Daniel Garcia-Galili - The Putney School

I’ve spent my life looking for community and trying to build it; it brought me here as a student and it keeps me here as a teacher.

Everyone here, students and adults alike, wants you to succeed. Whether you’re a kid or a teacher, everyone here is rooting for you.

Putney is different from the other schools where I’ve worked because at the highest level (administration, board) the school believes that the kids mean well, want to learn, and if we can mostly get out of their way and just offer some gentle guidance, they’ll do good things. Teachers often think that elsewhere, but it’s great to see it as a driving force in the institution.

Teaching math here at Putney, we need to strike a careful balance. We need to provide rigorous mathematical instructuction for kids who want to go on to further work here and afterwards in STEM fields, and we need to engage students who have been scared away from math by past learning experiences, all in the same class. We accomplish this best by treating math as simply another lens through which we can understand and analyze the world; this lets us spend most of our time sitting shoulder to shoulder with our students looking at and talking about the work together, rather than in front of them telling them what we think they should know. This allows students to develop skills in the context of their application rather than in a vacuum, and just as importantly it helps them graduate prepared to be informed participants in a democratic society.

I grew up in New Jersey and Israel. In my sophomore year of high school I came to Putney as a boarding student. After graduating, I worked at Mount Snow, attended Marlboro College where I worked for their Outdoor Program and completed a degree in physics with a focus on astronomy and computational methods. From there I continued to work in outdoor education for the better part of a decade before coming full circle. My old advisor from Putney helped me get a taste of classroom instruction, and after deciding that it was a good fit I completed my MA in Marlboro College’s Teaching for Social Justice program. My wife and I moved onto campus in the fall of 2015, and this is now, without question, our home.