Woodshop Teacher | he/him
Mike started teaching at SRV in 1982 at the age of 23.
The grandchild of a former SRV teacher, son of an alumnus and an alumnus himself, Mike had little hope of escaping the community he loves. Returning to the school as a volunteer while taking undergraduate and graduate courses at the University of Pennsylvania, Mike worked hard to make himself indispensable. Raised under Dewey’s experiential learning theory condensed to “learning by doing” and William Stewart Halsted’s “see one, do one, teach one,” Mike opted to learn to teach by teaching and took positions in the Afternoons and Camp programs, substituting, and co-teaching in classrooms. This gave Mike the opportunity to teach subjects that ensured his status as a perpetual learner and afforded him some sense of job security.
Mike then married the brilliant former SRV schoolmate, Lauren deMoll, who was just starting her own path in education back at SRV that saw her teach every grade from Kindergarten to Sixth and become the school’s Assistant Principal and then Acting Principal prior to retiring in 2014.
During Mike’s 43 years at the school, he created a physical education program under the name of Sports that combined free play, neighborhood style games, suburban sports, modified Sumo wrestling, unmodified Track and Field disciplines and games he invented. Mike stepped away from the Sports program 41 years later to make way for a program better suited to meeting the diverse needs of children in the current culture of play and athletics. Mike also created a Computer Science program during the dawn of home computers in the 1980’s that he taught up to 2002 at which time he assisted in setting up the school’s first network and computer lab then maintained the network as computers were moved into classrooms until outsourcing the job in 2010.
Now 65, Mike continues to teach the Woodshop Program to children who can (and do) start learning to safely use full-sized tools to bring new creations of their own into the world starting at two years and seven months of age. Mike jokes that his lifetime at SRV is due to a complete lack of ambition. In truth, he continues to love what he does.
In his free time, Mike is deeply enjoying his new role as a grandfather to two boys.
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