The 2009-2010 school year will be my eleventh year teaching high school English and my eighth at Newton South.  My first three years teaching were at Sharon High School.  Before that I was a building substitute at the Lawrence School in Brookline and spent three months during that shool year as a long-term sub in a sixth-grade classroom.

 

Before I came to Boston--and after I graduated from college (from the University of Wisconsin in 1985)--I spent about twelve years doing what I still call "creative drifting":  I spent three years traveling and working in North America (including Mexico and Alaska); I worked in a Japanese junior high school for three years; I traveled about in Europe (the UK, Ireland, France, Greece); and finally, I worked for about three years on a kibbutz in Israel, where I met my eventual wife, Viviane, who is from Toulouse, France.

 

We came to Boston in 1998.  (I have some roots here:  my father grew up in Dorchester, went to Boston English High, and my mother moved to Newton when she was a teen and went to Bigelow Junior High and then Newton High School [pre-Newton South/Newton North]).  We have three children:  Rebecca, who is in fifth grade at Zervas Elementary School, and twins Benjamin and Matthieu, who are in second grade, also at Zervas.  We live in Roslindale.

 

I grew up in Potomac, Maryland, and graduated from Winston Churchill High School in 1981.  The photo to the left is my senior yearbook photo.

 

I have a bachelor’s degree in Education from the University of Wisconsin in Madison, with a double major in English education and psychology, and a master’s degree in English from UMass Boston, with a concentration in creative writing--poetry.