Bradley Stoll

This Saturday, we will hear from a teacher and deep experimenter in kindness. For more than 15 years, Bradley has been a math teacher at the Harker School in San Jose. There he continually creates events and service opportunities for the school community to engage in deeper, values-based learning. Last fall, Bradley ran a 21-day Kindness Challenge with students that he tutors, and he is now gearing up to run a 21-day kindness challenge for teachers at his school, where teachers will practice random acts of kindness directed towards their students. His own loyal following of students attest to his impact: Former students frequently visit his classroom just to say hello. He attends plays and concerts that feature his former students in order to support them.

As Bradley once said: “A friend asked me about my legacy and what I want it to be. I've never thought much about that and, after some thought, I don't want to worry about it. . . . The world was surviving before my Earthly presence and it will survive (for several billion years, anyway) after I leave. I don't want a legacy. I want to affect, or rather, infect, people right here, right now, with kindness, compassion, and love.”

Ordinary, everyday experiments in kindness for Bradley include ones in which he has practiced inner change through compassion with the homeless -- including making 47 bag lunches with his wife and 2 children, and spending a day in San Francisco giving them out, as a family, to the homeless; literally giving the shirt off his back to a homeless woman who complimented him on the shirt (a ServiceSpace t-shirt otherwise prized by Bradley as a valued gift); inviting a homeless man to lunch, offering him a warm shower and clean clothes from Bradley’s home, and then driving the man back to the place where they met (full story in this blog post, under the "Waffle Wednesday: 21 Days of High School Kindness" heading).

Bradley graduated from a small high school in Minnesota and soon joined the Navy's Nuclear Power Program. He spent six years in the Navy, the last four as a nuclear-trained electrician aboard the USS Texas, a nuclear powered cruiser. For a two-month period during the Gulf War, his ship patrolled the Strait of Hormuz, a region between the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman. After an honorable discharge, he earned a bachelor's in mathematics and was chosen as the outstanding senior math student, before earning his master's degree as well.