or Thomas Joseph Wilson's Blog
While visiting family in Sevierville, Tennessee, my wife and son stopped by the McClung Museum of Natural History & Culture in Knoxville, a quaint if rather small museum with a very interesting human evolution exhibit. As someone who procrastinates with productivity tools, most likely due to family genetics (my father is an industrial engineer) and…
Look. I get it. Times are tough. In America, the strife is hot. But it won’t seem that way if you are holding a baby. That’s right. I’ve been four months into new parenting and those “I’m a dad” realizations have been stalking me. Most of these realizations are cliché and obvious things that if…
1. Twenty-five feet above the ground, I changed my grip and reached for the next hold, straining at the oddness of my body’s position before my feet slipped off the small chips of molded plastic screwed into the climbing wall for the second time in a row. The auto-belay slowly lowered me to the ground….
Panic in Our Pockets When Jonathan Haidt came out with The Anxious Generation, I was already well on my way to worrying about my own smartphone usage. As a teacher, I’m at the forefront of being a good role model: at least 150 eyes judge my behavior every week. What I’ve done with my phone…
A year and a half has past since AI came into our lives, and I would like to say my life is relatively the same, but it is not. And this is despite teaching mainly process-driven lessons–focusing students to practice creativity, patience, revision, and deep-thinking, which potentially makes AI more of a helper than a…
I love this phrase: “Writing is organized thinking.” It’s a simple sentence that heavy-lifts a deep and normally unthought of truth: thinking can be fleeting if you don’t have a concrete application for it, and writing is one the best tools for such thought containers. I have searched for its originator, but I think the…
The Answer to the Title by Both Me, the Human Author, and ChatGPT First of all: No. It won’t. It even admitted as much to me: The Trickery of Reading What You Thought Was a Student But Is Actually a Robot Is ChatGPT’s answer a definitive one? Probably not. But it’s a good one. One…
In a past post, I wrote about how English Language Arts class is a technology class. This post will cover how English Language Arts class is a design class. Internet Trickery One day, I was scrolling through Twitter thinking I was doing everything that the app did not want me to do. I’m a millennial,…
A Teacher’s Non-American School Experience “No logos or anything like that,” said my mom. She had just explained to me that we needed to take a bunch of precautions for our “vacation.” These precautions seemed more like we were becoming refugees rather than tourists. We were not to wear anything that would pin us as…
A Technology I am the teacher of a technology class; I am an unacknowledged STEM teacher; I am an English Language Arts teacher. This is a cute way to start an essay, but, seriously, the “Arts” part does a good job of camouflaging the core of ELA. And that core is learning how to use…