By John Harrington I
Recently, one of my highlights of the quarantine was the opportunity to sit down (virtually) through Zoom with three esteemed former RL faculty members, Matt Dinger, Andrew Kingsley, and Cary Snider. They were all glad to share their fond experiences at school and to shed light on the next chapters of their lives. Here are their interviews, in the order of how much I liked them as teachers, along with my editorial commentary. I’m totally kidding. It’s just alphabetical:
What are you doing now?
Mr. Dinger: I’m finishing up my first year of law school at Harvard Law School. We’ve been in person for most of the year but remote since around mid-March. We end the second semester of classes [on April 24th] and then we’ll be taking exams over the next couple of weeks. That’s what I’m doing, on the day to day.
Mr. Kingsley: I teach at the Riverdale Country School which is a K-12 co-ed private school in the Bronx. In terms of just academic demands, it’s like RL, but it’s about twice the size. I’m teaching 8th graders and 9th graders, and then there’s an 11th grade course which is sort of a co-taught co-curricular history and literature class that is like US History at RL but plus American literature. I took this job because of this class, it’s really well regarded, and it’s incredibly challenging, but it’s taught me a lot about collaboration and American history. I think it’s really how English should be taught. I would never even teach now To Kill a Mockingbird without using a lot of the history around it. I really wish more English teachers taught literature like this. (Editor’s note: Is this a shot at the English Department?)
Mr. Snider: The part time jobs that I have been doing are some substitute teaching and tutoring. Generally, I’ve been working on my Masters of Fine Arts. What that entails is a lot of reading and writing essays and then writing fiction, as well. Every month I have to turn in about 20 pages of new fiction, and a couple of essays, too. So I’ve been just working on that. I’m also hanging out with my buddies and working out. I live in a house with some friends from high school, actually, and in the back, we have what I call the “prison yard.” It’s not quite a yard, and it’s not quite a patio. It’s got these big high walls. It’s like a prison yard and we take weights out there, and we work out outside because our gym memberships are closed, of course, so we’ll just work out in the prison yard.
Do you have any ultimate aspirations for your career?
Mr. Dinger: I’m still not sure exactly what it’s gonna look like. What I’m doing this summer can maybe give some indication of what kind of stuff I hope to be doing. Pretty much everyone gets some sort of legal internship after their first year of law school. I’m going to be working for the ACLU of Michigan, which I’m really excited about. I’m not sure exactly what type of work it’s going to be, because what’s going on right now has brought a lot of really urgent things to the forefront in the realm of civil rights and civil liberties. One of the things that the ACLU is working on throughout the country right now is trying to make conditions in prisons and jails a lot safer. There’s been a lot of stuff in the news about the risk of spread [of coronavirus] in prisons and jails and trying to mitigate that risk as much as possible. The office where I’m going to be working right now has done a lot with immigrant detention centers and trying to release people from them in a safe way. I’d love to be doing that type of public-interest litigation and representing clients in groups who have been underserved in a lot of ways. So I hope to do that in some way, although I’m not sure exactly what it’s going to look like.
Mr. Kingsley: I think I would like to be a department head (Is the former advisee putting Mr. Cervas’s position in jeopardy!?). I think that all English departments are struggling right now with trying hard to diversify their curriculums, but I think it would be fun to be in charge of that effort, bringing in diverse voices into a curriculum, but also just diversifying how English is taught. As an English teacher, I like essays, but I also think that there’s so much more to English than essays, and I think that a lot of English pedagogy is strapped to that. And so if I were to be department head I would really try to push teachers to innovate outside of that mold.
Mr. Snider: In terms of my writing, I’d like to publish a book, either a collection of short stories or a novel. That’s definitely a big dream. In the short term, I think just getting some short stories published in journals and magazines would be a great first step for that. So in the next year or so I’m going to be submitting to a bunch of places to try to see if I can get my name out there a little bit, which would help. It’d be a good first step toward getting a book later on. It’s a really hard thing to do, but you gotta shoot for the moon, land amongst the stars.
What do you miss about RL?
Mr. Dinger: I think about RL all the time. I was chatting in Zoom with Mr Lieb earlier this week, just to catch up and see how things were going and it made me remember a lot of the things I missed. I miss the people more than everything. After I was at RL for three years and then took a three year gap, I was reminded last year being back how much the community as a whole is just such a wonderful group. I had a lot of 8 AM classes this year, and another thing I missed was Halls (Hot take!), which sounds weird, but it’s not like many professions. They can be really interesting, exciting sometimes, even though it’s not the thing you’d necessarily want to be doing at eight o’clock in the morning. Just having these incredible people sharing their life stories and some are so inspirational. I always found that it was such a neat aspect of being at RL – that you get to start your day with just hearing from some of these incredible people. I also miss the classroom. It’s funny. I’ve learned that a lot of people pursue the law partly because they really don’t like math, but math is actually pretty important in the law. I miss doing that every day but it is fun when something math-related comes up in a case and I feel, Oh yeah, I get to do some math again. Most of all, I miss the people, that’s the biggest thing.
Mr. Kingsley: I miss my friends, I had a lot of really close friends on the faculty. I don’t want to list them because I might leave someone out, but I missed a lot of people. I missed the advisor system. I don’t think our boys are aware of how special that is. In all of my searches for different schools, there was no school that did that. The fact that you have one faculty member who cares about you and gets to meet with you, you don’t see that. Riverdale has an advising system, but the intimacy that I built with RL students far surpasses the intimacy that any other advisor program at any other school will foster. I missed the Penn Fellow program a little bit because that only meant I taught two classes. Now I’m teaching four classes and five periods a day, because the 11th grade course is two hour-long classes each day, so it’s like a college class. The idea that I only taught two classes is laughable.
Mr. Snider: I definitely miss the people, just all the camaraderie and the family environment there, whether it’s working out in the gym after school and seeing those students, walking around the Yard Sale. It’s just so fun, or the 3v3 basketball tournament, you know, MayDay, the Question Bowl (Yes!!!). I missed that stuff big time. You know, people giving speeches about stuff that they’re passionate about, speakers coming into the school, but mostly just the people around you, even, and I’m sure many of my former colleagues would be surprised, but I actually miss those morning meetings that we would have twice a week. I actually miss just paling around by the coffee machine, talking to Mr. Buckley, you know, good times. I have that picture of all my former students on my desktop, and I absolutely look at it (Included in this issue).
Have you started doing anything else interesting?
Mr. Dinger: Not a lot of things that aren’t law-related, I haven’t had a ton of time. The first year of law school is traditionally by far the busiest, and they do keep you incredibly busy. I’ve actually been running quite a bit more recently since the lockdown – partly because I’m not commuting to and from law school and there are no other extracurriculars, so I just have a bit more time to be doing that. No new super exciting hobbies, but I’d love to learn the banjo.
Mr. Kingsley: I’m cooking a lot more. I find that I need to be creative in some way, and so I’m pumping out a few crosswords which is nice, but cooking is really fun for me. I call it “adult legos,” because as a kid, a lot of boys especially do legos, and cooking is just a more elevated form that builds up to something greater, following directions. So that sort of primal urge in me is being satisfied. I know it doesn’t look like it but I’m exercising. (Having seen him, I can say that he at least looks much fitter than the Yearbook editors). One of the things I was very proud of at RL was that I made a chess set, and I really wish I could get into a woodshop right now and make more chess sets. Woodworking is very fun, and just another way that I could create right now.
Mr. Snider: There are about three stories that I feel have a potential to be published. I’ve just been waiting I guess but now that it’s been quarantine I sort of thought, well, why just sit on these, I might as well try to share them with the world if people want to read them. That’s that’s actually on my to-do list. I have a list right here of things to do and that’s one of them, just shoot those out. And, oh! I have to upload all my iPhone data onto my computer because there’s no space anymore. My friend and I started a band, we’re called The Younger Brothers (Go follow https://www.instagram.com/theyoungerbrothersband/ !). We’re making a splash. It’s kind of like a little country-inspired rock duo guitar, two voices, a lot of harmonies. During this quarantine he’s been one of the friends that I see and we’ve written almost, I think, 12 songs. So we’re hoping to record them in the next couple months. My older brother’s a musician and so he’s going to bring us to a recording studio and we’re going to actually do it. And who knows, maybe, maybe people will like it but that’s been a really really fun thing that’s actually happened during the quarantine, it feels really productive and it’s with my longtime friend. It’s just sort of been taking off I don’t know. I mean I’d be happy to be a country music star, a sensation, that would be a terrific surprise for my life.
Besides that, I’ve been sweeping a lot. I really have been perfecting the art of sweeping. The basement in our house is from the 1800s and it’s got this brick, and no one had swept it in probably 150 years.
Besides that, I’ve been sweeping a lot. I really have been perfecting the art of sweeping. The basement in our house is from the 1800s and it’s got this brick, and no one had swept it in probably 150 years. And so there was just this accumulation of brick dust and stone dust and you can’t even see the bricks, but I knew they were down there, so I’ve been doing this thing where I just wrapped my face with a wet bandana and go down there and create this dust storm. It’s very hard to navigate and potentially dangerous, but I’m about two thirds through the basement, and it’s looking really kind of nice down there, a little bit habitable. You could actually live down there, and maybe play some music down there. A little gardening here and there. I bought the seeds. I bought the soil. I haven’t actually put those things together yet, but I have high ambitions here. (We would expect nothing less.)
Is there anything you would like to say to the RL community?
Mr. Dinger: I thought this would be a great opportunity to share my engagement. I got engaged a few weeks ago to my longtime girlfriend whom I met when we were both teaching in England. Then we took a year off and did some traveling together and now we’re engaged, just exciting stuff. I miss the people all the time. I want to say hello and thank you to everyone and I look forward to staying in touch with people in the years ahead!
Mr. Kingsley: Well, I have a buzz cut, which is very new for me. I got it a couple days ago, so I recommend it for many guys. It feels great (The Tripod hereby officially endorses the buzz cut). For fans of my crosswords, I have one more coming down the pipeline. It’s a tricky Thursday, and then I’m waiting on four (Fingers crossed). I want RL to know that they’re missed. I would love to hear from people, so if you want to reach out to me, feel free to just shoot me an email at akingsley@riverdale.edu.
Mr. Snider: Shout out to all my former advisees! MayDay 2021, the return. We got to come back with a little extra energy next year. I was considering a MayDay appearance this year but it’s impossible. Just because it was canceled doesn’t mean that my anticipated return is canceled. There’s still the possibility for me to be a terror on the Capture the Flag field and the football field. Everyone keep their fingers crossed for good weather and good health. Stay safe and you know tell the people you love that you love them, it’s a good time to do that. That’s all I gotta say.
