Richard Garcia:
CLASS OF 1964
Hicksville High SchoolClass of 1964
Hicksville, NY
SUNY at Albany - Arts & SciencesClass of 1964
Albany, NY
Richard's Story
Life
After leaving college with a degree in a completely useless discipline, I went to Ethiopia with the Peace Corps. That experience gave me, in addition to a lot of memories, a marketable skill--teaching English as a second/foreign language. On my return to the US, I spent a year in graduate school capitalizing on that skill, and then moved to Boston, where I got a job in the Boston public schools teaching English in an elementary school in a predominantly Spanish-speaking neighborhood.
Interviewer: Do you speak Spanish?
Me: A little.
[Interviewer should have followed up here and asked, "How little?"]
Budgets were cut, and I went to work for a nonprofit organization in Boston--temporarily, I thought, until I could get back into teaching. Temporary turned out to be 17 years, when budgets were cut and I did go back to teaching--this time, computer applications (word processing, databases, etc.) That led to an interest in computer progra...Expand for more
mming, which I also taught. The combination of programming knowledge and teaching experience led to a job in industry, training customers in the use of the company's specialized hardware and software products. Then budgets were cut (a pattern here?), and I'm now at MIT, in a position where I provide computer and educational technology support to faculty.
I'm happily married (28 years and counting). My first, last, and only daughter went a nontraditional route to education: She works full time as a preschool teacher in Cambridge, has a reputation as one of the best in the city in dealing with special needs students, and is completing her BA at Lesley University in May 2001.
We live in a small town about 40 miles outside Boston. The house was built in 1888 as a fire station, and was used off and on for that purpose right up into the 1960s, when it was converted to a dwelling. It's proof of the adage, "In an old house, nothing works but you."
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