Born and raised in Seattle, Washington, I was educated in the Humanities at the University of Washington, and in English Literature of the University of Oregon. I removed to Port Townsend from the city in 1998 in order to escape its increasingly frenetic pace, and ultimately to give my then newly-born son a quieter, more friendly and salubrious manner of life.
Apart from teaching, I currently write essays for a journal; review performances of Pacific Northwest Ballet for Critical Dance...
Born and raised in Seattle, Washington, I was educated in the Humanities at the University of Washington, and in English Literature of the University of Oregon. I removed to Port Townsend from the city in 1998 in order to escape its increasingly frenetic pace, and ultimately to give my then newly-born son a quieter, more friendly and salubrious manner of life.
Apart from teaching, I currently write essays for a journal; review performances of Pacific Northwest Ballet for Critical Dance Magazine (New York City); am in my eighth year of compiling and writing a specialized reference dictionary of English words having specific classes of noun-forming suffixes; am Contributory Reader for the Oxford English Dictionary; am member of the Forum for Classics, Libraries, and Scholarly Communication, the American Philological Association, and the Classical Association (University of London); am never inattentive to whensoever the Muses of Poetry impel my pen; and, in the spirit of Aristotle’s sentiment that ‘…to be learning something is the greatest of pleasures’, I am an eternal auto-didact, entirely in concurrence with George Gissings’s averment that ‘The zeal of learning is never out of date; the example---were there no more---burns before one as a sacred fire, forever unquenchable.’
I am under the decided belief that true education is about learning, as opposed to the forced instruction (so common in many schools) that has for its mandate the peremptory digestion of facts, information, and data just long enough for the passing of standardized tests. For, as is the purpose of education itself, I earnestly desire for my students to actually acquire knowledge, to retain that which has been taught; and therewithal to be better able to apply those inherent operations that give rise to and encircle concepts, discoveries, ideas, creativity, assimilation, inferences, principles, and conclusions that are applicable to and useful for every profession and manner of life after students leave secondary school. And I firmly believe that the potential for this is significantly increased when students are respected for their own individual thought and feeling, when they are not ‘dumbed down’ by rote instruction and the vapid memorization of dicta, and when, instead of being ‘talked to’, they rather become companions in discovery with their teachers and fellow students.
