I grew up in N.H. and was a high school history teacher for 16 years. I taught in private, independent schools in and around NYC. While teaching I attended the New School for Social Research to get a Masters in Liberal Studies (interdi... moreI grew up in N.H. and was a high school history teacher for 16 years. I taught in private, independent schools in and around NYC. While teaching I attended the New School for Social Research to get a Masters in Liberal Studies (interdisciplinary masters). I moved to San Francisco in 1993. I couldn't find a teaching position so, from 1995-97, I became a business-to-business high-tech sales lead generator (fancy name for telemarketer). That was good preparation for getting my PhD from UC Davis (Education) since I had to learn how to speak esoteric jargon without understanding much of what I said. For example, I had to speak to chemists and ask them if they were interested in HPLCs ( High Performace Liquid Chromatographs) or Supercritical Fluid Extractors; were they more interested in cations or anions? I learned how to program telephones, work in hypercard and Filemaker Pro. I learned the difference between routers and bridges. When arrived at UC Davis, I was able to wow my professors with my high tech background. One professor took my idea for coding qualitative data with Word and Filemaker and published a paper on it (without attribution!).
While working on my dissertation (The Business Roundtable and Systemic Reform, 2002), I started volunteering with the San Francisco Organizing Project, which was then engaged in small school reform. I worked with them from 2001-2005. In 2005, I joined three others to co-found the SF Freedom School. The goal of this six Saturday summer program was to convince participants, through the study of the Civil Rights Movement through the eyes of Bay Area Civil Rights Veterans (crmvet.org), that ordinary people can do extraordinary things. Yes, Virginia, we can fight city hall successfully. In 2007, I met the department chair of the Political Science Department at SF State University. He offered me a chance to teach at SFSU and I have been there ever since. I gave up on the Freedom School in 2010 and moved the curriculum to SFSU as a course. I now teach three upper division courses whose goal is to empower students to fight for social justice.edit
