Kees de Groot, a professor of secondary education, shares his mindset to keep passions for learning inside and out of the classroom. PHOTO CREDIT: Kees De Groot
Cornelius “Kees” de Groot has been an educator for 32 years, working as a professor of secondary mathematics in the School of Education at the University of Rhode Island for nearly 18 of those years.
For his further education, de Groot attended teacher training college, an institution created specifically for people who want to become educators.
“I grew up very [much] in poverty and we lived with my grandmother and grandfather,” de Groot said. “Until I was about nine years old or so, I remember spending a lot of time with my grandmother. And, you know, a lot of the entertainment as a young child is playing on the street.”
De Groot was born and grew up in Utrecht, a city in the Netherlands where he lived until after college. He came to the United States for the first time in 1981 after finding an advertisement in a Dutch newspaper for people interested in being an exchange counselor for a summer camp. While in America, he met his now-partner of 39 years.
De Groot ended up moving to the United States to be with his partner, and they lived in New York while he completed his Ph.D. degree at New York University before coming to Rhode Island to work as a professor at URI in 2008.
However, de Groot has many hobbies outside of the classroom, including making his own music, which he posts on Bandcamp and Soundcloud.
“I’d probably started around age 10 or 11,” de Groot said. “When I became a teenager, my parents got a little transistor radio and they predominantly got it so we could listen to sports, you know, on Sundays. But on Saturday mornings, that was the ‘Top 40’ every Saturday, and I had this little table and I got, like, two spoons and a cup and I would drum along with every song.”
De Groot went on to join a band in Ireland when he was in high school that played on the weekends and in the summer at different festivals. He describes his sound as “new wave progressive rock.”
He mostly plays the guitar, and said he has a studio in his house dedicated to his passion of making his own music. He even has his own digital audio workstation with a dedicated mixer and computer interface.
“I can play through my amps or my mixer and use my headset,” de Groot said, explaining his process. “Guitar players used to have old air effects on the floor. We used to call them stop boxes. New guitar pedals are much more complicated and they don’t do just one thing. But I actually have my pedals elevated so that I can manipulate them while I’m playing with my hands.”
In addition to his love for music, de Groot is a fan of cycling. He says that this comes from his roots growing up in the Netherlands, where there are more bikes than cars.
His love for cycling was heightened with his arrival to the United States and his participation in a cycling club, the Narragansett Bay Wheelmen.
De Groot’s diverse mindset and innate passion for his work is clear to his students, including URI alumni Matthew Guertin, who connected with de Groot in his freshman year at the University.
“We connected about our love for music,” Guertin said. “As a classically trained pianist, it was fascinating to learn about Kees’ approach to music. Whether sliding car keys down a tube, recording the spin cycle on his washing machine, or improvising on his MIDI guitar, Kees could turn any sound into music.”
After connecting on a musical level, Kees assisted Guertin with getting a summer teaching position at Central Falls High School in Central Falls, Rhode Island teaching math, which Guertin said proves the passion he has for his students.
De Groot reflected fondly on both his time in the Netherlands and in the United States and said he is glad he found his way to the University of Rhode Island.