Hello! I'm Damon V. D'Amore, your friendly neighborhood writer and artist. I have an AS in Social Sciences with a concentration in history My pet project is education reform. I play two instruments, speak two languages and I can't eat mushrooms. So that's me for you.
For various reasons I do not give out my home address or phone number online, however you may contact me at [email protected].
If you've looked at my website you may have noticed that it's devoted mostly to writing. You might be wondering why a writer would skip journalism or English and pick another academic nonsense entirely. I believe that writing is about people. Both real accounts and wild tales all have characters, and the most gripping of those have characters with shocking human traits and mannerisms. I contend that Social Sciences is the study of people, about which most writing is centered. I feel that by spending time studying my subject I am more prepared to write it than someone who has spent time studying language.
I feel that education needs to change. The nature of education has migrated away from teaching and much more on test scores. I feel that the purpose of a school is to educate students so that society as a whole can benefit. If we are teaching students things which are not useful on a small level, such as budgeting and cooking and we are not teaching them things useful to society such as carpentry and chemistry why have the schools at all? One may contest that yes we have shop class and yes we have a chemistry class but how much teaching happens? How concerned is the school the anyone learned anything? There is such a great emphasis on grades and test scores that nonscored classes are no longer taught, goodbye budgeting and information is drilled and memorized for a test... and students are encouraged to forget it to memorize more for the next test!
My love of art and music comes from those non-scored classes and is, precisely, why I still do art and play two instruments-- keys and sax. Not being scored left the teachers free to teach, and indeed I learned. I also learned a lot about cooking, too. I picked up my second language, German, in high school as well. I'm still working through Italian and Japanese. Maybe it's all the mushrooms in their cooking that makes it harder for me to learn their languages. I'm horribly allergic to mushroom.
I was never quite sure how to describe myself. I began this with a joke from a Kitty sketch (Victoria Wood as seen on TV, 1985. Link.) and ran with the joke. I think I covered more than I probably should have, but that's me for you.
I've gotten some questions I wanted to address. This space will be updated with more questions and comments if I feel the need to publicly address them. Usually I just respons to people privately.