Personal

I was born (January 25, 1977) and raised in Bucharest, Romania. My father and I moved on December 8, 1990 — almost exactly one year after the Romanian Revolution thawed the borders. We almost had to come back when my father could not find a job, but were fortunate to get some help along the way from an American family. My mother and younger brother Razvan, who is 11 years younger, still live in Romania with most of my family. My father remarried and gave me a younger half-sister who is 29 years younger

I attended Bellarmine College Prep, a sports and academic powerhouse, all-boys, Jesuit school in San Jose, where I was a varsity athlete in cross-country, soccer and track. I ran a mile in 4:39 and two miles in 9:53, but was still only the third fastest distance runner in my class! I had a blast playing chess every day at lunch, finished tops in my class in Santa Clara County, helped Bellarmine take 10th place in the nation my junior year and won $1500 in adult tournaments. I did not yet have much of a social life.

I was accepted at Dartmouth College and chose to go there over Stanford. It was an amazing place, where I could have lunch with many of my professors and call them by name, go kayaking and hiking at will and meet some intelligent but happy people. I was recruited for cross-country but saw the sad writing on the wall in my first race, when I finished the first of five miles in 4:40, one second off my best time and still at the back of the pack. This allowed me to join the heavyweight crew next year, which was by far the most rewarding and influential thing I did in college. It is hard to describe the toughness and discipline that is required of rowers.

The summer of 1997, my life took a stunning turn when I started swing dancing. I had never danced before and thought myself terrible at it. It took me months to get the East Coast Swing basic, but my learning curve accelerated and my senior year I was teaching classes through Dartmouth. I also took an informal e-mail list and turned it into the Dartmouth Swing Kids club, put on dances and organized roadtrips to see bands. I also started the performance group Jump Start, which I recently learned is still alive and was led by some of my former students!

After graduating, I chose to go into teaching high school: mainly math, with some physics, French and computer applications. I bounced around between four schools in three and a half years, tried different things, read a bunch of books on my own and while auditing Stanford Teacher Education Program classes and developed a pretty radical and student-centered view of education based on my experience as well as the writings of people like John Holt, Neil Postman, Alfie Kohn, John Taylor Gatto, Carl Rogers and Frank Smith.

The next few years I spent working part time at the Apple Retail Store in Palo Alto, tutoring individual students and, since December 2001, traveling everywhere I could for swing (and later blues) dancing. I used to be a pretty well-rounded individual until November 2004, when I organized my first workshop and taught my first blues class. Since then, blues and partner dancing in general has been my life, and for the most part I have not regretted it.

For the next few years, I am embracing my dance organizing business and teaching career. Eventually, I want to (1) go back into education, perhaps get a Ph.D. on my own terms and make a dent into our stupid and harmful school system, (2) become fluent in seven or more languages and (3) do more than my share in raising awareness of and finding solutions to global warming.