Before I was an English student in Mr. Garces Kiley’s class, I never saw myself as a large magnet attracting the metal in a dumpster or a mother chewing bits of food to break it down into small enough pieces to feed to her baby. But Mr. Garces Kiley uses metaphors to help his students relate to and remember what he’s teaching, so a large magnet attracting metal is just like how we are supposed to pick out the important, meaningful bits in literature, and a mother chewing food for her child is really us breaking down quotes so readers can understand and take them in. Clearly Mr. Garces Kiley views the world in a very creative way, seeing endless connections between seemingly unrelated objects and experiences. As he explained, “I have this kind of secret belief that there are correlations between phenomena in the world and what we think and how we think.”

For Mr. Garces Kiley, teaching is part of a larger mission in life. He follows the Baha’i Faith, which encourages people to be unified and embrace each other’s differences. It places a high premium on finding meaning in life and on helping others to find meaning. Through teaching, Mr. Garces Kiley aims to bring people together so they can talk to one another and, “see each other as being important.” By teaching literature, he also hopes to inspire students with a love of reading while also developing the ability to share their ideas candidly and listen to others with open minds.

Growing up, Mr. Garces Kiley experienced first hand what it feels like to be part of a community where people don’t embrace one another’s differences. When he was six, he and his family moved from Detroit, Michigan to a small town in southern Wisconsin. The community was almost all white, while Mr. Garces Kiley’s family was half Latino. Kids threw rocks at him and his sister on the first day of school. They had to climb to the top of the monkey bars in the playground for safety.

This experience as a child had a profound effect on Mr. Garces Kiley, inspiring in him a strong desire to make a difference in the world so that other kids wouldn’t experience the kind of discrimination that he did. After graduating with a degree in Women Studies and African American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Mr. Garces Kiley joined Teach for America, an organization that places recent college graduates as teachers in low income schools. Eager to teach in a region of the country where his Spanish would be helpful, and with a romanticized idea of what rural Texas would be like, Mr. Garces Kiley chose to be placed in the Rio Grande Valley. He ended up in Donna, a small rural town a mile north of the US-Mexico border where he taught bilingual first grade. Though Mr. Garces Kiley loves working with teens at BHSEC, he thinks, “there’s something awesome about working with little kids,” because of the way they show their emotions so openly.

After his stint in rural Donna, Mr Gaces Kiley moved to Houston where he taught first grade and then 8th grade history. He then taught math and language arts to students who had been institutionalized and were getting ready to go back to public schools in San Diego. In New York, Mr. Garces Kiley’s Spanish skills were helpful once again when he taught a bilingual 2nd grade class in Brooklyn. Mr. Garces Kiley then returned to school himself to get a graduate degree at Columbia University in Fine Arts in Writing, specializing in poetry. He also taught writing at Columbia as a Graduate Student.

He was so determined to work at a school where, “kids wanted to be [and] were excited to be,” that he applied for a job at BHSEC last year. He loves the diversity and the energy of the student body, and he observed, “I’m working with really motivated people from a wide variety of backgrounds.” He’s also impressed with the faculty and how well they get along. “Here there’s no backstabbing. I just don’t see people vying for control over each other. The relationship between faculty and administration is really positive and respectful. I think part of that has to do with the fact that all the professors here are really interested in what they’re teaching and they feel really good about it. It’s by far the best teaching experience I’ve had so far.”
When he isn’t teaching, Mr. Garces Kiley spends most of his time with his six-month-old son, Pablo, and his wife who is an art professor. They live in Bushwick, Brooklyn, and love to travel. Mr. Garces Kiley has been to all the major national parks in the country where he has seen almost all of the main American mammals in the wild. He is also working on his own book of poetry, which he’s very excited about. He is looking forward to sharing his poetry at a poetry reading at Blue Angel Wines on December 2nd. He told us, “There’s something surprising about poetry. You’re able to do things with words that you never expected you would do.”