On any ordinary scale, boat tours, beanie babies, brain freeze and black holes don’t have anything in common, much less have a reason to be mentioned in the same sentence. Then again, P4K’s newest team member, Brad Kirshenbaum is not any ordinary guy.
“I was actually published as an expert source on astronomy when I was in seventh grade,” Brad says. In all fairness the credentials he was credited with (a college-level astronomy professor) were bogus, but the information that he gave in his response to the post was completely accurate. Brad explains that as a kid he had a huge fascination with the field of astronomy and wanted to share his passion and knowledge with the world. On a lark he started surfing online message boards and answering posted questions about astronomy. To ensure that his responses would be taken seriously, he embellished his identity a bit, posing as a college professor who happened to specialize in the field of astronomy.
Several years after his mischievous, junior-high antics were a distant memory, Brad happened to run across an online blog, centered on science lessons for home school, with quotes from the seventh grade version of himself, posing as a professor and expert in the field of astronomy.
He also later found that the blog post had been printed in a book as well. “I imagine I probably destroyed every shred of credibility that author held,” he says.
These days, Brad still finds himself in the education arena, but this time his credentials are a little more legitimate and his focus is on preparing students to succeed through goal setting and achievement.
Brad recently joined the P4K team as a curriculum coordinator. His primary responsibility is creating the goal setting program model for grades K-9, which includes formalizing the goal setting process for collecting goal setting data as well as training staff and volunteers on the best use of Acuity.
He holds a master’s degree in Cultural and Educational Policy Studies and a bachelor’s degree from in history and economics from Loyola University—we checked, they’re authentic.
Before joining the P4K team, Brad worked in Chicago where he worked for an American College Testing (ACT) preparatory program, called Revolution Prep, developing and implementing a college prep/life skills course at Urban Prep in Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood. While in Chicago, he also gave boat tours of the city for 5 years, and worked at a beanie baby collectables store.
To learn more about Brad, visit our Teams page.
