Peter KELMAN

Peter Kelman

Peter's 2011 Autobiography

50 Years? Impossible! Let me check the math.

5 years in college and graduate school

1961-65 Wesleyan University, BA, Chemistry ‘65, M.A.T., Science Teaching ‘66

1969-70 Harvard Graduate School of Education, Ed.D, Science Education ‘74

5 years as a high school science teacher

1965-68 Chemistry, physics, & math teacher at North Haven HS (CT)

1968-69 9th grade science teacher at Benjamin Franklin HS (East Harlem, NYC)

1973-74 Chemistry, psychology, sex & drug ed. teacher at Springfield HS (VT)

10 years as a college faculty member

1970-72 Instructor of science teaching and coordinator of Urban Teaching, Wesleyan University M.A.T. Program

1972-73 Acting director of M.A.T. Program and founder/coordinator of undergraduate Teacher Education Program, Wesleyan University,

1974-75 Assistant professor & coordinator of the Office of Professional Lab Experiences in the College of Education & Social Services, University of Vermont

1975-1981 Assistant professor in the Education Department, Dartmouth College

11½ years as an educational publishing executive

1981-83 VP & editorial director for a small educational publisher in Watertown, MA 1983-85 Director of educational software for Coleco Industries in Hartford, CT

1985-86 VP of product development for CBS Software (Greenwich, CT) & CBS Interactive Learning (NYC)

1986-88 VP for CBS Educational and Professional Publishing & Director of secondary science textbook division at Holt Rinehart & Winston (NYC)

1988-93 Corporate VP & software division publisher at Scholastic Inc. (NYC)

14½ years as an educational business consultant

1993-2007 Peter Kelman & Associates and EducationWorks Consulting Group (with my wife, Therese Mageau): assisted educational companies with their technology publishing strategies, technology companies with their approach to the education marketplace, and educational organizations with their financial survival.

4 years as a retiree

2007-2011 I have been happily and busily retired: doing urban food gardening, managing renovations of our 4-story brownstone, writing experimental cyberfiction, traveling, reading, attending theater & other cultural activities, being an attentive grandfather to Clyde 13, Clara 9, Paloma 3, and Jules 6 months; and most recently, coordinating the search for as many classmates as we can find for our 50th Staples Class of ’61 Reunion. I’ve also been wondering lately: how on earth did I get everything done when I was also working for a living?

OK, so all those years of study and work do seem to add up to 50 years.

But let me double check by adding up the years I lived in various states:

12½ years in Connecticut

1961-65 Middletown, while I was a student at Wesleyan University

1965-68 Durham, CT, while teaching at North Haven High School

1970-73 Clinton, New Haven, & Killingworth, while on the faculty at Wesleyan

1983-85 Hartford, while working for Coleco

3 years in Massachusetts

1969-70 Belmont & Cambridge, while I was a grad student at Harvard

1981-83 Cambridge, while I worked for a small educational publisher in Watertown

6 years in Vermont

1973-74 Chester Depot, while I taught at nearby Springfield HS

1974-75 on Mallett’s Bay in Colchester, VT while I taught at UVM

1975-77 and 1979-81 Washington, VT in the first house I ever owned, while I commuted to Dartmouth, where I was on the faculty. My second wife & I had our 2 children while we lived here, and I always thought that some day I’d return to write, grow the food we ate, and eventually retire, but that wasn’t to be

2 years in New Hampshire

1977-79 Hanover, NH where I was faculty resident advisor at the Dartmouth College River Cluster

26½ years in New York

1968-69 Boerum Hill section of Brooklyn, while I taught At Benjamin Franklin HS in East Harlem

1986-1996 New Rochelle where my kids grew up, while I commuted by train to Manhattan to work for various educational publishers;

1996-2002 Upper west side of Manhattan where I lived and worked as a consultant after my divorce from my second wife

2002-present Windsor Terrace section of Brooklyn in a 4-story brownstone that my third wife and I own, which serves as our home, our offices, an important source of income (2 rental units), and my retirement haven---garden, writing desk, & library.

I guess it really has been 50 years, but it seems like the blink of an eye…doesn’t it?

Peter’s Update (2021)

Picking up from where I left off in May 2011 in Brooklyn with my wife, Therese….

2011-2015: Happily and busily retired: doing urban food-gardening in our Brooklyn house backyard; reading, attending theater & other cultural activities, foreign and domestic travel; being an active grandfather, now to 6 grandkids; and beginning in 2013 helping to care for my mother-in-law who lived with us as she descended into dementia.

2015-2020: We moved to Vermont, at first Northfield where we rented and continued to care for my mother-in-law until we could no longer manage it ourselves and she needed to be in a memory unit. In 2016, Therese retired, so we could do more traveling while I was still “spry.” We bought and moved intto a very small, energy efficient house near “downtown” Montpelier and, as usual, I gardened extensively and oversaw various renovation projects. I also became quite involved in local civic activity (especially Black Lives Matter, homelessness, affordable housing, migrant rights, Medicare for all, and a range of senior issues, including teaching a course on Aging-in-Place at the Montpelier Senior Activity Center. After the 2016 elections, initially at the request of my son, I wrote & distributed an e-Newsletter, called “Morning Pete,” in which I addressed a range of challenging social and political issues facing the country under the disturbing new Administration and Congressional radical-Republicans; the newsletter grew to a readership of about 100 appreciative friends and family.

We also managed to get in quite a lot of traveling: (2016) in the spring, a month in China including time with 2 of our 6 grandchildren and in the fall we walked the Coast to Coast route across England; (2017) a six week coast-to-coast car trip around the USA with an emphasis on visiting small art museums and birdwatching; (2018) another month in Asia (China, Vietnam, Cambodia) and more time, now with the 3 of our 7 grandkids, the latest one born in Shanghai; (2019) a month (January) in Costa Rica, mostly bird-watching, plus 5 weeks in Japan, which included two major walks and again spending time with our grandkids, as well as 6 weeks in France in Oct-Dec. Of course, as it turned out, it was a good thing we got in so much travel before 2020 and COVID.

2020-present: In February of 2020, I began writing an e-Newsletter for seniors, entitled “Aging Intentionally,” but with the first large-scale breakout of COVID-19 at senior living facilities in Seattle, I realized that this “novel coronavirus” was going to present a major threat to seniors throughout the country. I immediately pivoted to focus the newsletter on the mixed messages and confusion that was rampant during the first couple of months of the pandemic in our country; this ended up having a circulation of more than 600. In June, with a heightened awareness of our own vulnerability, Therese and I realized that our small home (with the only bathroom up a steep flight of stairs to the second floor!) would not be suitable if one of us were to become ill with COVID and, for that matter, as we got older. We also realized that we were going to be spending much more time by ourselves in our tiny home and not traveling much over the next few years. So, in late August we bought a new, much-larger, one-floor home with two full bathrooms, a swimming pool (for my lap-swimming wife), large flat areas for edible gardening, and woods all around us for walking and snow-shoeing. It’s on the other side of town, but still quite close to downtown Montpelier. Of course, I spent the fall overseeing extensive remodeling of the new home.

The unrelenting effects of the pandemic, including so many deaths, heightened our awareness of our mortality, which inspired me to launch two ambitious projects. You all know about the first one: the Zoom Get-Together and related efforts for our class of ‘61 and friends to re-new our contacts and share news of our lives. The second effort is War Babies: a we-moir, an online crowd-sourced effort to capture the stories of our lives. You’re all invited to participate.