I want to make an argument about cursive that I am not sure I can make cleanly, because the minute you say the word people picture their grandmother’s Christmas card and stop listening. That is the problem. That is exactly the problem I am trying to name. Cursive got cut from most American classrooms right… Read More Cursive Is Not Nostalgia, It Is A Cognitive Tool

Metaphor is not a flourish. It’s a diagnostic. When someone reaches for a comparison, they are telling you exactly how they understand the thing they are trying to describe, and often they are telling you more than they meant to. This is the part English teachers know in their bones and struggle to explain to… Read More Meta- forcing the issue: Metaphor Is a Diagnostic, Not a Flourish

The notebook is the last room in education a child actually owns. When a kid writes on a school-issued device, the ownership of that thought is complicated. It passes through a platform, a server, an account tied to a district license, a terms of service the child never signed and could not have signed if… Read More The Only Room In Education A Child Actually Owns

The fans whirring along were just strong enough to move the heat off the carpet but not quite blow the papers off my table as I graded essays — student voices in my head, excited young voices everywhere else. Jake and Abbey do a classic sibling outing — following each other around half the time,… Read More From Jumpalooza to Kanga’s

Stage two of a five-point Kelly Scale on work issues, aggravations, and the treatment of our children and adults that have me scratching my head — and setting a stopwatch for myself I could never possibly satisfy. So yes. I am talking about lunch. I use the H word. And frankly, the T word too.… Read More Silent Lunch

I have so much to say about education in Texas. Because I can’t wait a second longer to say that the dismantling of public education in Texas has been facilitated by mediocre sell outs at every level– especially positions in education administration. I have an entire series… 19 years… every appraiser… every experience, catalogued like… Read More To the highest bidder…

Most of my ideas start as notes. Sometimes they’ve been videos and clips and snippets I recorded because I just had to spit it out somewhere. So I’ve been slowly cleaning out my digital files and continuing to articulate the ways I hope to move forward in education, writing, life… On a whim, I sat… Read More TED– the talk, not the bear

Here is something I did not expect to learn from eleven months of evaluating AI language models: that the most reliable tool any of us had for doing that work was something we’d been building since childhood, mostly without knowing it. Let me back up. The team I worked with was made up of people… Read More What Working on an AI Contract Taught Me About How Humans Actually Think

Before the printing press, someone had to decide what was worth copying. That was the job. The monks in the medieval scriptoria — the copying rooms of European monasteries — were not simply transcriptionists. They were curators. They looked at an existing text, assessed its value, determined whether it was worth the time and material… Read More Abbeys, Monks, AI, and Me

I once sent a cover letter with a Venn diagram in it. Not a metaphorical Venn diagram — an actual one, drawn and formatted and placed in the sidebar of a professional document I sent to a real employer for a real job I actually wanted. The diagram was labeled, across its three intersecting circles,… Read More What the Venn Diagram On My Cover Letter Means