whois

=Who is Mr. Goldberg?=

I have been teaching high school history for a little more than a decade. I’m originally from a suburb of Boston called Newton, MA, the home of the [|Fig Newton]. I attended Duke for my undergraduate work – and I ended up covering the men's basketball team for the student newspaper, __The Chronicle__ ... so I essentially majored in Duke Basketball ... with a minor in Public Policy Studies. Several years later, I came back to Durham to earn a Master of Arts in Teaching, also at Duke.

At the turn of the millennium, I took a break from teaching because I was amazed at the educational potential of the Internet. I became particularly interested in the question of who owns information and what kind of access people – mainly students – should have to information. You may know this issue as the “digital divide.” I specifically became fascinated with copyright law. So I went off to law school at Georgetown in Washington, DC, where I learned about copyright law and intellectual property and educational fair use.

I graduated law school in 2003, passed the bar in Maryland (I'm a lawyer in that state, albeit with "inactive" status), and clerked for a judge in Washington, DC. After my clerkship, I found that I missed the classroom, so I went back to teaching. I taught history at The Potomac School, just outside of Washington, DC, in McLean, VA (across the street from the CIA). In my second year at the school, I became the "lead technology teacher," which meant part of my job was to help my colleagues on the faculty think about ways that technology (blogs, wikis, podcasts, etc.) might enhance student learning.

So how did I get back to North Carolina? Well, I met [|my wife Jocelyn] in Washington, DC, and we got married in November of 2005. She’s an education professor, and when she had an opportunity to move from her position at George Washington University to a similar position at UNC-Chapel Hill, we decided to leave DC for the Triangle. We just bought a house in Durham, and we spent the summer getting settled (we still have a few boxes left to unpack).

I’m incredibly excited to be teaching here at Cary Academy. I’m also incredibly excited that I’m a new father. Our first child, Benjamin Goldberg, was born in late June of 2007, and he's been keeping us happily busy -- and mildly sleep-deprived -- ever since he joined this world. He's currently on the six-step plan, meaning he takes six steps and then either grabs something or falls down. He likes people and he plans to make a few visits to our classroom. Here's an early picture of Ben: