geek.teacher

Dan Callahan.  Geek.  Teacher.

As you can tell by the title of this blog, a large degree of who I am and how I view myself comes down to these two descriptors.

I have a been a geek/nerd/whatever you feel like calling it for pretty much my entire life.  The first movie I saw in theaters was ET.  The first movie I remember my family renting for the VCR is Return of the Jedi.  My first favorite cartoon show was Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends, which turned me into a life-long reader of comic books.  I got in trouble as a kid for staying up too late reading.  I spent time on local BBSs, dial-up AOL when it was the only internet access in the area and cost my parents too much money in both internet and long-distance minutes.  I was doing research on the internet before it was the normal thing to do.  I participated in message boards, ran a website devoted to Star Wars video games, and produced a somewhat successful mod for Jedi Knight.  I made a couple hundred bucks off it and got to go to E3 once when it was awesome.  I listen to Ben Folds.  I made honor roll in high school and went to college on academic scholarship.  Some of my closest friends live hundreds of miles away, and we were friends long before we met in person.  I am not musically inclined, but I love Rock Band.  I am on Xbox Live.  I didn’t get Twitter for a year, and now I use it all the time.  I have an iPhone.

I work in the Upper Darby School District, where I teach learning support to sixth graders in Drexel Hill Middle School. I have too many certifications.  I stunk my first year, but I got better.  My favorite subject is Social Studies, although I don’t get to teach it as  much as I would like.  I teach some of the lowest students in the school but still try to maintain high expectations.  I don’t believe in tangible rewards, because learning should be its own reward.  I’m getting a little tired of teaching so many scripted programs, even when they’re well-designed.  I use websites and online activities with my students whenever I think I can fit it in.  I co-advise my school’s Student Council.  I like attending conferences, but can only afford to go to cheap ones.  Sometimes I try to help organize them. I use too many commas and parentheses.

That’s who I am and what this blog is all about: pretty much everything and nothing all at the same time.  I make no apologies for not being entirely focused, but I really look at the blog as an opportunity to just practice writing, something I haven’t otherwise done in a long time.  Most of the items mentioned above will probably come up at some point and in some way.  It’s really as much as anything an examination of who I am and how I view the things that I see, hear, and read about.  Lots of visitors, fame, and fortune would be nice, but I really got over that in my website-running days.

So the website is just me, a person now in his third decade on this planet, still trying to figure everything out.  I hope you like it.