User:Scartol/altup

Scartol (better known as Eric S. Piotrowski) is an American educator, writer, and activist. He has been involved with grassroots political organizations for many years (especially relating to East Timor). A mediocre cartoonist and electronic musician, Piotrowski enjoys such mindless distractions as go, video games, and editing Wikipedia. He is currently married with one dog and lives in Madison, Wisconsin.

Early life
Born in Gainesville, Florida, Piotrowski was the child of two teachers. His mother, Linda P. Lavery, is a schoolteacher; his father, George Piotrowski, was a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Florida. He has one older brother, Mark.

As a child, Piotrowski was picked on by the other kids for his big ears and bizarre taste in music. (He often walked around the playground with a boom box, blasting Twisted Sister's album Stay Hungry.) He attended Brentwood Elementary School, a la-dee-dah private nerd-cademy on the west side of town. After graduating with dork-level honors, he moved up to Fort Clark Middle School, and later attended Buchholz High School – home of the "fightin' bobcats". There he was a member of the French club, and one of the first students ever to be on the staff of both the literary magazine Spectrum and the student newspaper Cat Tracks at the same time. He currently finds it amusing that BHS is notable enough to have a Wikipedia article.

SONG
While a student at BHS, Piotrowski was influenced by a pair of older students named Brad and Tad, who published an iconoclastic newsletter called BNT. Inspired but shunned by their elitist upperclassman-ism, he started his own organization called the Student Organized Nonconformist Group (SONG). A pathetic one-page photocopied newsletter was published on an extremely sporadic basis, but nevertheless encouraged several younger students to attempt to join the organization (which, alas, didn't actually exist). Despite his classmates' ridicule, Piotrowski continues to insist that there is no inherent contradiction in being organized and nonconformist at the same time.

New College
In 1993 Piotrowski metriculated at New College of Florida, a total hippie braniac twilight zone of a school in Sarasota, Florida with only 500 students. Freed from the anti-Freire-ian confines of grades, he came into his intellectual own as a scholar and nerd of the highest order. As part of New College's annual Independent Study Projects, he finished writing a fantasy novel he had begun at the age of twelve, entitled Destiny Silent. He wrote a sequel as his third ISP, calling it The Visible Enemy. The third and final book in the series, Beyond Existence One, became his senior thesis. The novels were roundly praised by the professors who sponsored these projects – or would have been, had they actually read the books.

Piotrowski also organized student political activism at New College. He was active with the campus chapter of Amnesty International, and later helped start an organization called Working On Real Designs (WORD). This penchant for clever acronyms continued to serve him well as he published a weekly newsletter informing interested students about political activities and organizations in and around the campus.

The Final Analysis
He also served as a co-editor of a series of socially-agitational magazines, the most widely-read of which was The Final Analysis. (The title came from a motto of the college, "In the final analysis, the student is responsible for his or her own education".) Working with a motley crew of vagabonds and layabouts, Piotrowski struggled to write semi-profound essays about why voting still matters, and why AOL is so absolutely hideous. The magazine also featured profoundly random pictures of Mileena, Jack Kemp, and Wesley Willis.



East Timor activism
In the mid-1990s, Piotrowski began learning about the brutal Indonesian invasion of East Timor. Shocked at his government's complicity in "genocide", he began working with The East Timor Action Network (ETAN). Before long, he was doing layout for their newsletter Estafeta (applying skills learned in his high school newspaper days), and eventually joined ETAN's Executive Committee. His work on East Timor-related issues has become an integral part of who he is, and he spends one day each semester informing his students about the story of that bloody episode of human history.

In 2005, he went to East Timor for the first time, and wrote about his trip in a "political travelogue" entitled "Two Weeks in Timor". (It's supposed to be on his writing website, but so far he's been too lazy to make it into a web page.) Piotrowski continues to devote a good part of his free time to East Timor-related organizations like the The Madison-Ainaro Sister City Alliance. Each year he helps to organize (and participates in) the Tour de Timor bike ride.

Return to Gainesville
After graduating from New College and then spending a year working at a bookstore in a Sarasota mall, Piotrowski moved back to Gainesville to obtain a Master's of Education degree from the University of Florida. He did so, taking a summer off in 1999 to work in California with the International Federation for East Timor's Observer Project. In Gainesville he worked with the Civic Media Center and US Labor Party, as well as starting a Florida chapter of ETAN.

Once he was certified to teach, he spent one year as an eighth-grade English teacher at Kanapaha Middle School in Gainesville. He found the students generally friendly and responsive, but like many first-year teachers had some difficulty finding a balance between his Freire-ian ideals and effective classroom management. He also sponsored an after-school group called Write Club, for students interested in creative writing.

Take off, eh


Missing his friends from college (many of whom had moved north) and feeling lonely, Piotrowski decided to move to Madison, Wisconsin. This was a significant shock to his system, since he had spent his entire life in Florida and had no real understanding of the concept winter. Still, he enjoyed being among his college pals again, and soon fell in love with a lovely young lady he had met through East Timor activism. They got married on 07/07/07, and that's all he's prepared to say about her here.

In 2003 Piotrowski began teaching English at Sun Prairie High School in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin. He was invited to teach the Creative Writing I course, and also presides over ninth- and tenth-grade English classes as well. In 2007 he created and began teaching a class of his own design entitled "Interdisciplinary Poetics", which analyzes the history, poetic structure, themes, and cultural impact of rap music and hip hop culture. Although the class was criticized by the Sun Prairie Star newspaper, it has received considerable support from the faculty and community.

An avid fan of the board game go, Piotrowski is also the sponsor of what is perhaps Wisconsin's only high school go club. The group meets each day before school in his classroom, as well as during lunch daily and after school once a week. His colleagues agree that he makes himself far too available to the students, but he basks in the glow of their dedication to the game and their impressive learning curve.

Other activities
In addition to all of the above, Piotrowski spends excessive amounts of time making Flash cartoons and music videos, posting drivel on his blog, and creating electronic and hip hop music. There are rumors that he suffers from insomnia, and that he sometimes stays up late making soap.

Wikipedia
In August of 2007, he became woefully ensconced in the Wikipedia universe. He stumbled – more or less by accident – into the Balzac WikiProject, and before he knew what was happening, he had helped to make Honoré de Balzac a Featured Article. Emboldened, he set to work on Chinua Achebe and then Harriet Tubman, completing his first hat trick. Today Piotrowski continues to work as a copyeditor, peer reviewer, and general nerd at large. He does manage to balance his geeky post-work work with plenty of video games, however.