No excuses!
Howard Rokofsky had no idea what to do with his life until he found himself in front of a classroom. Before that, he’d tried just about everything. At age 13, after failing at gardening and snow shoveling, he went for broke and started delivering the local newspaper “Newsday” seven days a week, dragging a rusty shopping wagon around the suburbs. In those days, paperboys went door-to-door collecting weekly subscription fees. A teenager tracking down deadbeat customers seems absurd nowadays (newspapers are now delivered by adults in vans). The pimply adolescent spent his wages on baseball cards, which he traded and sold by the thousands (15 years before internet). Nearly all his dealings were with emotionally fragile, middle-aged men, and this turned out to be a priceless lesson in communication skills.
Summers while at university, he delivered heavy liquid O₂ tanks to terminal patients’ homes around NYC, refining his bedside manner and punishing his back. Although most bridges were forbidden to his hazardous materials, he had a 24-hour emergency parking permit that allowed him to park anywhere he wanted. And that he did!
After touring Europe, he enrolled in a master’s program at the University of Amsterdam (Netherlands), living off proceeds from the baseball cards and, after his visa expired, whatever he could do to pay the rent and avoid returning to the USA. Cooking, catering, red-light district bartending, managing an illegal sauna club, and ‘donating’ bodily fluids were just some of the exploits he engaged in as a relatively integrated, albeit illegal alien.
One day, an advert appeared in the local paper for a teaching position at the polytechnic “Hogeschool Holland”. He had no desire to teach, but he really needed a job. Fortunately for him, his Dutch was better than the director’s English, and so he was hired on the spot without being asked to show a work permit, let alone a residence visa. When he walked into a lecture hall full of cheeky, bright-eyed students, he knew this was his calling. After a couple of years he took the show on the road, moved to Prague and started training corporates in ‘soft skills’: assertiveness, negotiations, EQ, and public speaking skills. His pet project was four semesters of ‘Clinical Empathy’ at the Charles University Medical School and he dreams of someday teaching this to bonafide doctors.
In 2002, Lonny Gold invited him to assist him on a Suggestopedic English course in subtropical Hainan, China for a 2-month course, which was so successful they immediately hired him to teach his own course for another two months. He’s been back there 3 times since, and has developed quite a love-hate relationship with the Middle Kingdom.
Travels have included, in addition to the standard fare of train tickets and backpacking, hitchhiking, couchsurfing, trespassing, and squatting. Ever flirting with danger, he’s been in and out of a fair amount of trouble and has survived to create this website with no major scars. Except for that broken femur.