Mark Richman has been teaching for over 45 years. He worked thirty – one of those years in the NYC School System. His first nineteen years in NYC were served on the middle school level at JHS 43, in Brooklyn, where he performed as a math teacher and as Dean of Discipline. He then taught for 5 years at Brooklyn’s Lincoln High School. He not only taught math to pupils in grades 9 through 12 (Algebra, Geometry and Trigonometry), but he also taught “AP Calculus” for three years. At Lincoln he served as the union “Chapter Leader” of his school.

In 1997 (after being in the classroom for 24 years), he moved into administration where he served at Brooklyn’s Erasmus Hall HS as the supervisor of math, guidance, organization and security.

The following year, he moved into “staff and curriculum development” for many of the High Schools of Brooklyn and Staten Island in NYC. In this role, he had the wonderful opportunity to train teachers in the improvement of their craft. After serving in this role for three years, he again returned to the classroom where he became a math teacher at Automotive High School in Brooklyn, NY. He again taught math to many High School pupils at this vocational school.

The following year he was called upon to serve once again in administration at The High School of Economics and Finance in Manhattan (right across from the World Trade Center). As described in some detail in the book, his third day on the job was 9/11/01. In Sept. of 2002, he returned to the classroom for two more years (in NYC) at Port Richmond HS in Staten Island, NY – another tough inner city school. In June of 2004, he retired from NYC after 31 years and is now (January 2020) in his fifteenth year as a teacher at Columbia HS in Maplewood New Jersey.

These many experiences in education are discussed in this book and serve as the ground work for many of the insights that Mr. Richman relates to his readers.