{"id":17,"date":"2026-04-05T11:22:28","date_gmt":"2026-04-05T01:22:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/leetraynor.com\/blog.multi\/foundation\/?page_id=17"},"modified":"2026-04-06T11:13:56","modified_gmt":"2026-04-06T01:13:56","slug":"about-lee-traynor","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/leetraynor.com\/blog.multi\/foundation\/about-lee-traynor\/","title":{"rendered":"About Lee Traynor"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>I was born in Melbourne and went to school there and in Cairns. Between school and university I was an exchange student in Wuppertal, Germany. I then read biochemistry at University College, Oxford, and moved to Germany after completing my degree.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I had learnt German at school for four years, but my trial by fire was being an exchange student in 1977-78 and working in Wuppertal in the summer vacation of 1980. Having two languages (and two passports) enabled me eventually to land a position teaching English as a foreign language to students of science, mathematics and engineering at the Leibniz University of Hannover, where I could not only \u201chold up the flag\u201d and send many a student on their own journey of discovery to Australia or New Zealand, but also to teach critical thinking. I was a member of the Germany Skeptics (GWUP) from just its inception in 1988 until I left Germany at the end of 2025 when I retired after having taught for nearly 25 years. With the advent of AI relieving students of the trouble of thinking for themselves at all, thinking critically has become more necessary than ever.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>As a staff member at the university I had access to the sports center, and actively took part in the Water Sports section, in swimming and paddling. I qualified as a cadet Surf Lifesaver in 1975 at Woolamai SLSC, and I know what makes water sport enjoyable and saves lives at the same time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<script>\nfetch (\"https:\/\/leetraynor.com\/counter.php?sid=Foundation Lee\");\n<\/script>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I was born in Melbourne and went to school there and in Cairns. Between school and university I was an exchange student in Wuppertal, Germany. I then read biochemistry at University College, Oxford, and moved to Germany after completing my degree. I had learnt German at school for four years, but my trial by fire [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-17","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/leetraynor.com\/blog.multi\/foundation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/17","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/leetraynor.com\/blog.multi\/foundation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/leetraynor.com\/blog.multi\/foundation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leetraynor.com\/blog.multi\/foundation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leetraynor.com\/blog.multi\/foundation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/leetraynor.com\/blog.multi\/foundation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/17\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43,"href":"https:\/\/leetraynor.com\/blog.multi\/foundation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/17\/revisions\/43"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/leetraynor.com\/blog.multi\/foundation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}