SUPERIOR — If you were in Superior on Friday, May 31, you may have been confused to hear what seemed to be an army of angry lawnmowers screaming for over half an hour in the middle of the day.
Well, your ears didn’t deceive you as the small engines class at Superior High School was holding their second annual Mario Kart lawnmower race.
Matt Doughty is the teacher for this rather unique class. The U.S. Army veteran and a hot rodder himself, the passion and joy Doughty brings to the students he teaches is undeniable.
With no formal teaching background, he obtained his teaching certificate through on-the-job experience thanks to the superintendent who had taught Doughty as a child. Because of this, he is able to bring a perspective to teaching that is one of a kind.
For example, the students are graded by the total amount of points that they have by the end of the class. Each day they are awarded up to 15 points based on their performance, effort and application of skills that they have learned.
“If you call in sick, you don’t get points, just like if you called out of work and don’t get paid," Doughty noted.
That was another key theme in Doughty’s teaching style: real-world applicability.
“We always get new kids coming in and they learn so much that they take it and use it in the real world," he said.
The class itself is structured around getting to the end of the year, where at that time the class participates in a race — a Mario Kart lawnmower race that is.
The students spend the first half of the class studying and learning from the book, they learn how engines work and what makes them go. Clutches, four-stroke versus two-stroke, pistons, compression, fuel, timing, steering angle, camber, caster — the list goes on and on.
After learning from the books the students are tested on their knowledge to make sure they are ready for the second half of the class. That's the part where they take an old scrapped lawnmower and turn it into a go-kart.
The lawnmowers are all donated - or bought for little to nothing - and the parts used to convert them are all recycled.
For example, scrap sheet metal from the school’s welding program is given to the class to be plasma cut and CNC’d into the various components the students need for their karts.
“No kid repairs the same mower the same way. And they find their new problem-solving skills," Doughty explained.
The repairs the students make are often left right down to the wire. Right before Friday's race, you could see almost all of the racers tinkering with their karts desperately trying to get them working.
And trying to resurrect a 30-year-old lawnmower to race is no easy task.
“They get a glimmer of hope as they see the first one run and then the second and next thing, you know, we have a race! And then as we go through that final day, they say ‘I’d do the whole year all over again’ and they feel so accomplished, they feel great and inevitably they come back," Doughty told MTN. "And they're advanced students for us the next year and they get to have a lot more fun to try harder, more difficult projects.”
A special note to this year’s race winner — Landon Richards — who fought back and overtook what was the race leader 10 times to win. He told MTN that he didn’t foresee a future racing career, one in mechanics would be of more interest to him.
