Everyone has a story worth telling. At least, that's the theory. To test it, Tempo is throwing darts at the phone book. When a dart hits a name, a reporter dials the phone number and asks if someone in the home will be interviewed. Stories appear on Fridays.

        The simple equation is posted prominently above the chalk board in Paulette Perkins' classroom at Campbell County High School.

        NO WORK = NO CREDIT!

        “I'm very consistent in my rules,” the 33-year-old soft-spoken algebra teacher says. “I don't bend a whole lot. (Students) know what I expect of them.”

        That's posted in the room, too. Among other things, they're expected to know the quadratic formula, the laws of exponents, how to solve single- and double-variable equations, and how to simplify radicals.

        All of which can be immensely fascinating or incredibly boring, depending on your point of view.

        It helps, of course, to have a teacher who can explain the fine points of perfect-square trinomials without causing a mental meltdown.

        Such as Paulette Perkins.

        “She'll have little stories to go along with how to do a problem,” says freshman Chas Thornberry of Southgate, who admits that algebra is not his best subject.

        Mrs. Perkins ties lessons on negative exponents to a story about living in a duplex apartment. She talks about radicals (square roots) as if they're people getting out of jail.

Paulette Perkins works with ninth-grader Amanda Eggie. (Mike Simons photo) | ZOOM |

        “Whenever I talk about slope (of a line),” Mrs. Perkins says, “I always talk about skiing. Horizontal lines you can cross-country ski on.” But ski on a vertical line, she points out, and you're not long for this world.

        “I'll tell them ahead of time, "This sounds really stupid, but you'll remember it.' ”

        She likes working with freshmen. “You can still mold them,” she says. She's worked with that age group since coming to Campbell County High nine years ago. (She also teaches one eighth-grade class at Campbell County Middle School.)

        The summer before she arrived, in 1992, she had a different teaching experience. For two months she shared her Christian beliefs with young people in Kazakstan, which a few months earlier had proclaimed its independence from the Soviet Union.

        She didn't have to think up stories for those students. They were already at her fingertips, in the Bible.

        The youngsters she met were open to learning about Christ. Adults were more leery, “but you'd still see them peering through windows, listening.”

        “It was probably the greatest summer ever,” she says.

        In high school, she isn't ministering. She's teaching algebra. But with similar zeal.

        Freshman Amanda Eggie from California, Ky., says Mrs. Perkins is “patient with us. She's never yelled at us. We all look up to her.”

        Maybe some of that patience comes from being the mother of 2-year-old Jonah. She and husband Dan — he's studying to be an elementary school teacher — are expecting their second child in July.

        Although it's nice to be liked by students, that's not Mrs. Perkins' No. 1 goal. She's out of earshot when sophomore Jennifer Strunk of Alexandria pays her the highest compliment. “I learned a lot in here this year.”

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