I am a teacher. Besides teaching graduate education classes at Cal State LA, I tutor young students in many subject areas. My relationship with Cal State is long and rich. I received my history degrees here. I helped pioneer the Cal State-Marshall Fundamental Partnership Program, bringing middle and high school students to the campus for summer immersion classes.
I do love history. History is alive and part of every conflict going on around us, but unlike fiction, it provides real and long-term drama. The home I grew up in was part of it. My mother's activism in the Civil Rights Movement in Boston exposed me to the struggle to integrate our cloistered society. The Vietnam War shaped my teen years. In California my work with churches and activists assisting refugees from war-torn Central America exposed me to deadly struggles. Working with immigrants from Southeast Asia in the Learning Center at Pasadena City College exposed me to a still larger world. Living history. I lived in France, learned to speak French, worked in a dozen countries, sailed a small boat in the Mediterranean, spent a summer in Mexico and another in Alaska. Living history. I became a high school teacher. The most exciting work I had ever done. More exciting than traveling. More rewarding than anything. I loved it so much I wanted to write a book about it. But no one works harder than a high school teacher and I could not find the time. Teaching high school became my life for many years, and then I came to Cal State. Now I teach teachers. Paying it forward; paying forward a lifetime of teaching. In 2011, I published my first novel Results May Vary: A Novel About An Urban High School. Living history. Education as the key that can unlock the doors to a better world.
The most important thing in my life is my wife, Teri, a certified doula with her own client base. She is the joy that brings everything else together. I love to read, to play chess, to be outdoors. In nature I believe we find can all the meaning we need for spiritual serenity. A mountain glade may be the finest house of worship on earth.