Professional river rafting guide, commercial producer, and now Ojai Valley School math teacher, Adam Anthony Farmer is the newest addition to the OVS Upper Campus faculty.
After the sudden departure of former math teacher Benjamin Kolbeck, Upper Campus Headmaster Craig Floyd and other OVS administrators scrambled to find a new Statistics teacher to finish off the year.
That’s how they found Mr. Farmer, who was referred to the school by history and outdoor education teacher Zach Byars. Mr. Farmer’s teaching experience prior to OVS came from working as a substitute math teacher during the off-seasons of river rafting.
Before Mr. Farmer arrived at OVS, his life led him on a series of adventures through different jobs.
Mr. Farmer was born and raised in San Diego, but he went up north after graduating high school to attend UC Davis and major in business.
“My dad is very entrepreneurial and owned multiple pharmacies while I was growing up,” Mr. Farmer said. “I still have the entrepreneurial spirit and getting a business degree made a lot of sense to me.”
However, despite majoring in business, his passion led him to pursue a job far away from a typical office building; he fell in love with being a river guide and spent a large portion of his life leading whitewater rafting trips.
His love for rafting started when his father took him on a few trips throughout high school. Then, he spent the spring break of his sophomore year in training and worked as a guide for his summer job.
“It was just a ton of fun,” Mr. Farmer said, referring to his summer months spent on the river. “I worked my way up more challenging rivers as I got better and then spent most of my guiding career on the Rogue River in southern Oregon… it’s just beautiful up there.”
Twelve years later, life brought him back to the city when he met some people from the Los Angeles film industry during the last trip of the 2007 rafting season. They said he’d be great at working in production and, out of curiosity, he went down to LA to work on set because it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. After that, he ended up falling into working on TV commercials for the next ten years.
Working in the film industry was also how he got into a relationship with his current wife, actress Melinda Clarke, who he met on that exact same rafting trip.
They started out as just friends, but their relationship grew through working together and joking about creating a reality TV show on the river.
“[River rafting] gives you your action, drama, and adventure all built in,” Mr. Farmer said. “But the more I learned about what it meant to be a reality TV show producer, the less interested I was. I didn’t want to go out there and put people in danger to get all this dramatic footage.”
Though the reality TV show never took off, his relationship with Melinda Clarke did and in September, 2015, they got married. Just last fall, he, his wife, and his step-daughter, Catherine Grace, moved to Ventura.
Though most of his jobs consisted of guiding people down challenging rivers and creating commercials that appear on TV every day, he still needed a job during the off-seasons of his days working as a guide.
Right out of college, he worked as a substitute teacher when he wasn’t working on the river, providing him experience teaching math which made him a great fit for the new teaching position at OVS.
He found out about the open math position from Mr. Byars, a long-time friend who heard about the position opening up and got him an interview knowing he used to teach high school math.
It had been a long time since he taught high school students, but finds the experience just as enjoyable and enriching as the first time.
“When you take the class you have a certain understanding of it, but when you get older and into a teaching role, it’s a whole deeper level of understanding,” Mr. Farmer said. “So, for me right now, I’m really exploring all these different ways to explain statistics in one to two or three different ways.”
Already, many of the new students enjoy Mr. Farmer as their new teacher.
For senior Sophia Cluff-Thompson, math classes have always been more challenging for her as opposed to language arts and history, but she thinks Mr. Farmer teaches it in a way that explains the curriculum well and even makes it easy at times.
“I was worried that the new teacher couldn’t recreate the fun learning environment we had with Mr. Kolbeck that made learning math so easy,” Sophia admitted. “But, Mr. Farmer has been great so far and I’m happy to continue learning AP Stats from him.”
Mr. Farmer initially applied for the job position as a long-term substitute teacher, but, after three weeks into working at OVS, he hopes to keep working here in the long run.
“It’s great. The kids and the staff are good and it’s a very small school, so you get to know people really quickly and I really like that for the classrooms,” Mr. Farmer said. “I’m hoping this could be a long-term fit for me.”