About Me, My Work Experience, and My Experiences Learning Technology

Hello! My name is Zach. In 2004 I graduated from Connecticut College with a B.A. in English and a certificate in Elementary Education. After college, I moved to Harlem and began work as a schoolteacher at P.S. 85 in the Bronx. During my first two years I worked as a math "cluster teacher," which meant that I rotated amongst about ten classrooms (grades 3-5) teaching supplemental math. During my second year as a cluster teacher, I designed a unique curriculum that integrated art into my math instruction. More recently, I've self-published my curriculum in a book called Math Art, which I sell through Amazon and promote through my website MathActivities.net.

After two years teaching only math, I spent my third and final year as a teacher in a general fifth grade classroom. Compared to being a cluster teacher, I did not enjoy this experience as much since it required the teaching of all subjects. Wanting to try something new, I left P.S. 85 to work for a couple years in the field of website sales and marketing. Although I liked the company for which I worked, I found the work less rewarding than teaching.

Therefore, I plan to re-enter the teaching field as a Technology Specialist. This is my third semester in the Technology Specialist program at Teachers College. This semester I'll be student teaching at the Friends Seminary lower school (near Union Square). I look forward to possibly applying this course's content to my student teaching and sharing with the class what I've learn while student teaching.

I have much experience teaching myself various technologies (e.g., web design, photography, image and video editing, online self-publishing, online marketing).  My talent at "figuring out" software applications was one of the reasons I entered the Technology Specialist program.  I believe that Martinez's essay about "problem solving" describes my approach to learning technology.  When learning a new technology, I often use an incremental, "trial-and-error" approach.  Since many technologies are extremely complex, it is often impossible to understand all that they are capable of doing.  Nevertheless, by "playing around" with some of the various features of a technology, one can eventually learn to put it to practical use.  For instance, I hardly know everything that Adobe's Photoshop software is capable of doing.  But this is OK since understanding the entirety of Photoshop was never a goal of mine.  Instead, I've set and achieved smaller goals for myself over time, and as a result have learned to use Photoshop to meet almost all of my photo editing needs.

However, though the "trial-and-error" approach to learning technology often suits me well, occasionally I need more assistance and support, especially when I'm first starting out.  For instance, last semester I took my first programming class.  Since I had no prior experience writing code, I had to seek assistance from the professor on multiple occasions.  However, by the end of the course I felt that I had developed a foundation of understanding from which I could continue to learn on my own.  Or, as Martinez would say, I reached a point designing programs using code became "self-sustaining" activity which "[pushed me] along by its momentum."