Education & Experience:

Rick Lydon teaches science and is in his third year at the A.L.T. He previously worked for many years as a manager and corporate trainer in the financial printing industry. Rick studied Fine Arts at the University of New Hampshire and Hartford Art School receiving a B.F.A. in 1976. He recently received his Masters in Education in Integrated Learning from Antioch New England Graduate School. He is a founder and co-owner of the Early Learning Center of Milford.

Hobbies and interest:

Rick is an artist and nature lover who can often be found hiking, biking or kayaking with his wife, Carol, or any of their four children. He also enjoys cooking and visiting their two grandchildren in NYC.

Philosophy of Education:

Students are active participants in constructing their own knowledge. Their level of interaction or engagement with an experience will often determine the success of the learning experience. Methods such as repetition and memorization will be more successful with students who possess a high level of verbal ability. Other students will respond better to auditory, visual, tactile or kinesthetic approaches. This is due to the individual nature of each student’s natural inclination to understand learning experiences in a way that makes sense to them and build on their previous knowledge base.

Instruction must therefore be organized and directed in a way that students can access the content through several and varied experiences. My learning challenges are structured in such a way that students are directed to find out more through progressive inquiry. Instruction is most effective when it satisfies a hunger within the student to know more. My job is not to merely fill the student up with knowledge; my real job is to make them hungry for more and point the way.

Curriculum that is challenge-based tends to involve students more than passive exposure to texts or the work of others. Additionally, students tend to get deeper into the learning experience when they are immersed in a challenge or project rather than passive learners.

For me personally, knowledge is not a thing that is attained. It is a process of becoming. Every new idea, every new skill, every moment of understanding contribute to a person’s own personal growth as a human being. We can apply new skills to solve new problems about things we may have never thought about before. Teachers are not just providing information and skills for students to have a better life (although this is a logical result). Teachers are actively involved in helping their students become better people, day by day, one lesson at a time.

E-mail

lydonr@nashua.edu