A native of Denver, an avid fly fisher and a relentless teacher, I left the peaks and streams of Colorado and moved to the mountains and rivers of Montana in 1977. I have been teaching at Great Falls High School since 2002, covering English (mostly sophomores and mostly Honors of late) as well as Vocabulary Development. I live with my wife, Donna, who works for Special Olympics, and with my drift boat, which works for me.

I thoroughly enjoy the faculty and students at Great Falls High-the Bison truly are the best, and they keep me pumped every day. Literature, new words, and fish feeding turn me on. Paying attention to words--those organic little bits of sound we use, miraculously, to communicate the most abstract of notions--opens up the entire universe to our frantically filtering brains. Literature, fortunately, is built with words, so I keep happy during the school year paying attention to mountains of words. During the summer I tickle trout bellies, while turning over stones on the river, looking for aquatic insect clues and sometimes looking for Norman Maclean's words "under the rocks" (A River Runs Through It).

And, oh yeah, it's true. I do like to diagram sentences.