Happy Birthday Kansas! I’m celebrating the state’s 148th birthday by telling you about one of my very favorite Kansas historical figures, astronomer Clyde Tombaugh. Although Clyde wasn’t born in Kansas, he got here as quick as he could! As a young man growing up in rural Kansas, Clyde taught himself to grind his own optics and build home-made telescopes from spare farm machinery parts.
Using his homemade telescope, Tombaugh made detailed sketches of the planets he saw and sent them to the Lowell Observatory in Arizona. He was subsequently offered a temporary position which ultimately turned into a long and illustrious astronomy career. During his time at the observatory he made the discovery for which he is most famous- the discovery of the 9th planet Pluto.
One of the things I find most interesting about Tombaugh is after he made his huge discovery, he returned home to study astronomy at the University of Kansas. The legend says that the professor who taught the Introduuctory Astronomy course refused to seat the famous freshman, saying it would be a waste of time. Can you imagine such an odd situation? An internationally known astronomer, discoverer of the 9th planet, wanting to enroll in Introductory Astronomy because he had yet to earn his college degree! Eventually, Clyde Tombaugh did graduate from KU, and the observatory there bears his name today.
Clyde Tombaugh will always be a Kansas hero, even if they did disrespect his discovery by downgrading its status to “dwarf planet”. Let’s just hope that Pluto doesn’t take it too personally.
I’ve been meaning to write a post like this for some time but finally have found the motivation needed to make it happen. Our pocketbook has been getting slammed lately. We’ve had to spend several thousand dollars on different repairs to our car in the past few weeks. Yesterday, my wife had a tire blowout on a poorly maintained county road. Luckily, she avoided a wreck and wasn’t hurt, but we’ll soon be investing in an expensive set of new tires.
I’m a relative newbie when it comes to blogging about issues pertaining to teaching & education, so I may have missed this topic. However one thing I rarely see come up in conversations about what makes a great teacher is Personal Finance.
What?!? What the heck does personal finance have to do with great teaching? I’ll admit that it does seem rather odd, but think about this for a second. Why is it that it doesn’t seem to matter if the economy is booming or if the economy is in the ditch, schools and teachers can never seem to get ahead with finances?
I’ve heard plenty of educators comment (or worse) about the low pay we receive relative to others with similar education levels, but I hardly ever hear of any potential solutions to the problem. But I would argue if your finances at home are in order, you can do a better job at work, no matter what your profession is, including classroom teaching.
Without revealing too much about my own stupidity, I will tell you that there was a time not terribly long ago, our finances were in shambles. We were thousands in debt, leasing expensive automobiles and living paycheck to paycheck. We were on the brink of disaster, and watching the bloodbath of layoffs this week brings it all back to me with crystal clarity.
The tipping point for us was when my wife became pregnant with our second child and lost her job of 20+ years when the company she worked for went bankrupt, all within a couple of weeks time. A double whammy!
I was a beginning teacher at the time, and if you think this didn’t affect my performance in the classroom, think again! I couldn’t sleep and I was a mess trying to figure out what to do.
To make a long story short, not long afterward I heard a guy on the radio Dave Ramsey, and people were calling in screaming “We’re debt free!” What the heck? Nobody ever gets out of debt do they?
I so wanted to be one of those guys, without the month to month worry of making those stupid credit card payments. So I ordered the book, read it in one night, and decided his plan could work for us.
Here’s the simple plan in a nutshell:
Live on less than you earn using written budget
Pay off debts smallest to largest
Sacrifice to win – “Live like no one else so later you can live like no one else!”
It took us a couple of years to get all of our credit cards & consumer debt paid off, but we are finally in a place where we have emergency funds available to handle the stuff that life throws at us, like these frustrating challenges with our vehicle. Instead of being a major challenge, it is a frustrating minor annoyance. Thank goodness we finally have some sanity in our personal finances as the world slogs through this recession.
So if you’re thinking that life is pretty tough because your finances are a mess, take heart. You can fix it. There is help available. Others have done it and you can too! I want to encourage you to fix this broken part of your life so you can do the best job that you were meant to do!
This morning just after waking I was greeted by an excited 7 year old, bursting at the seams with enthusiasm. Are you ready, Daddy? she asked. Still groggy, I rubbed my eyes and asked, Ready for What? Video! was her enthusiastic reply.
Oh yeah, the night before when we were watching her hermit crab pets, I mentioned we should make a video of them and put it on her new blog. So this morning at 6:30 am, she wanted to get going on it.
Emily, you’ve only been a blogger girl for one day. Can I at least get a cup of coffee?
This is a perfect example of the power of 21st century literacy. Writing is still important, but only part of the equation. So what is the difference between the literacy of today and the literacy of the past?
As a technology guy, I am always intrigued by the gadgets & tools that technology offers. But I always try keep in mind that the technology is not the end, but only the means.
Contrary to what some may think, 21st century literacy is not about technology, it’s about relationships. It’s about conversations. It’s about connectedness. The new technologies are just enabling the connectedness, the conversations and the relationships to happen in real-time without regard to place.
In one day, Emily discovered this idea and was hooked. Admittedly, I gave her a jump-start when I mentioned it on Twitter and a number of people from around the world visited and commented on her new blog. It appears that she may even soon have an 8 yr old e-pal in Australia who is also a girl blogger, thanks to an online conversation between her mother and I. She is also invited to work online with an elementary math class in Virginia.
The seeds for all of this were planted last year during the Summer Olympics. Both of my kids were amazed to learn that it is nighttime in China when it is daytime here. A few days ago, Emily asked me again about time zones, and about how in some places it is winter and other places it is summer. I thought the best answer might be to correspond with someone in Australia, where it is both opposite time of day and opposite season.
So I put out a tweet on Twitter about my daughter’s interest in learning more, and within a few minutes I had a reply from a teacher in Victoria, Australia with an 8 year old daughter who has a blog. After chatting back and forth for little while, we thought if Emily also had a blog, the pair could easily correspond back and forth.
When I showed Emily her new blog, she took to it like a duck to water. Certainly the immediate feedback she received helped to motivate her. But I don’t know if I’ve ever seen her working so hard on composing sentences and sounding out words to spell.
My wife Wendy also noticed how hard Emily was working, and asked me why all schools don’t use blogging to teach writing. Why indeed? It is an excellent question that all of the teachers who do use blogging are wondering.
There are a number of reasons why they don’t, ranging from simply not being aware of the possibilities, to a fear of the unknown. Parents and educators who didn’t grow up in a digital world are understandably uncomfortable with all of this. But as a technology professional, I can honestly say I am less comfortable with putting my daughter on a school bus each morning for her eight mile commute than I am with her sitting down at a computer and writing about her Webkinz animals on her blog.
For some reason people think there is some sort of bogeyman out there waiting to harm kids if they go online, but honestly I can only think of the Florida cheerleader MySpace incident where online activities were related to a problem in real life. I’m sure their are more, but the incidents are rare.
There are certainly a lot of things that threaten the well-being of our kids in this world. I would no more let my kids have unsupervised free access to the Internet than I would turn them loose to roam the streets of a large city alone. But that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t take them along with me for a visit. There are plenty of cool things to see and do in a city, just as there are on the Internet. If there is any real threat to our kids today, it is the threat of being left behind as the world moves ahead without them.
Instead of banning cell phones, iPods and social networking tools, schools should be finding ways to leverage the digital communications tools the students are already using. For example, a school can invest hundreds of dollars on electronic “clickers” used to record class surveys in real time, or they can use free online services to record text messages sent by cell phones that do the same things. Schools can (and have) invested thousands to bring internet access into the classrooms, but many students bring their own wireless internet access each day on their phones and are simply told to put it away.
Projects like the Washington County kids visit to Washington DC for the inauguration gives me some hope. They were sent with a mission to not only witness history, but to report about it to the folks back home. Unfortunately for the project, the wireless access was clogged in D.C. limiting the amount of information flowing back home, but the concept was sound. I know a number of people in this area began testing the waters of Web 2.0 as a direct result of this initiative.
Of all people, I fully understand that it takes time to implement change in school systems. I would just like to encourage parents and educators to learn more about 21st century literacy skills. (A good place to start is the 2009 International Student Blogging Challenge) As we learn about powerful learning tools such as blogging, my hope is that we will start to see a whole new approach to how we do education. By the way, we finally did get the hermit crab video posted today!
I was up early this morning in the wee hours. Couldn’t sleep. Then I remembered I was also up early on this day eighteen years ago.
On January 17, 1991, I was aboard the USS Missouri, steaming somewhere in the Persian Gulf. The evening before, we were advised to get some sleep because we would have an early start the next day. With Saddam Hussein’s deadline for withdrawal from Kuwait expired, we knew something big was going to happen.
At 23, I was already an old-timer compared to many of my shipmates. When reveille was played early that morning, the captain announced that we would soon be going to General Quarters (battle stations) in preparation for a Tomahawk cruise missile attack on Iraq.
Words cannot really describe that gnawing feeling in your gut that comes when you come to the realization that you are about to participate in causing the deaths of other human beings. I distinctly remember thinking of and praying for the innocent people that would inevitably be killed in our soon to be starting war.
I also remember a certain uneasiness. We had no way of knowing if there would be an immediate retaliation, or if we would simply launch our cruise missles and go about our business. But one thing was certain, we were going to war, and our country had not been at war for nearly twenty years. To all but the most experienced veterans, this was all brand new.
Certainly we were well trained and we knew how to do our jobs, but there is a huge difference between training for combat and actually entering into it. Now it was time to put our countless hours of training to the test. So we hurriedly got dressed and waited for the GQ alarm to sound.
I recall one young sailor who kept saying, “we’re gonna die, we’re gonna die!” I told him to shut up and be a man. If there ever was a good place to be in a war, it is aboard the battleship Missouri. Secretly, inside, I felt his pain and wondered to myself if we would ever make it home again.
My battle station was in the forward main battery plotting room- the control center for the 16″ guns which wouldn’t be needed that day. I remember one of the hardest things to do was to sit in silence, our equipment not even energized, waiting for the inevitable. Soon, we would hear the roar of the tomahawks, and though our particular services weren’t needed just then, as the crew of that famous battleship, we would all have blood on our hands.
When you enlist in the service, you are only vaguely aware of the duties which you may be called upon to perform. As a young person without much life experience, it is difficult to consider the life or death situations you might soon find yourself in. But here I was, nearly six years after joining, about to participate in a war.
We sat in silence as the Tomahawks launched one by one. Somewhere I have a journal I kept, which says exactly how many we fired and at what time, but I wasn’t able to locate it for today’s entry. I’ll keep looking. As the missiles flew, with nothing else for me to do, I just prayed.
We had a CNN radio feed piped into the plotting room. It was surreal. Our missiles were on the way to Baghdad, but the reporter on the other end didn’t yet know it. For nearly an hour we waited in near silence, as the missiles lurched ahead toward targets in Iraq some 500 miles away.
Then, all of a sudden pandemonium struck. Explosions began to rock the city as the handiwork of the coalition forces took its toll. We listened for some time, and we waited to respond to any impending counter-attack, but none happened, so we went and ate a hearty breakfast of bacon and eggs.
I can identify a little with the survivors of the US Airways crash that happened this week. The feeling that you have somehow cheated death is so euphoric. I remember the breakfast that morning 18 years ago was extra delicious in knowing that we had survived the first act of a very dangerous undertaking.
This is a phase of my life that I do not often spend a great deal of time thinking about, but it is especially hard to forget every time January 17th rolls around. However, I will plan to continue sharing about some of my experiences in the Gulf over the next several weeks
I’m presenting today at the 6th Annual Teaching Retreat of K-State’s Faculty Exchange for Teaching Excellence. My subject is Teaching in the Intersection. It is about how the disciplines intersect, and how we shouldn’t become so narrowly focused that we miss related knowledge in other disciplines.
Articles and links I will be referring to are listed here:
All of these are part of the Web 2.0 read/write web. Let’s talk briefly about some of the more interesting ones in the list.
RSS feeds
Perhaps one of the most powerful and least understood tools for communicating with an online audience is RSS or Really Simple Syndication. Think of it as a subscription service. RSS allows your audience to read what you have to say on their terms, not necessarily when you want them to read it. RSS is a great way to show your customers that you respect them and their time. It allows you to inobtrusively connect with them. If you have a website, you need to set it up with RSS so your customers can subscribe and immediately tell when you have posted something new.
What do you need? You need an RSS client reader. I use Yahoo, but plenty of people use a Google or other type of client. Just as there are many e-mail programs available, there are many RSS clients as well. I recommend picking one in an environment you are already familiar with. If you already have a Yahoo account, why not use the Yahoo RSS reader?
Blogging
I started out blogging in April 2008 and haven’t looked back. It has been an amazing experience, connecting me with people from around the globe. I was amazed to learn at SXSW that there are actually people out there who write on blogs for a living. Penelope Trunk is one of my favorites.
Facebook & Twitter
Also known as social networking. Myspace should also be included, but it is losing traction to Facebook and Twitter. Even still, Myspace is a big player and helped to make teenage Ashley Qualls a wealthy entrepreneur.
Wendy, my wife, is not interested in computers at all, but has recently become interested in the power of social networking. Her business, Wendy’s Party Treats, received several orders over the holidays as a direct result of our participation in social networking on Facebook and Twitter.
Twitter has been receiving a lot of press recently and is experiencing rapid growth. Obama used it to get elected, and eye-witness amateur reports were sent in via Twitter during the Chinese earthquake and the Mumbai terrorist attacks. I have been using it for most of 2008, but have seen a big growth in it’s activity during the past couple of months as Twitter catches on in the mainstream. Before you dive in, read the Beginner’s Guide to Twitter.
Wrap Up
I hope that I have given you food for thought in this three part series on using Videos and the Internet in Marketing. Obviously, I am neither a video expert or a marketing expert. I’m just a computer guy with an interest in both. I think that the biggest challenge that companies face today is how to stand apart from all of the noise. There are a million websites out there. And Billy Mays is always shouting at us on TV.
I believe that if you will give people more than what they expect and build relationships of trust with customers by helping them reach their goals, you can reach your own goals as well.
The title of the workshop emphasizes video, so I will take a bit of time to discuss Internet Video here.
You cannot discuss Internet auctions without mentioning eBay, and you cannot have a discussion of Internet video without discussing YouTube. YouTube is the go-to site for internet video.
Before you try to begin a viral video campaign, it would be wise to understand some of the history and culture of the Internet. The Internet began life as a public, not-for-profit cold-war effort. Commercialization of the Internet did not begin until the late 80’s & early 90’s. I believe that recognizing the history and culture of the non-profit Internet can help you even if profit is your ultimate motive.
Take for example the BlendTec line of blenders. BlendTec has successfully started a viral video marketing campaign while respecting the non-profit Internet culture that exists. What makes the BlendTec approach succeed when others fail? Several things are in play here.
It isn’t shouting. Instead, BlendTec is using Kathy Sierra’s new way of marketing by showing how people can be great if they are using a BlendTec.
After reading about the story, I contacted Ms. Taylor to find out what she thought would be appropriate topics of study for modern journalism students. She was kind enough to give a prompt reply, and I am only now getting around to sharing her insights with you here. (I have highlighted some of her points I found most interesting.)
I think I would start at the basics because clearly not many of my classmates know how to blog.
So probably some courses on blogging, the ethics of the hyperlink, and how to scan the web for sources. Then, a web video class focused on taking broadcast correspondence to the web and how to do your own video reports through a youtube channel or on a podcast. How to keep track of your work and the comments that are made about it or linked to it. How to monetize your blog.
A class could also be on crowd-sourcing and how to use social networks as an advantage to get good sources for stories and get responses from a wide range of people. Likewise, how to use these same people as a means for promoting your work and getting your stories read.
As a sort of subtopic to any of these classes there could be specific day when the professor teaches the students about online presence, reputation, and personal brand. That being on the internet and promoting your work and persona is not something to be feared but rather to be exploited for its full potential. If you market yourself well enough, in the niche and beat you’re interested in, you will get exposure early on without having to waste years fetching coffee in an office, build business connections, etc. The list of positive outcomes to building a strong name online is infinite. This can be applied to blogrolls, Facebook, Twitter, etc.
I would also do some sort of partnership with digital news and media sites so that students can work on freelance projects that might give them a better perspective of what the real working world requires.
I think I still have to put some more thought into it and try to come up with a more concise list and detailed explanation of the types of courses I would like to see at NYU but I think that overall, there needs to be an emphasis on the use of technology and an awareness of how powerful the new platform of social media in regards to communication. It’s changing the world.
It’s the sort of thing that kids my age could seriously thrive on precisely because it’s so new and there’s still flexibility for anyone to take it new directions or make a big name for themselves.
I just think that a lot of kids have been brainwashed (for lack of a better term) into thinking that the status quo will never change. My generation is short of entrepreneurs, specifically in journalism. You won’t find people trying to create change in journalism, because it’s exactly the sort of industry you’re told not to be yourself in. You have to be objective and not have opinions and take orders.
But that just creates a “press” that writes the news that government and money wants them to write, not the news that matters most.
With news of the printed news media struggling to reinvent itself, her recommendations do not seem terribly far off of the mark. In fact, they seem like rather good ideas for anyone with Web 2.0 entrepreneurial aspirations.
For a small town Clyde, Kansas has a lot to offer. We are kicking off 2009 with a series of economic development workshops. The first is called Using Videos and the Internet in Marketing offered by your’s truly. I am writing this post, not only to share with regular TechIntersect readers, but also to use as a reference for people attending the workshop.
Now I am not a marketer by trade, but have had a little background in the subject over the years. I am more of a technology geek with an interest in business and entrepreneurship, especially now that my wife has opened a business Wendy’s Party Treats. She depends on me to get the necessary binary bits flowing.
Being geographically remote has it’s challenges, but many mail order companies actually appreciate being in the center of the USA, with only a few days shipping required to any address in the country. If we can learn to take advantage of our FTTH high speed internet, I believe the opportunities for our residents can be unlimited.
Big changes going on right now
If you aren’t already aware, there have been some big changes going on all around us. It is as if we are living in the time of Gutenberg’s printing press and the idea is just catching on. Indeed, something every bit as revolutionary is happening and the people who can recognize it and harness it stand to benefit the most.
Just as in Gutenberg’s time, the general population was widely illiterate due to a lack of inexpensive reading material, I believe in our own time most people are technologically illiterate for a similar reason. We have only recently witnessed the very first generation that has grown up digital. Not too terribly long ago, all of the amazing digital media devices that we now take for granted were either prohibitively expensive, or had not yet been invented. For example we now have:
iPods
digital cameras (still & video)
cell phones
laptop computers
Wii consoles
broadband connections
My Journey – Web 1.0
As far as the widespread availability of Internet goes, I was an early adopter. Mosaic was the first graphical Internet browser, released in 1993. By 1994, I was regularly using Netscape Navigator which was the new name later given to the Mosaic Internet browser. I was even creating my own web pages on Geocities and on the now defunct Dustdevil.com servers. There was no local connection number in those early days, so all of my internet activity was paid with long-distance fees in addition to my internet access fees.
In those days, if you wanted to publish something on the web, you needed to learn something of internet technologies like web servers, HTML, and FTP. Not a big deal to a computer nerd like me, eager to learn, but to many it was a sufficient barricade to stop people from contributing to the web’s content. However, for those interested in learning more about the basics of developing web pages, I am offering an online course on Web 1.0 technology.
However, most people are not interested in even learning the web technology basics. It is no surprise. Most people don’t know much about how their cars operate either. They just want to drive, they don’t want to be mechanics.
Web 2.0 – The Read/Write Web
In the early days of the automobile, motorists needed some mechanical aptitude to drive because cars weren’t user friendly. As cars became more reliable and user friendly, non-mechanics could operate them as well. In recent years, the same thing has happened with the world wide web. Normal, non-geek people could finally contribute thanks to the Read/Write Web. Fellow K-State Professor Mike Wesch explains it in his wildly popular video: The Machine is Us/ing Us.
After Wesch’s video had over 1 million views in just a few days within it’s release, I knew I had to meet this guy, so Wendy & I invited him out for lunch in Aggieville (Manhattan, KS). It’s a good thing we met when we did, because in the months following, Michael Wesch has become something of an international celebrity, winning many awards and having many demands upon his time. But the story of a guy with an idea explained in a simple YouTube video gone viral made a great impression on me. That experience marks the beginning of my beginning to understand Web 2.0, and probably the starting point of thinking about this kind of workshop.
My lights are beginning to come on.
Last spring, I attended SXSW. I wrote about it here, so I won’t go into great detail now. Suffice it to say, SXSW convinced me that blogging, podcasting, and other Web 2.0 technologies are not just narcissistic fads, but in fact new ways of having global conversations. Not long afterwards, I started this TechIntersect blog. (Penelope Trunk has written about why she thinks blogging is essential for a good career.)
Some Books to Read
Since SXSW I started reading about things Web 2.0 and I have learned some fascinating things. Here are a few books to consider:
We are entering into a world where people are no longer content to be passive consumers of media. They want to participate in a conversation, including conversing with the companies with whom they do business.
Ever feel frustrated by the fact that you were a nameless face when dealing with a large organization? Smart companies counter this frustration with professional corporate bloggers.
I certainly do not have all of the answers about marketing your business with the Internet. However, I can tell you that traditional marketing strategies, e.g. the Billy May’s shouted message, is losing favor with people.
Sure, Billy is a millionaire and people buy his stuff, but that doesn’t make his methods right. E-mail spamming makes a lot of people angry too, but enough people respond to it, and the cost of the method is so low, it is worth doing. Read Seth Godin’s suggestions on writing personal e-mails.
The Billy Mays advertising method is still working, but I believe his days are numbered. One reason for this belief is because young people don’t watch television as much as their parents did. In eighty years of television history, only recently has television watching declined in popularity, thanks to the Internet.
Check out what Kathy wrote about teachers and marketers to learn more. (This philosophy is the same as former GE CEO Jack Welch who wrote in “Winning” that real leaders reach a point where they are more concerned about helping their people succeed than in helping themselves succeed.)
Many times I am asked by my students why I do things the way I do in my classes. In hopes of explaining myself better, I present to you the following…
Student FAQ’s about Mr. Genereux’s Philosophy of Teaching
(If you are a current, former, or potential future student of mine, please feel free to expand this list of questions by posting your own as a comment for me to answer.)
Q. What do you know about the “digital generation” and how have you adapted your teaching to accommodate us?
A. I know that the world is a rapidly changing place, and that new technologies are emerging that can radically change education. I am not afraid to experiment with using some of these new tools such as video, blogs, wikis and podcasts.
Q. How much do you care about me and my success as your student?
A. How much do you care about your own success? I will bend over backwards to help any student who has been giving an honest effort to learn. Students who expect me to do all of the work for them unfortunately will be disappointed.
Q. Why do you teach when you are so obviously talented you could be doing a variety of other things that pay much more?
A. I ask myself the same thing from time to time. The main reason is, I like helping people, and I like feeling that I am making a difference in people’s lives. I want my students to look back ten years after finishing school and think, “That guy encouraged me. That guy taught me some useful things.”
Q. Why aren’t you teaching “X” in your classes? You are behind the times and should be teaching me “X” instead of what you are teaching.
A. One of the nice things that twenty years of experience with computer technology provides is recognizing that “X” will soon be obsolete. If I redesign my course and curriculum to be centered on “X”, there is a good chance that it will become obsolete before you graduate and enter the work force. I believe in teaching timeless fundamentals that will remain relevant throughout your career. Of course we should look at current technologies, but in the context of how they will relate to what will be useful to you throughout your career.
Q. Why don’t you just tell me the right answer?
A. I want you to understand the process of obtaining the right answer more than I want you to know the right answer. Of course, both are important, but if you can gain the confidence that you know how to find answers to questions that you don’t already know the answer to, you will have mastered an important key to success.
Q. What are your rules regarding classroom behavior, late assignments, etc.?
A. I really have only one rule in classes I teach and that rule is “Feel free to engage in any behavior that does not cause a problem for someone else. When problems do occur, the person who caused the problem gets to solve it.” The catch to this rule is that the teacher is a member of the class. If I inadvertently cause a problem for my students, it is my responsibility to fix it. If a student causes a problem for me, the student fixes it. Late assignments cause a problem for me because it is more convenient to grade everything at the same time, rather than trying to come up with a fair system of grading work that comes in late. However, if I am slow to grade assignments, it causes a problem for students and it is my responsibility to solve that problem. See how this rule works? I think it is really fair. If students think I am being unfair in any way, they should tell me and we should talk about it.
Q. What should I avoid as your student?
A. You should avoid projecting the appearance of apathy. I am not saying you have to be perfect, I am simply saying that you should be sending me the message that you have taken ownership of your education. If things aren’t going well for you, the worst thing to do is act as if you don’t care about it. Talk to me! I want to help you! But I have to know that you have a problem and you want to fix it before I can help.
Q. Why are you the way you are when you teach?
A. I think students learn better if they are having fun. I think they will trust me more if they see that I’m human, willing to have fun, and not afraid to be me.
Q. Any other advice for your students?
A. I think it is important to always move forward, always strive towards improvement. I have a Jim Fay quote on my door, “Building self-respect comes from struggle and achievement, not from being made comfortable.” I believe this is so true for students and faculty alike. It is why I like to try new things and set an example of exploration outside of my own comfort zone. It’s why I started a business with my wife, and why I do summer work as a faculty intern. I don’t ever want to become irrelevant in what I know and what I teach. Students who want a long, happy and successful career will quickly adopt an attitude of lifelong learning. I hope my example helps them to realize this.
Last year, NYU journalism student 
The main reason is, I like helping people, and I like feeling that I am making a difference in people’s lives. I want my students to look back ten years after finishing school and think, “That guy encouraged me. That guy taught me some useful things.”
