Teacher & Tutor
MY CALLING:
I entered the teaching world in 1991. My brother's law firm needed to add an in-house defensive driving program to their practice as a result of a change in the Texas Traffic Laws, which mandated the requirement of traffic ticket clients to take the course where before it was not a requirement.
Before developing and teaching this program for my brothers, I was well aware of what everyone said of defensive driving courses -- they are "long, boring and useless." These words alone set me on my way to make the class interesting and useful, which would make the time pass quickly.
Within the "overly restrictive" guidelines on Defensive Driving Courses provided by the Texas Education Agency, I took a boring class and brought it to life by adding real footage of street driving in Houston, diagrams of real accidents, and real citations then comparing situations to the safe driving rules espoused in the course. I'd ask every class if the "2 Second Rule" for safe distance was reasonable while driving on the freeway? With out prompting this always often led to the "useless" statements followed by claims of its impossibility within Houston. Then I'd show a self made video of me driving out from downtown Houston in rush-hour traffic, followed by me driving on I-10 in rush-hour traffic, followed by me driving on Loop 610 in rush-hour traffic. In each scene, I drove for 4-6 minutes while maintaining a 2-socond following distance at all times.
Time and again defensive driving students would return and new clients came per recommendation because the class was real, meaningful, and interesting. Experiencing this led me to see teaching to be my calling.
EXPERIENCE:
2023 - Present
St. Thomas Episcopal School
Teacher: AP US History
2021 - 2023
Cristo Rey Jesuit College Prep
Teacher: US Government, Economics
2012 - 2020
Western Academy
Teacher: 5th Grade Homeroom, Latin, History, Math
Coach: American Football, Rugby Football
2008 - 2012
St. Pius X High School
Teacher: English Language Arts, Computer Science
Coach: Rugby Football
2003 - 2008
Aspen Education Group: Excel Academy
Teacher: English Language Arts, Computer Science
Activities Coordinator
TUTOR:
PHOTO: Working with a mother and her 6th Grade home school son.
Aside from being a high school teacher, I regularly work as a personal tutor to students of any age. My primary area of focus is all subjects 4th Grade through Middle School, High School English Language Arts, Algebra, Geometry, Economics, and any area of Social Studies.
EDUCATION PHILOSOPHY
EDUCATION:
Master of Liberal Arts
Political and Economic Philosophy
University of St. Thomas - Houston
Graduated 1996
Bachelor of Science
Professional Writing
University of Houston
Graduated 1993
In 1949 Albert Einstein is quoted in a New York Times article as saying, "It is nothing short of a miracle that modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry.’’
Too many modern education models espouse a simple utilitarian purpose for education ... "graduate well from high school, goto a good college and earn a good degree so you can get a good job and be successful ..." or something along these lines.
The original purpose of a university had nothing to do with preparing one for a future career. No, the first universities focused on the development of a person's knowledge and wisdom so to foster the development of becoming a better human being. Education is to provide far more than some utilitarian purpose to graduate onto one’s future profession. In his IDEAL OF A UNIVERSITY John Henry Newman held that the primary end of education was "not to provide useful information or skills needed to perform an occupation in life. Rather, education is for the cultivation of the mind."
St. Paul write in 1 Thessalonians 5:23 that a person consists of a body, soul and spirit. The Greek Church has three different words as well, which helps further clarify the difference between soul and spirit. For the Byzantine Christians, the word for soul is pneuma (πνεῦμα), which means "breath" or "movement" or "life force," which today may be related to "energy." Likewise, the word for spirit is psyche, which in its essence simply means "mind."
Most schools today have stripped away the encouragement to wonder and seek through curiosity to simple memorizing sets of facts to be regurgitated later. This has led to simply doing what a student can to earn a grade and very little more. The desire to learn has, for the most part, been squeezed out from the student. For this reason I do not accept what most schools today have come to provide. The only form of education that carries any worth is a classical education focused on the trivium and quadrivium in order to lead students to see a unified idea of reality.