Curt Gabrielson

My fellow Missourian Mark Twain reminded us not to let school get in the way of our education. I took this to heart early on, and learned quite a lot in the process of setting up hair-trigger cup in the middle-school attic to dump liquid Jello on our band teacher’s head. While I did learn a good bit at MIT, what I learned on the hog farm of my youth turned out to be much more applicable to life. Building multi-level tree houses, exploring the bottom of the pond with a garden-hose breathing system, and rigging up baby pig incubators near the woodstove were just what I needed to meet the challenge of making education real and relevant for kids. After the great Midwest and Boston, I wandered on to Berkeley, San Francisco, Beijing, Xining, Watsonville, and Dili, learning what I could at all stops, including four languages. San Francisco's Exploratorium fed my mind and the Community Science Workshops nourished my soul. Timor-Leste is one of the deep, black marks on the history US foreign policy; a crime comparable to Cambodia’s killing fields, though this time with Uncle Sam supplying the arms. Since Indonesia departed in 1999, I’ve done my best to contribute what I can to the enormous need for science and mathematics education there. In addition to my English books, I’ve written a couple of science and mathematics hands-on teaching manuals in Tetum, Timor-Leste’s lingua franca. I find writing a fragile joy; I’ve always wedged it into a corner of my life, for when I focus on it full time, my back aches, my legs twitch, and my mind wanders off the page and back to the workbench.