This article is one of a series of posts dedicated to our latest project, Humans of La Tour. Inspired by the successful Humans of New York by Brandon Stanton, Humans of La Tour is comprised of a series of journalistic portraits created by the Journalism students at La Tour. They seek to highlight a few of the many people who make up the La Tour community: those we see every day as our professors and classmates, as well as those whose hard work and dedication keep the school running smoothly on a daily basis.
Each portrait was created by an Anglophone Section student in Ms. Temple’s Journalism Elective as part of their final project for the Spring Semester 2021.
Xavier Yeponde, mathematics teacher and so much more.
By Thais Jourdan (2EA)
In mathematics, teachers always want us to find x’s and y’s, but today, we’ll try to get to know X.Y.
You might have heard of him as “the teacher who plays Among Us with his students,” or seen him in the hallways and thought, “he looks like Koba La D.” But apart from that, what do you actually know about him?
I don’t know that many things about XY, but here’s what I can tell you: from music to his career, through sports, this man has done a lot of things. Like a lot.
In the long list of instruments he has played, you can find guitar, clarinet, drums, saxophone, and a little bit of piano. “My place is kind of a junk room of instruments,” he says. He also had a radio program in college where he talked about music and stuff, that you can still stream on Soundcloud today if you want: it’s called “Cale Son.”
When it comes to sports, he plays soccer and judo. When he was a teenager, he was in the judo selection of French Guyana and done a training session with Teddy Riner. He even had Lucie Decosse’s number, who called him when he broke his arm. “It was pretty cool,” he added, laughing. I also asked him why he supported l’Olympique de Marseille. He said that it was because it’s the only team on TV with history, and being a supporter of the Geldar de Kourou, where he grew up, didn’t sound that great to him. He adds that he finds the Paris team … “pathetic” (we’ll use this word for eventual fans who will happen to read this 🙂
What he is most proud of, other than his ranking on FIFA, however, would be his professional career. He said that he has been able to do a little bit of everything and that he doesn’t regret not having tried something and to be where he is today, considering his journey to this point. For that matter, he went to boarding school at St Cyr l’Ecole, then completed a physics degree at University Paris-Sud Orsay and at Université Paris Saclay. During his L1, he worked at the Palais de la Découverte and did an internship at Polytechnique during his M1. For a while, he also worked as a wine merchant with a friend, and now he teaches mathematics and physics to classes of lovely teenagers at La Tour.
His hobbies include correcting our (successful) DSTs, annoying his students (or “spiritual children” as he calls them) music, sports, video games, too, and mostly discovering new things “like cheese, for example.”
The Tower Times Blog 