lived at the schools — they didn’t have a family or anything outside of that. I assumed that second period world history was their entire life. So now that I’m outside of it and have a wife and daughter and other things I realize, oh, there’s a lot more going on. They’re more than just teachers.”

Two miles south of Quinn’s classroom, at PineCrest Elementary, Kayla Thomas and Jessica Newhard were reading books to their first-graders.

When they were CK students, Newhard attended Green Mountain Elementary and Klahowya Secondary, and Thomas attended Cougar Valley Elementary, Central Kitsap Junior High and CK High School.

Children are impressed by her ability to spell a word or draw a picture, she said.

“They’re just like, ‘Wow how do you know how to do that?'” Thomas said.

Thomas said she has a new understanding of her profession now that she was a teacher herself.

“As a student I never realized how much planning went into everyday activities that we do. As a student I always just felt that it went from one thing to the next and that’s just how it always was. But now as a teacher I have to constantly think, ‘OK, how’s that transition going to work? How long is this going to take us? What are we going to do if we run out of time or have too much time at the end?,'” Thomas said.

More is expected of students today compared to when she was in grade school, Newhard said.

“Now we’re expecting our students to read more than 60 words in a minute. That’s a lot of words to fit in. They have to have this huge bank of words in their head already and it’s only first grade,” Newhard said.

Thomas said technology is more important to students now than when she was young because children need computer skills in order to take tests. When Thomas was younger, school was “very paper-and-pencil.”

“But now we have to plan time to teach them keyboard and mouse skills,” Thomas said. Her students have varying levels of familiarity with the technology, depending on what their home life is like.

“Some know touchscreen technology and others don’t know how to work a mouse,” Thomas said, adding that that makes accurate testing more challenging.

All three teachers sometimes bump into their previous teachers at district meetings.

“When you meet them, you still want to say ‘Mr. and Mrs.,'” Newhard said.

Just like their teachers before them, these teachers want to be a positive influence on their students.

“You want to be that teacher that kids look up to,” Newhard said.