O'Callaghan, Sean (K)

I'm Sean O'Callaghan. This will be my 9th year as a teacher and I'm lucky to say that I've been a Northwood Owl for as long as I've been a teacher.

After attending school infrequently as a child, I learned to read and write at the age of twenty two at The Evergreen State College. Great books became my first safe and functioning family. Think "Good Will Hunting" sans good looks and minus an exceptional IQ. 

After Evergreen, I accidentally got into the MFA program at Columbia University for filmmaking (being illiterate for so long, my first love and my first way into ideas, articulation, and the interpretation of this strange human experience was through TV and films, when I could get at them) dreaming I was going to be some feral trailer trash Bergman, Tarkovsky, Fellini or Satyajit Ray.

More recently and more relevant to education, I have a Masters in Teaching from The University of Washington. 

I have two children. Rainier is nine and Maple is twenty one. When Maple came into my life, she evolved me and healed me in ways I never saw coming, and Rainier is knocking the rust off that imperceptibly and slowly accreted over time. Having a nine year old whilst closing in on fifty four feels a bit like I am raising my own grandson - Ha!

The three animals in my home are two Irish Wolfhounds -- Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchel -- and a cat called Marta.

I like to run far, mostly in the mountains around here and in the deserts of the Southwest. I've completed multiple ultra marathon runs of distances up to 135 miles. This summer I've made the advanced age reckless decision to again run the Cascade Crest 100 Mile Endurance Run. Running around our brutal and beautiful mountains here in the Pacific Northwest is my favorite physical activity, and when I'm lazy, listening to records and watching films (and by watching films I mostly mean rewatching old, boring, slow, pretentious, cherished arty cinema gems) are my chosen activities.

I answered the call to become a teacher relatively late in life, and I am so glad I did. There is a breeze at my back when I'm doing the hard and satisfying work of distilling all the big ideas and inspirations of my life into a primary classroom setting so that my K babies may make contact with them, the big ideas I mean, and thereby begin to fathom themselves and to begin to fathom each other, my guiding question always, "What is a classroom?”

The heart and spiritus locus of 116: I find nothing controversial in my simple position that the number of humans who deserve to be dehumanized is precisely zero. And I refuse to allow the fostering of critical thinking wherein the brain and the heart become connected devolve into mind numbing snark or political debate. 

I admit to being fairly confused by space and I admit to being fairly confused by time, but I am pretty sure the rule is love. In 116 we indulge shenanigans, ballyhoo, and potty humor. We also awaken to the praxis of being human.

I am an accidental professor at UW for their College of Education the last few summers, one of the top rated teacher preparation programs in the country. They recklessly allow me to create and teach a philosophy of education/equity and identity class for their incoming cohort of master's in teaching candidates. Now the guy who didn’t learn to read and write until he was twenty two years old is a steward of k-babies and grad-babies -- What a world. In both settings I simply ask, "What is a classroom?"

If your little sapling has been transferred into 116 soil for nine months (a not un-symbolic duration, yes?), I am glad of it, and I hope at some point you will too. 

116!