About Me

My name is Richard Hunsperger. I was technically born in Palm Springs but lived in a connecting city for all of my childhood life. I went to a private Catholic school called St. Theresa for grades 1-8. School there was fairly easy for me and I made many life-long friends. This is one of the benefits of attending a private school. The Catholic part of the school was always a challenge because I never really identified myself as Catholic even though both of my parents did. From an early age I enjoyed math but I never thought I would go on to college to major in the subject. After finishing St. Theresa School, I went on to Palm Springs High School. This was an old school and as a result the teaching methods were very standard. We had really no use of technology, aside from computers in an Into to Programming class I took. I can only hope that they have updated their methods to include technology. Again, my favorite classes in high school were always my math classes. At this point I still didn't see myself going to college and getting a math degree. I always thought I would do something with computers since I was always tinkering with them. By the time I entered high school, my sister had already graduated and moved on to attend UCSD. This put the pressure on me to go to college and become successful. During my Junior year of high school I had a few slip ups and did bad in some of my classes. I promised myself I would put more effort in and ended up doing very well my senior year. I applied to many CSU schools but ended up choosing CSUSM because of the location--my sister had already established herself in San Diego. I went into CSUSM with an Undeclared major and took GE's my first 2 years. After struggling between Computer Science and Math, I finally chose to major in Math.

I was very keen to technology from an early age. I started inheriting my parents' old computers whenever they purchased new ones. I was always tinkering with the hardware and upgrading parts here and there. The first operating system I learned was Windows 95 and I fell in love with it. After that came Windows 98 and eventually the Windows we have today. I also experimented with SuSE Linux during my years in high school and had great interest in writing my own scripts. I played many computer games in my teen years, most notably Half-Life and all of its mods. Gaming had become a growing passion during my middle to high school years and I'm still very passionate today. I have always welcomed the computer revolution and will continue to support its development. It is my personal belief that everyone should own a computer and have access to the internet.

Before applying to the School of Education at CSUSM, I read the Mission Statement and became very inspired. I have always valued diversity in education (especially coming from Palm Springs) and I plan to implement multiple diversity-supporting practices in my classroom. The reason behind my decision to support diversity is simple--it's just the right thing to do. No one likes to be discriminated against and no one likes to be an outcast. Everyone should be given equal opportunities for success, especially in education. Overcoming diversity can be easy if we all live by the motto, "Treat others as you would want to be treated."