Dr. Dale Cooper

Contact: dcooper@tuhsd.k12.az.us
Phone: 480-967-1661 Voicemail Ext. 20542

Courses: Drawing and Painting, Ceramics, IB Visual Arts

Biography

Born in Iowa in '74, the second child of three, to parents who worked in the medical field. When I was 11 my parents transferred to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota where my troubles with traditional education began to surface. Think of the most annoying, troublesome student that you can think of and then multiply it by two or three... and that was me. I was programmed to believe, by many teachers and doctors, that my disengagement in the classroom was due to learning disabilities or my inability to process the information, when in fact, I now know, it was due to the educational institutions inability to deliver the curriculum in more than one format. I won't spend a ton o' time on irrelevant curriculum or teacher complacency, but let's just say my motivation for earning a doctoral degree and staying a life long learner is internal and personal, but also external, with hopes of contributing information to non-traditional curriculum and delivery in relation to student achievement.

Now jump ahead a decade or two and I have proven the majority of the doctors and traditionalists wrong by earning a B.S. in education from Northern Arizona University, a M.Ed in curriculum development/instruction from Arizona State, and a doctorate in Ed., with a focus on educational leadership from University of Phoenix in teh summer of 2014.

I am currently a high school teacher at Tempe high school in Tempe, Arizona. I am going into my 17th year as a visual arts specialist, and I am also the International Baccalaureate Visual Arts instructor for our department too. Can you say excited? I have been teaching holistically/multiculturally for going on 17 years now, and the IB program reinforces those ideals. Besides being a full time teacher, I have also done curriculum consultant work for the EDUindex: http://www.eduindex.net/, owned a couple businesses and recorded an album for RCA. The most rewarding work I've done though is teach, and not teach high school kids what to learn, but rather, how to learn.

I have been married for 15 years to beautiful Molly, who blessed me with two sons, Tommy and Joey. My hobbies include but are not limited to: anything combustion, video games, pinball, lowbrow art, playing music, listening to music and playing more music, vintage chevy stuff, comics, vintage toys, physics,...I could go on and on. I love to learn, process and share new information, and I look forward to, and embrace the day, when we have the ability to upload and download directly to our brains via neural implants. Long live critical theory!