Anyone who reads this blog knows that I’m a math teacher. Math and teaching are two of my life passions and they are two things that I have some talent for. I would say that I’m a ‘very good’ teacher but merely a ‘good’ mathematician.
I’m also a writer. I’ve written 7 books (4 math books, 2 books on teaching, and co-authored 1 children’s book), about 20 published articles in various magazines and journals, and, of course, hundreds of blog posts. Writing is another passion of mine and, in my opinion, the thing that I do best. I never wanted to go through what it takes to make a living as a writer. I’m not someone who can really force my writing so I don’t think I would like the pressure of needing to write to eat.
So over the past thirty years, I’ve gotten the urge, from time to time, to work on my collection of personal essays about my life. I started writing these when I was about 21 and, over the years, would write an essay when I’d see a call out for the ‘Chicken Soup For The Soul’ series of books or just when I’d get the urge to write. Even though I’ve been a prolific blogger, these essays are much more difficult to write. There are only about 25 of them written in the past thirty years.
Though you might know me as a serious writer who writes about education and charter schools and who makes scatter plots about value-added data, the type of writing that I do is ‘humor.’ Comedy is something that I’ve been drawn to since I was a child. When I was about 11 years old my mother gave me a record of Woody Allen doing his stand-up from the 1960s and I listened to it all the time.
You never know if you are really funny until you try to perform stand-up in a New York City comedy club and, as a hobby over the past 15 years, I have done that from time to time and have always done well. Here’s a montage of some shows over the past 15 years.
About 8 years ago I published a Kindle e-book of essays I had CONTINUE READING: Back By Unpopular Demand! My Kindle E-Book About My Life | Gary Rubinstein's Blog