About Rob
Teacher & Tutor
I have worked as a classroom teacher in high school English; a substitute teacher in all subjects, from 6th to 12th grade; and a tutor and academic coach, focusing on time management, test-taking strategies, and study skills.
A crucial goal is to help students cultivate the confidence and endurance to excel even in what they may find boring, dull, or hard, and not simply to improve at what they already do well. To learn means to move into strange territories, to move toward rather than away from uncertainty.
It is imperative to help them approach every subject with an open generosity so that they might discover what they didn’t know they love. This surprising discovery might lead on to a humane and humble curiosity in things that once seemed fearsome or even dangerous. This is a foundation of critical thinking, which is nothing more than the ability to travel beyond our expectations and awaken to the limitations of our own intellectual entrenchments.
In all this work, then, my basic task is to promote attentiveness and wakefulness, and to instill respect, empathy, humility, and a compassionate objectivity. To encourage curiosity. “Curiosity” means to be attracted to the strange. This requires a playfulness, an openness, a feeling that approaches love. It isn’t easy. This playfulness takes work. In everything I do, I strive to foster a heart at play and a mind at work.
Process Design & Improvement
As a certified Green Belt in Six Sigma, I help companies and individuals manage and improve their processes and operations. This means I’m usually designing assembly jigs, deliberately asking lots of stupid questions, and probably telling people where to put their furniture. This also means looking for important steps we’re missing or unnecessary steps we’re keeping. I’m all for simplification, but it’s usually better to leave the unnecessary steps alone than it is to skip necessary steps. And those “unnecessary” steps might be there to let us take a pause, to recuperate.
Selected Readings
Design & Art
- Robert Bringhurst: Elements of Typographic Style.
- John Cage: Silence.
- Pauline Oliveros: Sounding the Margins. Her idea of “deep listening” can be applied to any act of perception.
Teaching
- Paulo Friere: Pedagogy of the Oppressed. This book, among its many virtues, advocates for meeting the student where they are, and to see the teacher as collaborator in the process of discovery and learning rather than dictator. Students are not empty vessels to be filled with “knowledge” or shapeless masses of clay to be molded.
- Keith Stanovich: How to Think Straight About Psychology. It could just as easily have been called “How to think Straight.” A fantastic primer on logical fallacies and critical thinking.
- Longinus: On the Sublime.
- Epictetus: The Discourses. A masterclass on how to push a student through discomfort and into awareness.
Writing
- Verlyn Klinkenborg: Several Short Sentences about Writing. Crucial guide that centers our attention on the most important element of writing: the sentence. As I tell my students: Ideas are easy. Sentences are hard.
- Natalie Goldberg: Writing Down the Bones.
- Anne Lamott: Bird by Bird.
- Brenda Ueland: If You Want to Write. Be bold! You have something to say.