Interview by Christina Li, Class I
Photo by Mr. Sloan
In this Q&A, we highlight and welcome the newest member of the TBLS community, Mr. Sloan!
Have you taught at other schools and if so, where?
Well, I was a student teacher at Brooklyn Latin. That was my most extensive high school experience. And then last year I taught at Hunter College as an adjunct instructor.
What subject do you teach and what do you like about that subject?
I teach two subjects. I teach TOK [Theory of Knowledge] and then I teach Latin. TOK is fairly new for me, obviously, but I really like how open the topic is and how it engages with all the different materials and ideas at TBLS. It’s not something that any one individual can completely wrap their heads around, and that’s kind of great because no one is in this authoritative position on all of the thinking. I like that about it: having an open-discussion format kind of class. About Latin? Let’s see. Similarly, I got drawn to classics because it was a way to use a lot of different skills like literary analysis and historical analysis, and really, the only thing that was constrained was the time period and the language in which the literature was written. So that’s why I like teaching that: a lot of things come up.
Which borough are you from?
I live in Brooklyn.
What do you like to do outside of school? Do you have any hobbies?
I do have hobbies! I am a longtime soccer player; I used to do that quite a bit and look forward to being able to do that again. I am sort of a middling level guitar player as well. I do a lot of that in my free time.
What’s your favorite book?
It’s always a really hard question for me, and I feel like I need to . . . give a big introduction. I really like this book called In Pharaoh’s Army by Tobias Wolff, who is . . . known more as a short story writer, but he wrote a couple of fairly well known biographical works, one called This Boy’s Life and then the other called In Pharaoh’s Army, which is about a lot of things. The title refers to his time serving for the U.S. military in Vietnam, and it’s just—I mean, he has an interesting story and an interesting take on that era and those times—but it’s really more a book about the act of writing a memoir or the act of re-narrating a story. And he actually talks a lot about trying to present some of the ideas initially aloud to his friends and how it was kind of a failure, and about how some of those ideas when you refashion and rethink and recategorize them—it just changes. So the book kind of builds as you read it. I came across it in high school; I took this independent study class where I read some different novels that were written in response to the war, and this one always stuck with me, so I reread it occasionally.
I know that this is a bit of a weird year because everything’s happening online. Would you like to share anything about your experience with that?
It has been challenging. I wouldn’t categorize myself as a “computer person” but I feel like every skill that I’ve learned—or [have] come to terms with—are things that are just generally useful to either particular students or just the school as a whole, so that has been a little bit of a trial by fire but something that I think is going to be useful going forward.... The TOK class is so much about how we communicate ideas and share them, and when that discussion is happening in a somewhat artificial way, it raises some interesting questions. It’s almost like the format is informing the class, and that’s been, again, challenging but also interesting.
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