Dan DiTursi

Bio

Dan has been teaching in one capacity or another since the day in the high school library when a cute girl flounced up to him and said, "I know you - you're good at math. Can you help me with my homework?"

Since then, he has tutored, TAed, or taught in a wide variety of fields - at RPI alone, he was a tutor or TA for over a dozen courses in mathematics, computer science, economics, core engineering, physics, and chemistry. He has also been an adjunct professor for the Computer Science department at Union College in Schenectady, a computer science instructor for Johns Hopkins University's CTY summer program, and a high school teacher in physics, chemistry, and mathematics.

Outside of teaching, Dan enjoys cooking and gaming. He is currently a football and lacrosse official, and he has been a contributing editor for The Polytechnic, the school newspaper of his alma mater, with many sports articles and a long-standing restaurant review column to his name.

Dan's formal credentials include Bachelor of Science degrees in mathematics and computer science, as well as a Master of Science degree in computer science, all from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y. He also has New York State teaching certification for math, grades 7-12.

Educational philosophy

What is the purpose of education?

From the perspective of society, education has two main goals. First, it should provide students with the skills necessary for them to become productive members of society, social and organizational skills being no less important than the more obvious academic and physical skills that are learned. Second, education propagates the ideas that the society finds most important - the morals and ethics that allow society to function at all, the truly fundamental scientific concepts that underlie the society's technology, the common metaphors that allow us to communicate concepts for which we have no words.

From the perspective of the students, education provides a chance to experiment - to discover what disciplines they enjoy and which they do not. It prepares them for a career, and hopefully for life in general. Education should help students learn how to listen, how to speak, how to think, and (perhaps most importantly) how to learn.

What is the role of the student in education?

Students must be willing to be engaged. They must be willing to recognize the potential value in the material they are learning, and they must be willing to be interested by knowledge. In short, they must be willing to learn.

Students also need to take interest in their own learning process. They need to participate, not just when the discussion turns to a topic that interests them, but in a dialog about what topics should be discussed. Students must actively seek out what they enjoy learning.

What is the role of the teacher in education?

The teacher's role, primarily, is to create an environment that is conducive to learning. Teachers must enforce rigor in the thought processes of the students - students must be allowed to create their own conclusions, but it falls to the teacher to ensure that the students examine the conclusions, and the process by which the conclusion was reached. Finally, teachers provide students with feedback, and feedback is the single most important factor in the learning process.

What is the role of the teacher in the community?

Outside of the school, teachers should be role models - keepers of the ideals of the school. They should be thinkers, people who carefully consider facts before coming to conclusions. They should be welcoming of new ideas, and nurturing towards those who come up with them. Teachers need to be good learners, and they need to model this for everyone in the community.

What is the purpose of the school?

The school itself provides a place that is dedicated to learning. Everything about a school building and grounds should be created with that focus in mind. This means that it should be a safe place. This safety must be not only physical (though that is important), but also emotional. A school should be a welcoming, caring environment, and students and staff who do not help to create such an environment need to be instructed (preferably by example) in how to behave so that everyone does feel welcome. This aspect of social learning should be a major part of any school experience.

A school also provides a formal setting where students can have their performance evaluated. Again, feedback is the primary factor in the learning process - at a school, students can receive that feedback without the fear that negative feedback will result in overly severe consequences.

Why are you involved in JZEF?

More than anything else, in my experience, the success or failure of a school to educate stems from the institutional culture. If a school has a culture where success is expected and academic rigor is the norm, then its students will generally thrive. If the school is permeated by negativity and a lack of respect for the learning process, then its students will generally fail to meet their potential. Changing the culture of a school is a slow and difficult process. I hope, by getting in at the ground floor, to ensure that every step of the process of creating our school is taken with the institutional culture in mind. In short, I want to create a place where the students themselves believe they will succeed.