as you can tell from the tools carried
on the back of the municipal garbage truck, eh?
mr
I'm working on the many familial and personal tasks that I let slide while working too hard at Stuy. These tasks are daunting, time consuming, necessary, and nowhere near as much fun as the teaching job. But on a brighter note, they include exercising and playing trumpet, both of which make me happy.
The latest — and probably last — chapter of my employment ended in February 2023. I resigned in good standing after a 9½-year stint trying to help 170 students at a time understand some cool things about computer programming and computer science, preferably without hating the effort that learning requires.
It was an honor, a privilege, and an enormous pleasure.
Generous students listened as if I knew something, worked as if learning mattered, shared our jokes as if they were funny, and tolerated my errors as if they were intentional.
Great teachers — who included both colleagues and students — inspired me by their examples, pointed me towards improvements, tolerated my shortcomings, and encouraged every success with apparently bottomless generosity. Which is what great teachers do, eh?
It felt like a huge team in a joint effort against ignorance, with significant successes.
The past tense above is deceptive, since people have been treating me to email with their news and opinions. These communications are so valuable that I commonly postpone reading them until I think I've earned that pleasure. (Hey, you knew I was weird before you read this far.) At the jobs below, recognition of good work was communicated explicitly only in the paycheck. But the outstanding reward of teaching lies in successful efforts to help people with the challenge of learning and growing, for which these emails provide the clearest reward. The pleasure these give me beggars my attempts to communicate it.
Samples appropriate to this medium:
A department of 12 sharp people worked under an ace manager to address research questions, create models, and support educational marketing. Programs we wrote analyzed securities, currencies, and economic variables to support the department's core mission and side projects.
Quantitative analysis relies on convenient access to up-to-date data. We designed databases to store the data, wrote software tools to automate loading them, documented them, and supported their use by others.
I spent a dozen years working at this firm.
A long-time friend started a computer department that introduced a central computer to a firm whose highest tech was adding machines. Good people joined, producing some solid work.
We wrote programs to store abstracts of leases, keep accounts on cash and accrual bases simultaneously, and process disbursements. We designed, implemented, and supported two programming languages that allowed structured programming, arithmetic expressions, and regexes in our general ledger. Accountants and analysts with no previous programming experience programmed in these languages.
I was privileged to work in the department for eight years and to lead it for another seven years.