This the personal page for Matthew Dale Affolter, from the desert of CA. I now live in Salt Lake.
I currently work as an Earth Science teacher at Cottonwood High School in Utah. In 2019, I won the Utah Science Teacher Association award for outstanding Earth Science Teacher. In 2016, I won the National Association of Geoscience Teachers educator of the year, and in 2014, I won the State of Utah's Earth Science Teacher of the Year from the Utah Geological Association. Formerly, I taught at Granite Park Jr High in South Salt Lake, Utah and Fort Herriman Middle School in Herriman, Utah. I have also been a geologist with Kennecott Exploration on Copper Porphyry exploration, a well-site geologist with the Utah Geological Survey's Snake Valley Ground-Water Monitoring-Well Project, and a geologist on a (now-defunct) iron project in Southern Utah.
I have a B.S. in Geology from UCLA. I also have an M.S. in Geology from the University of Montana. My thesis was on volcanic lithic fragments, published in 2019. I also have an M.A. in Teaching from the University of Utah, with a certification in Secondary Earth Science Education.
I am on the board of the Utah Geological Association as their education coordinator for their yearly teacher award. I also am an author at opengeology.org, the best and only geology open-source textbook website, which is adopted by more than 140 institutions over 30 states and 7 countries at last count.
My motto is: those who reject science should reject technology for consistency.