PAUL MCCULLOUGH
High School Teacher
William Stafford once said that you have to teach kids NOT to be poets, and Mr. McCullough’s personal history has led him to believe this to be true. Everyone loves to be read to, and through his own experience of this, Paul became a voracious reader as a kid. But then high school came along and he stopped caring about everything except skateboarding, music, and girls. How much of this was his own short-sightedness and how much of this was a product of his rather narrow and uninspiring cultural milieu (Silicon Valley at the turn of the millennium)? Having a bad-luck-run of apathetic teachers during his junior and senior years didn't help either. Paul drifted through most of his freshman year at Cal Poly getting B minuses and nodding off in the back of huge lecture halls--until he took two classes simultaneously: a class called Great Books: Romanticism through Modernism taught by the inimitable Robert Inchausti, and Introduction to Philosophical Classics taught by Ken Walker, to which and whom he owes an enormous debt of gratitude. Those two professors had opposite teaching styles in nearly every way, but both showed him that there were important things to be found in books--things that he desperately needed to hear. He started reading voraciously again because he wanted to know what they knew. (He maintains that he will never come close.) That was years ago now, but in many ways he’s still reeling from the electric shock of reading Tolstoy, Melville, Plato, and company for the first time. That's how his subsequent journey began, anyway: from undergrad at Cal Poly to pursuing a M.A. in English at the University of Iowa, and then on to Yale Divinity School for a M.A.R. in Theology. Paul stayed on the East Coast for a while, Teaching at the Westover School, an all-girls boarding school in Middlebury, CT. “It was a lot like Gilmore Girls, but with fewer commercial breaks.” Alas, the West Coast was calling to him, and SLOCA offered him the perfect opportunity to come back home. He was wooed by the small class sizes, the students who love books, and the sense that we - the entire community - are in it together. In his first year at SLOCAHS he has already worn many hats: Teacher of English, Master of Athens House, Leader of Book Clubs, Senior Project Director, and Occasional Blogger. When he’s not diving into literature with the students at SLOCAHS, Mr. McCullough can be found skateboarding around the mean streets of Los Osos, reading in Linnaea's, tilling his little plot of ground, backpacking in Big Sur, batting leadoff and playing centerfield for the Royals (SLO Men's Baseball League), and attempting to cultivate various forms of constructive idleness. His own search for greater understanding and personal education has lately sent him on an investigation of comparative cosmology.
