My experience

I will organize my experience by fields and importance, rather than chronologically. I will also be more honest and less varnished 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.

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.