Well, my life’s been quite a ride since finishing high school.
And so, the merry-go-round began.
I attended Manhattan School of Music to study violin, intending to be a professional violinist. Music runs in my family, as my father was a freelance professional French horn player in the New York City metropolitan area. Yet, after music school I went sane and decided to take a different path. I attended SUNY Binghamton and earned a degree in math and computer science. While there I was a founding member of the Binghamton Crosbys, their first all-male acapella singing group. I also played violin in the Binghamton Pops orchestra. After graduating from Binghamton, I spent the next ten years working as a computer programmer while giving private violin lessons and tutoring math on the side.
For a while, I enjoyed the intellectual workout of writing software but there was little human interaction involved in writing code all day. So after ten years of coding, I went back to school and became certified to teach math and music. The next twelve years were spent as a music teacher in public schools at the elementary and middle school levels. During those years I began an elementary string instrument program at a local Long Island school district. Later on, I took a job as a middle school string instrument teacher in New York City, arranging and writing my own music which was performed by my students in concerts throughout the year.
Eventually, music teaching jobs began to be eliminated as public education made high stakes testing in Math and English a priority over the arts. Pivoting once again, I used my background in math to secure teaching jobs in mathematics at the middle and high school levels for the next ten years.
Got all that? I’m retired now, and have been indulging in my hobbies, which include a lot of reading, writing music and getting back to playing the violin. I’m a bit of a history nerd, having read dozens of books over the years on American and British history including those with a bent towards social justice. A plug here for one of my favorite books, “Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America” by David Hackett Fischer. If you want to understand regional cultural differences in the United States today as well as in the past, this is THE book.
I’ve been married to my wife Ellen for forty years now, having met her while at SUNY B. We have a wonderful daughter who after having earned a degree in biomedical engineering from Harvard University performs immunology research as a computational biologist. She is currently applying to law school in preparation for a new career as an intellectual property attorney.
I’m genuinely enjoying my best life right now and look forward to sharing life’s experiences with y’all and hearing yours as well.
-Ken