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By KEVIN ECKLEBERRY

Daily News

Kenny Moore loves to teach, whether he’s in a classroom taking students through the ins and outs of calculus, or guiding his players as the coach of the LaGrange High tennis team.

For Moore, his ability to teach and coach has been severely limited over the past two months since the school has been closed because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Where there’s a will there’s a way, though, and for the past few weeks Moore has been offering face-to-face calculus instruction to his students, albeit in a safe manner, and with social distancing in mind.

It started with Moore offering instruction to two students who live close to each other, and it has grown from there.

“I was going crazy. I just want to teach school,” Moore said. “I connected with these two girls. The first time, they were sitting in the driveway, and I was in the yard, and I had a little flip chart attached to a ladder, and we had class. The next time I invited the whole class, and we met out there in that field by St. Mark’s. We had several kids, and they all had lawn chairs, and they were all spread out, and we had class. We’d done it a couple of times since then in a parking lot. It was real cool.”

Moore is helping prepare the students for the AP calculus exam on Tuesday, and that process has obviously been complicated since school hasn’t been in session for nearly two months.

“It just takes me forever to do anything virtually,” Moore said. “I’ve had Zoom meetings with them, I’ve had sessions where I give them a problem, and then I will video myself working it out and send that to them. Gosh it just takes forever to get anything set up, so just having some time where we’re all together is just priceless, and the kids have been wonderful, and it’s been awesome of them to meet with me, and they’ve worked real hard, they’ve asked questions. It’s been real cool.”

Moore has been at LaGrange High since 1989, and he has been teaching AP calculus for nearly three decades.

Moore was a football coach at LaGrange for nearly 20 years and he was a part of four state-championship teams, and he has led the tennis program since 1991.

Last season, Moore earned his 800th victory as LaGrange’s tennis coach, and he’s looking to still being around for win number 1,000 in a few years.

LaGrange’s boys’ and girls’ tennis teams were both rolling along when the season was canceled because of the coronavirus.

“Everybody was working, and it was a fun group, a fun year,” Moore said. “We had some success, and they’re all just heart-broken that we had to stop.”

Moore is disappointed that the seniors in the school, including the ones on the tennis team, won’t get to participate in a number of activities that have been canceled.

“The seniors have missed out on so much,” Moore said. “They didn’t have a prom, they didn’t have a spring concert their senior year. They’re going to have some kind of virtual graduation. They didn’t have the last week at LaGrange High School of class when they knew it was the last week.

“Of course the athletes didn’t have their senior season of tennis, or baseball, and all this. My heart goes out to the senior bunch.”