One of my favorite hobbies includes playing the guitar. In 2006 I made my one and only public performance at the Nuyorican Poetry Cafe in New York City, playing a blues accompaniment as part of a spoken word with Mo Beasley (right). I met Mo in a NYC high school, where I was once a math teacher and he a guest course instructor on creative writing. I brought in my guitar to give a student a lesson (as part of a music club I was co-leading) when we serendipitously met and hit if off right away. Mo invited me to join him at the Nuyorican and I was happy to cross off "public guitar performance" from my bucket list. Today I'm lucky when my kids let me play for them, but oftentimes when I need a break, jamming over a D-minor backing track is my go-to personal therapy.

From 2000 to 2002 I lived in a small Swazi village in South Africa, close to the border of Swaziland. For two years I went by the name of Mthokosizi Msango, and did my best to integrate into the community. The Peace Corps was an amazing and formative experience that significantly shaped my identity. It was during this time that, working as a teacher trainer in schools, I discovered my passion for education. I did not know much about theories of learning, like cognitive apprenticeship, but apparently had strong intuitions about how to design learning environments that lead to sustainable transformation. For example, one of my biggest projects involved setting up a mentoring program between highly skilled and novice teachers. Jason Carter, former US President Jimmy Carter's grandson, was incidentally stationed nearby (about a year before me) and wrote a book about his experiences. Mine were of course different, but given that I never wrote a book, his does a fairly good job of telling the story of life and its struggles in communities similar to the one where I stayed.

I worked for five years as a mathematics teacher, technology coordinator, and assistant principal at Vanguard High School, in New York City. Vanguard belongs to the Coalition of Essential Schools (CES), an organization dedicated to organizing schools as learning communities. This is where I developed a great deal of my ideas about education.

One of the most formative experiences from my time at Vanguard occurred after Chris, a 9th grade student who was having a lot of trouble in classes, was out in the hall shouting at his teachers and peers and overall just out of control. After many months of struggling with him, I was fed up. I told Louis, the Principal (who was standing next to me), that I thought it was time for us to find an arrangement for Chris outside of the school. He was just disturbing too much. Louis, with his usual wisdom, had other plans when he asked me to be patient, and uttered a few words that would change the course of my life. "Give him time to enculturate our ways," he said to me. Sure enough, four (or five) years later Chris was the first person in his family to graduate high school, breaking a cycle of alcoholism and crime that had plagued his family. Louis' words and values resonated so strongly with me and touched the core of my educational beliefs and philosophy. Not surprisingly, the idea of enculturation in learning communities turned out to be the grounds for my PhD dissertation and is still highly evident in the work I do today.

The book on the bottom left is not about Vanguard and, while the idea is clever, I am not endorsing (or rejecting) it. Chapter 3 does provide a case study of Vanguard (I personally shared some of the data the author cites in this chapter about the school) to support his claim about TSL. That aside, I think it tells a beautifully written inside story about the school, which is why I am sharing it here.