Connected Academy

Language Arts Teacher

I graduated from Milton High School in Fulton County, where I flourished under a superb English department, but my teaching days go back to when I constructed a classroom full of shoebox desks and repeated my elementary school lessons to a bunch of stuffed animals. They were very dutiful – and very quiet – students.

Once I made it to New York University, I continued my education in the humanities while single-handedly running a student theater organization. I directed and produced various shows, including No Exit and Waiting for Godot.

I’ve also done my share of acting and have had five one-act plays produced by student groups. During my work with NYU’s Steinhardt School of Education, I helped devise a new performance piece about body image and performed it for NYC schools.

At the same time, over the summers, I worked at the Governor’s Honors Program in Valdosta, where I ran seminars on poetry and playwrighting, and co-founded an educational theater company in Forsyth County: The Shakespeare Studio. We produce shows and teach classes. With my literary background (i.e. I’m the wordiest) I am especially the go-to guy on textual analysis and scholarly research, two skills crucial for college that I am eager to bring to high school students.

Finally graduating, I’ve managed to become the first student in NYU history to have a full-length play produced on the Tisch School of the Arts mainstage. I’ve also written an honors thesis for the English Department and gained an education I consider priceless.

Connected Academy, with its focus on expanding the walls of the classroom to encompass the real world, is very appealing to me. Literature should be understood as a part of the world, not just words on a page. And in this techno-savvy age, we as citizens now have a greater responsibility to be better informed. This extends to art; we must be informed artists as well as readers and audience members. The tenets of this school are in support of that idea, and I’m excited to be a part of it.