My name is Graham. I am the author of The Apprenticeship of Being Human: Why Early Childhood Parenting Matters to Everyoneand am launching Learning is Learned to help disadvantaged students learn how to learn.

I’m a real person, just like you. I’m blessed with a loving wife and two delightful daughters. My wife is a developmental pediatrician who works in global health; that has given me the privilege of being a full-time father to my girls, and has enabled me to co-found a web business, write a book, conduct parenting seminars and workshops, and coach social entrepreneurs.

Content

This is my personal website, focused on learning and formation. My background is helping parents better understand their critical role in laying the foundations of civil society – and to help the rest of us celebrate and empower parents to fulfill that role.

{Audience} 

One Amazon reviewer wrote of my book: “Everyone who knows a parent should read this.” While my writing has been particularly aimed at parents of young children, it is germane to everyone who is curious about how we learn. Here is the constellation of issues that are my core:

Biography

{Place} 

I grew up in Fargo, North Dakota; I attended Wheaton College, through which I lived for seven months in rural Uganda; I have lived, studied, and worked for the majority of my adult life in New York City; and I now live in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Those places have shaped me. The people in those places have molded me. Living and working in different communities – urban and rural, domestic and international, poor and wealthy – and interacting with common people and cultural elites has profoundly influenced the way that I live, speak, and write.

{Vocation} 

My post-college vocational journey began in New York City in a talented team consulting group in the financial services. After a few years I resigned to become a New York City Teaching Fellow, teaching in a failing public elementary school in my Brooklyn neighborhood while I earned a Master of Arts in Teaching. I worked as a Project Manager at the Advanced Studies in Culture Foundation. I now serve as Director of Operations of a financial planning firm.

I entered into the brokenness of my community, and discovered the formative power of parents, schools, and communities – for good and for ill. During my years of teaching my eldest daughter was born, and I experienced parenting first-hand – while living and working in a community of poverty.

{Parenting} 

When my daughter was eighteen months old, I took a child care leave to become a full-time father. That rich, challenging, delightful experience of parenting has been the fuel and context for starting a web app for parents, producing an interview format podcast for parents of young children, writing The Apprenticeship, providing full-time care for the children of dear friends in our community [yes, working as a “manny” in Manhattan is on my résumé], serving on the vestry of All Angels’ Church, participating in a vibrant start-up community, as well as contributing to magazines and journals.

{Loves} 

In my free time, I enjoy reading, writing, running, climbing, racquet sports, hiking, camping, climbing, cooking, and spending time with my family and friends (often doing one or more of those things together). I am a member of Trinity Presbyterian Church in Charlottesville, and consider myself a life-long member of All Angels’ Episcopal Church in NYC, which has become a second family to us.