My boss at the engineering firm had a joke he liked to make about my hiring. He was a P.E. — civil and environmental — and he used to say, with genuine warmth, that my teaching background had prepared me for the professional world ‘even with engineers.’ He was right, though not quite in the… Read More I Made Engineers Sound Like Humans for Six Years: Different Context, Same Toolset
Neil Postman argued in 1998 that every new technology arrives as a Faustian bargain. Not bad, exactly. Not good, exactly. A trade. Something is given; something is taken. And the trade is rarely examined carefully before it’s accepted, because the thing being given is usually immediate and visible, and the thing being taken is usually… Read More Every Tool Is A Faustian Bargain (Here is the one we’re currently making)
There is a question I have been hearing a lot lately, in various forms, from teachers trying to figure out how to work in an AI-saturated content environment: how do you know what’s good anymore? The answer is: the same way you always did. You developed discernment. You just may not have known that’s what… Read More Guess Who’s Ready for the AI Slop?
I want to tell you what ADD is actually good at, because most of the conversation about it goes in one of two directions — either it’s a superpower and everything is fine, or it’s a deficit and we should manage it carefully — and neither of those is quite accurate, and neither is particularly… Read More Whistles, Bells, Coaches, and Me
My daughter chose Margaret Mead for her biography museum project. She was ten. She stood at her poster in her white blouse and read aloud: ‘Never doubt that a thoughtful, committed group of citizens can change the world — indeed it is the only thing that ever has.’ I posted a photo and went home… Read More What I Decided To Give My Kids
I wrote a paper about my mother when I was seventeen. It was for a Women’s Studies class — the kind of intro course that’s supposed to give you a framework and ends up, if you’re paying attention, giving you a way of seeing your own life. The assignment was to examine a woman’s life… Read More A Woman’s Shoes
The realization doesn’t always arrive with fanfare. Sometimes it comes sideways, at an inconvenient time, in the middle of an argument you’ve had before and will probably have again. You’re saying something — or you’re listening to something being said to you — and then the ground shifts slightly underfoot and you think: This is… Read More It Was Not Normal
There is a version of the mother-daughter relationship that the greeting cards cover well. Most relationships hit at least one of these baking-together, matching-clothed, finish-each-other’s-sentences stride at least in moments. But then there is also the other version. The one where you are the one showing up. Where you are the one saying the right… Read More Learning To Be The Adult In My Mother’s Life
There’s a moment, if you’re paying attention, when you catch yourself doing something your mother did. The specific cadence of a criticism. A particular kind of silence. The way you deflect a question by asking one back. And you stop, mid-sentence or mid-sigh, and think: where did that come from? It came from her. And… Read More The Pattern Didn’t Start With You
There is a specific kind of cognitive overhead that comes with a brain like mine, and for a long time I just accepted it as the cost of doing business. You lose things. You forget what you were doing. You start three things and finish two and spend a non-trivial amount of time trying to… Read More The ADD Tax
