I would like to tell you a little about myself. I have been a Social Studies teacher in New York City for twenty-nine years. For seven years, I was a teacher at I.S. 246, and the last 22 years I have been teaching at Erasmus. I wanted to be a teacher since I was very young. I love the entire classroom atmosphere and I love working with young people. To me, there is no other job on earth as rewarding as teaching.

I have a Masters degree in History in Russian-Soviet Studies, and consider Russian-Soviet Studies as the field of my expertise. Three of my favorite pastimes are sports, reading, and travel. My favorite sport used to be Hockey, but now it is football. I am a Rangers hockey fan, a Mets baseball fan, Giants and Jets football fan, and a Knicks basketball fan.

For reading, I prefer historical books as you might expect, but some of my favorite fictional novels are "Lonesome Dove," "To Kill a Mockingbird," "Brothers Karamazov," and "Dead Souls." My all-time favorite historical book is “Peter the Great” by Robert K. Massie.

Most important to my philosophy of education in Social Studies is the idea that it is imperative that you as students do not simply accept any information as a given. You must question and analyze everything that you read, hear, or see. That is why my classroom will strongly encourage open questioning of all ideas. Nothing is held sacred. You must learn to question and research to find your own answers to the ideas and questions discussed in the classroom. I believe if you carefully examine the quote below, it will help explain what I believe history is about and how to approach its study.  

"Everyone falsifies history even if it is only his own personal history. Sometimes the falsification is deliberate, sometimes unconscious; but always the past is altered to suit the needs of the present. The best we can say of any account is not that it is the real truth at last, but that this is how the story appears now."

Joseph Freeman