I get along with people of all ages and backgrounds. One of my great pleasures is helping students reach "aha" moments when the light dawns and confusion gives way to knowledge. I'm able to figure out what someone is not "getting", and why -- what they are overlooking or don't know, or what misconceptions they may have -- and then remove those obstacles to their understanding. I have tutored and taught people my own age, kids, highschool students, college and graduate students, always with enjoyment and and interest in their personal development.
I have a diverse educational and professional background which includes both humanities and sciences. I grew up in NYC's Greenwich Village in the 60s and 70s. I received an excellent education at PS41, Trinity, and Elizabeth Irwin. My interests then were music, art and film, language(s) and literature. I took advantage of the cultural richness of the city, frequenting museums, live music venues (rock, jazz, blues, classical, and what's now called "world music"), galleries, libraries and bookstores. As a pre-teen I took classes at the Museum of Modern Art, Greenwich House (music), and got started on guitar at the legendary School of Fretted Instruments (aka The Folklore Center, celebrated in a Dylan song). I was in my first band in 6th grade; we played an event for Fortune magazine, and recorded a few songs in a real studio. In high school, in addition to the standard and not-so-standard curriculum, I studied music composition and music theory (our textbook was Piston's Harmony, a standard college & graduate level text).
On entering Columbia as a freshman, I was focused on writing, Romance languages and literatures, and I thought I wanted to be a philologist. Only problem was, the field had ceased to exist. I thrived on modern linguistics and philosophy, however, and after a few courses became fascinated with the formalisms used to describe language and reasoning -- mathematics and logic, in short.
Family and personal reasons led me to take a year off, during which time I taught myself a great deal of math -- all the topics which I had "sort of" understood in high school, on through calculus on Banach spaces, basic modern algebra and set theory. On returning to undergraduate studies, I went to CCNY, where my aptitude was recognized. I took many one-on-one courses in advanced math topics with professors who were happy to teach their specialties. I also studied computer science, which by comparison seemed like recreational mathematics. During my last year and a half as an undergrad, I taught the course on discrete math for computer science students. I learned that I genuinely enjoy sharing what I know with others, and that I can explain complex things clearly. I quickly learned to adjust my approach and expectations to the needs and capabilities of my students. Many thanked me later for having learned a lot, and for my taking the time after class or by appointment to help them "get" challenging topics. I graduated with a 4.0 GPA, and I was awarded the Ward Medal for outstanding proficiency in math, an honor which the college had not bestowed in several years.
I went to MIT for grad school in pure math (logic) and computer science. I earned my Master's, proved a few theorems, edited my thesis adviser's monograph, but I remain all-but-thesis. At MIT I was a teaching assistant, and again had the opportunity to help students understand conceptually difficult material.
During grad school and beyond, I was wrote and designed software as a consultant and contractor. I've worked on diverse projects, including corporate applications, engineering applications, and audio plugins. I was architect/senior developer on a sizable project for SAP, and taught the more junior developers many aspects of good practice, writing code to be read and easily maintained, efficiency of algorithms, and the like.
As a technical writer, I've written and developed many manuals, tutorials and conceptual overviews of computer science topics, for clients including Symantec, IBM, and Cakewalk Music Systems.
My main focus currently is music (-making, producing, engineering) and audio post-production for film and video, on which I've guest-lectured at The New School in NYC. Over the years I have had a select number of guitar students, ranging from aspiring rock players to members of established world-music fusion bands. I've studied Indian Classical music (vocal and fretless instruments) and Arabic music, and work with musicians from those traditions as well.