Rick Gordon
Director of Long Range Planning, Humanities Teacher, Soccer Coach....(I'm the one in the middle, my Dad is in front, my son Koby in back).
I'm excited to be back at Compass after a year of traveling the globe with my family. Having been on the Founding Board at Compass and serving as School Director for 4 years, it is wonderful to see how the school has evolved and how it truly has helped transform students' lives. It will be great to be back working with the students, and I hope to facilitate courses for the 11th and 12th graders that are challenging, interesting, thought provoking learning experiences for all (including me!). I especially look forward to my electives this year, exploring Religions, Immigration, and Fast Food and Sustainability (these are three different courses, not one oddly integrated one).
The great thing about teaching at Compass is that I can bring my diverse background to my classes. In college at Stanford University, I began as an environmental engineer and ended up in Political Science, later being in a PhD program on Public Policy at University of Minnesota, and completing a PhD in Social and Multicultural Foundations of Education at University of Colorado. In between all this, I led travel programs in the US, Europe, and Asia, traveled the globe, ran a little company making kids' fleece hats, worked in the New York State legislature, taught in high school and college, co-directed a non-profit helping teachers reform schools, and taught college faculty how to develop more engaging learning experiences to infuse service into their courses (in addition to skiing a lot in the backcountry, biking many miles, and enjoying watching my two children grow up). Somehow, this all seems to help in making Compass a vibrant and dynamic learning community.
