The Teacher

Hello from the teacher and webmaster! It's my privilege to be teaching Catalina Foothills High School math students this year. I can imagine that some readers would like to know more about the person who provides the instruction, so here is a short description of me.

My name is Keith Alcock. I grew up in Minnesota where I attended a public high school very much like CFHS only much older. Math was my favorite subject there and I finished all the courses through calculus by the eleventh grade. That's when personal computers, just developed, caught my attention. I wanted to build and program them, so ended up studying the digital systems area of Electrical Engineering at the University of Minnesota. The area combined the hardware and software areas I was interested in. This study required a significant number of math courses, especially in the applied and discrete branches, which much later fulfilled teacher certification requirements. My secondary interest, language, resulted in a degree in German and I was ready to hit the international job market.

Through a study abroad program I found an internship with a German company in Mannheim, where I lived for several years. The next stop was a back in the U.S. where I opened an office near Silicon Valley and continued to work writing software for the Germans and for a while UC Berkeley. After ten years an opportunity arose to move to the Netherlands. There I worked at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics for a time and learned the language we speak at home, Dutch. In 2001 I moved with a growing family to Tucson. Here I worked writing software for various university departments (Linguistics, Psychology, MIS) and small business before deciding to look into the field of education.

The training program I followed was Pima Community College's Post-Degree Teacher Certification Program. It put me into the classroom sooner that other programs and by the time I was finished, I had been through two primary schools, AmeriSchool High School, Catalina High Magnet School, and Tucson High Magnet School. Student teaching was conducted at University High School. I spent some time subbing for Flowing Wells, Amphitheater, and Tucson Unified School Districts before finding a regular teaching position at BASIS Tucson. There I taught Computer Science and Computer Applications for a year before coming to CFHS.

It is my hope that I can apply the quality of teaching that I witnessed at UHS and BASIS to CFHS and that my engineering background can be put to good use in the classroom.