Matthew met his first grade class teacher in an oddly-shaped room and knew he had found a home away from home. As a student at the Green Meadow Waldorf School in Chestnut Ridge, New York, he spent twelve years moving through the grades and soaking in the stories, lessons, and relationships that were offered to him. Together with his sister, Matthew spent glorious afternoons playing in the nearby woods and streams, and swimming in the local pond. In high school, he spent seven months studying in the Bochum Waldorf School in Germany through Green Meadow’s international exchange program. Matthew was often found outside or on different wilderness trips throughout his middle and high school years.
With rose in hand in 1997, Matthew attended St. John’s College in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he took up the great books program. This felt like a natural extension of his studies in the Waldorf school with a third cycle through the evolution of human consciousness through the western classics. Continuing an active life outdoors in college, Matthew was a member of the St. John’s College Search and Rescue team and worked throughout his college career as a rafting guide and wilderness trip planner.
After St. John's College in 2001, Matthew spent a year working in Washington D.C. before joining the Peace Corps as an environmental education volunteer in Guinea, West Africa. It was in Guinea that he found his love of working with adolescents. Upon returning to the United States, Matthew took up a high school teaching position with the Santa Fe Waldorf School and simultaneously enrolled in the Waldorf high school teacher training certificate program from the Center for Anthroposophy in Wilton, New Hampshire. Over the next eighteen years, Matthew taught mathematics, science, and art classes, completed his Waldorf teaching certificate, and coordinated and led the high school wilderness program taking students outdoors on a variety of trips. He also held several administrative roles at Santa Fe Waldorf School until the school’s closure in the summer of 2023.
Now he is continuing to promote Waldorf education in Santa Fe, focusing on his family, and taking the easy way out with the beeswax by sticking it under his arm.