Steven Kant

Steven Kant

Steven grew up in Maryland and came to Olympia in 1974. He lived on Foote Street and then Sherman Street in a hotbed of 1970s Olympia activism; since then he wandered to the east side for 10 years and then back to the west side neighborhood from 1985 to the present. After some short-term jobs, he taught at the Off Campus School for five years, then worked for 10 years supervising a self-paced math/learning lab and teaching math classes at The Evergreen State College, then created and distributed a visual curriculum called Flip-Chip Algebra (with Frank Edge), and finally started Working Systems (with Jim Cubbage in 1989), a company that made software for labor unions. Steven and Jim retired in 2020 and Working Systems was converted to a successful worker-owned cooperative.

Steven was involved in several of the events described in this project – alternative education, Central American activism, labor organizing, and Nicaraguan solidarity. He also helped in schools with education about sexual assault and violence against women; he was an early male volunteer in Safeplace and a founding member of the Heartsparkle Players. Steven was a part of an activist men’s group in 1979 that has survived to the present day with a more social format.

These days Steven is a short-distance but regular bicyclist and hiker and has been spending time in Hawaii during the winter. He is still an active volunteer in elementary schools—in the last years he has been teaching math classes and bringing his playground of math puzzles and games to summer camps and four different schools, often several times each week (see www.flipchipmath.com). Steven has two children and three step-children.