Look and Listen

Biography

I was born in Los Angeles, California in May of 1988. At the age of 2 and a half I was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes, a challenge which remains a source of discipline and motivation to the present. By the age of 3 I had taught myself to read; at 7 I was performing rudimentary algebraic operations. As I progressed through the school system, however, I was increasingly bored and dissatisfied. I stopped reading. I focused only on the more immediate pleasure of solving math problems and watching basketball and playing water polo. Though I was still able to score magnificently on six AP Exams, took Multi-Variable Calculus as a junior, studied three foreign languages, and managed to gain admission to Berkeley, I was far behind. When I got to Berkeley the effects of my boredom were not terribly obvious, but my grades dropped precipitously. At first I was unconcerned; in one large, curved class I began with a D only to work my way to a B- on the two remaining exams. That means that I still had the capacity to outscore a full room of other bright people on difficult economics exams. But when my best friend was pushed out of a window, on drugs--an event for which i was not present and did not have any knowledge until afterwards--and the school attempted to cover it up, it became apparent that I lacked the essential tools which would have allowed me to meet the challenge head-on. So I struggled through an 8 month witch hunt, with my rights consistently violated (especially as pertained to due process, because they'd say I "admitted" to everything, and to psychological evaluations, because they consistently came back normal and the school demanded the notes from them, which I did not want to give). It was only at the end that I became a great student, realizing what had been taken away from me, and toughened up. The director of student conduct, who had a long, documented history of these kinds of illegal activities, wsa fired six months after the witch hunt ended. I enrolled at Pierce College in Woodland Hills, got virtually straight As in my sleep, and transferred to California State University, Northridge, finding the school lacking in institutional control and having had numerous and repeated confrontations with professors and administrators regarding the total lack of effort both from them and from other students. In one particular case, one of my professors was pimping out women in Thailand; in another, a professor of Business Management couldn't even manage his own classroom, which the students wanted to be a haven for phone discussions. When I graduated--still on time, for all of this, in May of 2010--I found my degree worth less than the paper it was printed on, despite having at that point a 12-page list of authors and texts which I had seriously considered. It was at this point that I made a push to write my first book--out of sheer hatred for the incompetence, criminality, and lack of ethics I saw in the university system--and made a push to enhance my reading list, which by the end of that summer was at closer to 20 pages. Playing hours upon hours of basketball, I managed to read through Locke, Sterne, the Hippocratic Writings, Lucretius, Epictetus, Melville, lots of Gibbon, Montesquieu, much of Shakespeare, Pascal, Adam Smith, The Federalist, the remainder of Montaigne, Rabelais, Dostoevsky, Dewey, Malthus, Ricardo, Brooks Adams, Lord Acton, and a plethora of others. There were the moderns, too: a book about the rise of statistics, one about the life and times of Chaucer, one about Clinton's presidency, one about Theodore Roosevelt's, one about the election of 1828, several about the recent financial issues, two about the economics of integrity, many about diplomatic conferences, several about sports, many biographies of great leaders. And now, a year and a half later, my list is at 30 pages, covering all of the major classics and then some and hundreds of modern books on a range of subjects. I tutor kids in a range of subjects, from basic literacy to college calculus, writing and history, and test prep for a range of exams including the ISEE, HSPT, SSAT, SAT, and others.

Inspiration

I am inspired by what I see as an increasing trend in the modern world to reward those who may not be deserving at the expense of those who are. I see my parents' generation claiming they care about ours, yet creating a world where we will be less well-off than they ever were. I think it's important for us to study the past because this is not the first time such a thing has happened, and I worry that many in my generation don't have enough respect for history to see it as having any value. So I try to make it possible for them to view being educated not as being in contrast with being socially acceptable, but as being complementary to it. I do so with my students and my friends, and it's having its effect, slowly and surely.