Stephen Herr

Stephen Herr

Assistant Professor CC of English

Stephen Herr has taught writing and reading at Leeward Community College since 2001. Before coming to Leeward, Steve owned and operated a full-time resume service (Diamond Head Resume Service) in Honolulu for eight years and was a career counselor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa; he also sold movie cameras in Chicago, was a claims authorizer for the Social Security Administration for two years, and drove a taxicab at night in New York City, Chicago, and Denver. He taught academic English to university students in Asia for seven years – in Indonesia (two years), Malaysia (four years), and Japan (one year).

Steve grew up in a small village of 700 people in the Adirondack foothills of upstate New York, 30 miles from the Canadian border. He is a graduate of Beaver River Central School in Beaver Falls, New York, where he used to go small- and big-game hunting after school. He remembers seeing his father, who taught college and high school English for 35 years, reading and grading student essays after dinner on many school nights. Steve has a B.A. from Northwestern University and an M.A. from the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

When Steve was a senior in college, he met a woman from the south side of Chicago in an anthropology class and invited her to see the legendary blues star Howling Wolf in nearby Chicago. A few years later, they were married and have been enjoying life together for many years.

When he is not responding to student essays and planning his classes, Steve spends much of his time running, doing chin-ups, riding his bike, and paddling his kayak near his home in Kaaawa. He has been practicing Vipassana meditation since 2002. Steve has two cats who claim much of his attention and help him maintain a balanced perspective about life.

Steve enjoys teaching at Leeward. His goal is to help his students become clear thinkers and writers who can succeed in their academic careers and express themselves effectively in writing in their future jobs. He holds 15-minute individual conferences in his office with all 100 of his students during the first two weeks of the semester.

Throughout his life Steve has enjoyed making new friends and acquaintances. Although he loves to travel and once travelled around the world with a backpack for one year, one of his favorite quotations is

"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new landscapes, but in having new eyes." (Marcel Proust)