My experience

I will organize my experience by fields and importance, rather than chronologically. This will also be more honest and less varnished, even controversial, than an average résumé.

Teaching

Coalition School for Social Change (CSSC), 1997-2003

I taught physics, chemistry, environmental science, earth science, biology, living environment, and music.

Every year in physics I taught project-based units, kinematics and electronic circuits being the mainstay projects. I added an astronomy library research project to the physics course in the middle of my tenure.

Chemistry without serious equipment-based labs was mostly a disaster.

I taught music only one year; it was not good, without enough instruments; fortunately the school was able to fund a much better music curriculum and hire a real music teacher after me.

The highlight of the environmental science was that it was a team teaching job by me and Conrade Welch. He was a good mentor, and we developed an excellent field experience helping the Central Park Conservancy study tree viability in the Ramble, a wilder area of the park.

Biology was a thoughtless mid-year appointment; I leaned heavily on the much more qualified biology teacher. Earth science can be an excellent curriculum, but difficult to teach without field trips.

Hopefully it was a benefit to my students to learn that an adult could be interested in these diverse fields. It was certainly a benefit to me to understand the scope of high school science curriculum in New York, now that I work with a broad spectrum of teachers.

I also advised the yearbook team every year, and managed the computer system until (well, even helping then) they hired a manager.

Northern Lights Learning Center

2009-:I teach 8-10 week project-based units to groups of home-schooled students in a space they lease in Ithaca. Each session I invent a new course and the center lists it in a catalog for students.

My first course was to build panel-reflector solar cookers.

My second course was to build electronic circuits, just as we did at CSSC.

My third course was to build an electronic data-logging anemometer, based on a micro-controller.

International American School, 1995-1996

It was certainly eye-opening to teach science and math to 4th through 7th graders in Warsaw, Poland. I taught in english to pupils from Poland and many expatriates.

The major issue was corruption. For example, administrators had my grades changed so that a student wouldn't have to be held back a year. It was wrongly assumed that a person who studied engineering would be a better teacher of math than a person who studied education. Polish parents lost sight of our promise to teach an American curriculum, when it came to math. There was too little communication between the native staff and the foreign staff.

The students were fascinating and vivacious. Some were worked too hard for their age, by their parents. I knew it was right to skip a lesson on some sunny days and take the children to a neighborhood playground, to get away from the drab interiors and oppressive curricular atmosphere. Weekly strawberries-on-rice for lunch was a boost to my constitution. I always ate with students.

I do not regret going there for a year.

Student field experience, Ithaca High School

As a M.A.T. candidate at Cornell, I shadowed a physics teacher at Ithaca High School, and taught one lab class on reflections using lasers. I remember seeing the guide to Regents Physics curriculum, how everything was laid out for the year, topic by topic; that I think of as the beginning of seeing how poorly state-mandated physics curriculum was aligned to the future of the students who took it.

Substitute, Ithaca City School District, 1993-1995

Being inexperienced, I was only called when there were many subs needed. I remember students at Dewitt Middle School trying to push my buttons, students in Boynton Middle School expressing deep respect for their absent teacher. Unfortunately, I never got to substitute for a physics teacher, just math at Ithaca High School.

EnergyTeachers.org

See the page EnergyTeachers.org. Specifically relevant to my experience as a whole, EnergyTeachers.org has been an opportunity to work with hundreds of other teachers, giving me a perspective on diverse needs and approaches to all sorts of pedagogical issues.

American Association of Physics Teachers

I was only a journal-reading member from 1999 to 2003. But the summer I left CSSC, I attended my first national conference, and was impressed by the interest among physics faculty in energy issues. That impression lead to my founding of EnergyTeachers.org, with the help two colleagues, another active member of AAPT and a chemistry teacher also late of CSSC. I have listened in on many committees, including Physics and Society, Women in Physics, and History & Philosophy of Physics, the last of which I was appointed a member, 2011-2014. I don't go to all the conferences, but when there are several interesting-to-me sessions and workshops, and the location is reachable, I go. Interestingly, the meetings in 2009, 2011, and 2012 are in the city near my parents-in-law, my mother, and my dad, respectively.

Music

Music has been an interesting superlative in my life. Always my best academic subject, but never my academic or career focus. I have learned many instruments, but remain dilettantish in all.

I worked in a bar weekly with a couple friends in NYC, while teaching, for a few months, spinning records. I've recently (2010) been practicing DJ skills at home, with a view to making mix-tapes and supplanting the abysmal local 80s-Night DJ, or perhaps playing laid-back music at a restaurant/club.

I've also started playing the drums more often, and through drills have been able to make my limbs more independent rhythmically.

Computers

Ah, the freedom to customize your shackles! I have been able to do so many different tasks thanks to an understanding of quite a diverse skill-set on the computer, but it has taken quite an investment to learn all that. How about a list of skills?

• Programming and interpreted languages
  • Basic
  • Assembly language, for micro-controllers, mostly the 8051 family.
  • Linden Scripting Language:For Second Life, these are the only programs that have earned me money.
  • Applescript
  • C:mostly for Arduino, and I've only dipped my foot in the Objective-C pool for Cocoa.
  • MySQL:All the information for EnergyTeachers.org is stored in a highly relational database. I usually have to custom-write queries because of the relationships.
• Productivity software
  • Adobe Illustrator:Great for making educational diagrams.
  • Adobe Photoshop
  • Adobe Indesign (formerly PageMaker):I spent hundreds of hours on PageMaker and Indesign for the yearbook at CSSC; I also published a book for EnergyTeachers.org, for which I used some advanced features.
• Music Software
  • I really enjoyed the Amiga (1987-1994) for music production, but it wasn't my first computer for music. In high school my music teacher asked me to pioneer the use of a Yamaha CX5-M, a computer with built-in synth, sequencer, and MIDI, the school somehow acquired. I used it for experimental sequences based on jazz, and to sequence back-up tracks for singers quickly.
• Hardware:I've changed quite a few hard drives, memory, batteries. I've cannibalized computers and phones and music-players. I know my way around SCSI, PATA, SATA, USB, and FireWire. I've set up WiFi networks. I've interfaced micro-controllers and musical instruments to computers using USB, MIDI, and RS-232 serial communications.

Electronics

For a project for an educational class in grad school, I started learning how to build electronic circuits. I started with transistors, and phototransistors, and light-dependent resistors. I've used micro-controllers to measure light, temperature, and wind speed, and to store data in volatile memory and on non-volatile memory cards; to display data on a LCD screen; and to communicate controls to a MIDI instrument.

Photography

Another serious hobby started in high school. My high school had a great darkroom, where I developed hundreds of photos for yearbook and just to practice. I've used Photoshop since 1993, and have been taking digital photos since 1999. During the 2000s, I scanned hundreds of slides, mostly Fuji Velvia, to process and print digitally. As of 2010 I still use an Epson 2200 I bought in 2002 for printing; the key to keeping the heads clean is a few drops of ammonia on the idling pads.

Academics

Extramural studies in 1992-1993 at Cornell inspired me to matriculate for a degree in education there. That pattern is repeating in 2010, after taking two excellent courses extramurally again, STS 3301 and EDUC 6470.

For my undergraduate degree, 1987-1991 I studied physics and the history of science. The Undergraduate Research Program was quite formative for me; my sophomore year I took a graduate course in the history of modern physics, and the professor graciously allowed me to help him and eventually coauthor a paper on four quantum pioneers, for that research project. None of the concentrations for physics majors appealed to me, except the freely customizable one, which I set to a set of history and sociology courses.

My graduate degree was originally intended to be an M.S., but I earned an M.A.T. for practical reasons at the end of it. I didn't have a workable thesis, but I had met all the requirements for the M.A.T., and it was useful for my teaching licensure. I took many more courses than required for an M.A.T., and am now a richer teacher for it.

Christian Science

I have been a member of the First Church of Christ Scientist in Boston, MA since 2004, when I lived a block away from it. I also joined First Church of Christ Scientist Newton MA in 2006. I studied in Christian Science sunday schools from 1974-1988, very much centered on thoughtful readings of the bible and the Christian Science textbook. I have experienced some notable demonstrations of healing and have gained insight and perspicacity on many issues thanks to teaching, precepts, and demonstrations.