Faculty Highlight: Rob Travieso ’97, Upper School English Teacher

For almost 240 years, Friends School’s educational journey has equally emphasized the mastery of content with the mastery of essential skills required to succeed in the world - skills like critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and empathy - to name a few. Meet some of our outstanding faculty who guide our students through this journey each and every day.

Rob Travieso ’97
Upper School English Teacher
At Friends School since 2016

Q. Why did you choose Friends and/or what do you love about teaching at Friends?
A. I chose Friends because I wanted my children to go here, only one of whom existed at the time of my hiring. I also understood Friends School to value much of what I valued, and still value, in education. I wanted to work at a school where thinking was important, or essential, and where students were given tools to develop the kinds of thoughts that might guide them for the rest of their lives–and in doing so, help guide whatever communities they might find themselves a part of. I wanted to work somewhere that considered learning, thinking, and creating to be both important and a particular kind, maybe the best kind of fun.                                                             

Q. What do you love about teaching your subject in particular?
A. I love talking about art with teenagers. It’s weird, but I don’t really like talking about books or poems or plays all that much in general, in my non-teaching life–I mostly think of reading or seeing a play as an internal experience, or an experience between me and the art itself. But a classroom is communal; my alacrity grows alongside the kids, and I think vice versa–we hype each other up–and that’s fun. 

Q. How do the Upper School curriculum and teaching at Friends School prepare students to be successful?
A. The Friends School English curriculum provides students with reading and writing skills that would open up the world to them, so that when they read something complicated they are able to comprehend it, notice things about the language, how it’s constructed, and what it seems to be saying. They are then able to articulate those thoughts, out loud, and on the page, or onto their computer screen. My goal is for students to enjoy reading, to have increasingly interesting thoughts while reading, and to then finally experience as little heat loss as possible as they transfer their thoughts into sentences. That’s got to be useful for something. 

Q. Something fun about you - a motto or hobby, perhaps? 
A. Hmm. Do people have mottos? I don’t have a motto. My hobbies include playing basketball and writing short stories. I have a fair amount of published short stories that I tend to keep separate from my teaching life, but I guess cat’s now out of the bag.