Bob Finn

email: thefinns@rcn.com

Homepage: http://cuip.net/~bobfinn/profile

Occupation: TEACHER

  • Middle Years International Baccalaureate Programme, Year 3
  • Wildwood Elementary School
  • CPS: Region 1.

Favorite Quotation:

Your "I WILL" is more important that your IQ!

Personal Information:

I am married to my college sweetheart, Lou-Ellen. I met my wife when I was 18 and a freshman at MacMurray College in Jacksonville, Illinois. This December we will have been married for 34 years. We have two adult children. Chris, 29, a Microsoft expert, is a computer network manager in Oak Brook, Illinois. Brandon, 26, a graduate of St. Louis University with a degree in Philosophy, is a baker for the Great Harvest Bread Company in Evanston. Lou-Ellen taught for CPS for 34 years. She now works at Northwestern University's School of Education and Social Policy. We do a lot of gardening and traveling together. My wife is a gourmet cook who loves to try new recipes. This is a probable explanation for why I have gained about 70 pounds since our wedding day in 1969.

 

Professional Information

This is my 37th year as an educator in CPS. My career path changed about eleven years ago. In 1992 I went through a mid-life crisis. I was an administrator who had an unfortunate experience with Beaubien School's Local School Council. As a result I asked myself what part of my career in education had given me the most satisfaction. The answer was teaching the children. So in March of 1993 I went back into the classroom as a reading and language arts teacher at Stone Scholastic Academy. I joined the faculty at Wildwood in September, 2000.

Wildwood Elementary School is on the extreme northwest side of Chicago. Wildwood is a wonderful school. We were named one of the top ten neighborhood schools in Chicago this year. I am part of the International Baccalaureate Middle Years Programme. I am the teacher for Year 3 or Grade 8. My class is somewhat self-contained, so I am responsible for the following curricula:

  • American History

  • American Literature

  • Algebra.

We had our accreditation visit in March and are anxiously awaiting work that we are an official MYIB school.

The Present:

This summer I am attending the Web Institute for Teachers.I am looking forward to learning a great deal about creating exciting, relevant, viable curriculum websites for my students. We are just beginning to learn about Micromedia's Dreamweaver MX.

Past Travels:

My favorite vacation spot is Acadia National Park on the Atlantic coast of Maine close to Bar Harbor. We spent a week there about 4 years ago. It was fabulously beautiful. We really understood the meaning of the red granite of Maine. We did so much hiking there that this was the first vacation that my wife and myself acutally lost weight. We had afternoon tea several times on the lovely Jordan Pond in Acadia.

Spring break, 2003, my wife and I spent ten days in Ireland. What a beautiful country! We started in Galway and went on to the Dingle Peninsula. Next, we went to Kinsale, the gourmet center of Ireland. We stayed a Buggy's, a bed and breakfast near the Wexford Castle. We ended our trip in Dublin. Trinity College was magnificent. The main chamber of the Old Library, the Long Room, is nearly 65 metres in length, and houses about 200,000 of the Library's oldest books. The grandeur of the Long Room was the inspiration for one of the scene's in George Lucas's latest Star Wars movie.

Our most meaningful trip occurred in December of 1998 when we went to Bethlehem in Israel. Our church, the First Presbyterian Church of Evanston, has a sister church there, the Christmas Lutheran Church. My wife is a member of our church's English handbell choir. The purpose of our trip to Israel was to bring the Christmas Church a set of handbells and have our handbell choir teach the children of the Bethlehem church how to play the bells. We were there for ten days. The first 5 days we worked with the children in the morning and went to various sites throughout the adjacent area in the afternoon such as the Jericho Tell and Herodium. At the end of our trip we toured all of Israel including the Dead Sea, Haifa, and Nazareth.

We spent a day at Yad Vashem, the Halocaust Memorial in Jersusalem. Most memorable of what we witnessed there was the Children's Memorial. This unique memorial is hollowed out from an underground cavern. It is a tribute to the approximately 1.5 million Jewish children who perished during the Holocaust. Memorial candles, a customary Jewish tradition to remember the dead, are reflected infinitely in a dark and somber space, creating the impression of millions of stars shining in the firmament.

This trip really brought both the New and Old Testaments of the Bible alive for me. Because we spent so much time with Christian Palestinians, our understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was greatly enhanced.