Ph.D., David Brooks

David Brooks, Ph.D., lives in Birmingham, Alabama, with his wife, three children, two German Shepherds, and one Golden Doodle. He has taught English and History in the Birmingham Catholic Schools for the past twenty years. Before earning his Ph.D. in European linguistic history, Dr. Brooks earned Bachelor's degrees in Philosophy, Psychology, and English Literature and Master's Degrees in Secondary Education and and Renaissance History. For the final five years of his teaching career, Dr. Brooks each May gathered his high school and middle school students on the floor with him and together they would edit, reorganize, clarify, improve, and simply enjoy reading every page of The Well Kept Secret. His book is dedicated to his children and these intellectually-curious students. He retired from teaching in May 2012 in order to develop his innovative chess academy, The Knight School. The high-energy, counter-intuitive, fast-paced, party-based approach of this chess academy had already experienced viral growth up to 400 students before his retirement, and now The Knight School has begun its expansion into Dallas, Austin, Nashville, Memphis, and Huntsville to begin bringing an entirely innovative, party-based chess approach to hundreds of elementary school chess teams throughout the United States. Dr. Brooks' teaching philosophy has always been to get the kids hooked on the subject in an innovative, student-focused, party atmosphere, since only the fully-committed student will achieve full mastery; this has been his approach for 20 years in the classroom, in which Dr. Brooks was considered a highly effective teacher, in The Knight School, which wins multiple State Chess Championships every year, and in his novel, The Well Kept Secret, which his students often reported to be a very good read. All Dr. Brooks' endeavors have in common a party-based, innovative, high-energy, counter-intuitive approach designed to teach and delight simultaneously. In his novel Dr. Brooks' goal is to use a fast-paced, compelling adventure, treasure-hunt, and romance set in the eleventh century to completely disguise that The Well Kept Secret is a fully memorizable, meticulously scholarly history textbook. The result is The Well Kept Secret, the first book in the genre of self-propelled textbooks.