About Me

I was born in 1953 and lived in the New York suburbs until I was a freshman in high school, when my family moved to Mexico City for my father’s job. I became hooked on international travel, and during the four years I attended university in the USA, I worked summer jobs in Amsterdam and Kenya, then joined the Peace Corps when I graduated, spending three years teaching English and training teachers in rural South Korea. When I returned to New York after Peace Corps, I quickly finished my Master’s degree in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages at Columbia University, then returned to Korea for another two years. After that I completed my doctorate in Applied Linguistics at Columbia, then went to Japan for three years to serve as director of the Intensive English Program at a branch campus of Southern Illinois University in Niigata Prefecture. I finished my career doing two things: running a business writing program that entailed my traveling to about a dozen countries around the world to teach writing skills at Fortune 100 investment banks, and training teachers at the Bronx Charter School for Better Learning, where the students (grades K – 5), who lived in a poor district which typically underperformed on New York State’s annual tests in math and English, soon surpassed their peers in the wealthiest suburban towns.