1 I was on my way out of the house to workout when I got a text message from our neighbor: our large backyard oak had shed a thick branch that spanned the intersecting lines of four properties. In the backyard, a pile of small leaves showed where my neighbor had done some cleanup, but…
Author: Thomas Joseph Wilson
We Have Always Been Defined by Our Tools
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…
If You Want to See a Nicer World, Carry a Baby
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…
Calling for an Ambulance: A Personal Story of Healthcare, Finances, Teaching, and Adoption
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….
How the Smartphone Panic Taught Me to Be a Better Teacher (And No, Not in Terms of Anything Smartphone Related)
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…
Just Checking in on a Year and a Half of Worrying about AI in the Classroom
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…
English Teachers Are Thinking Teachers
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…
Another English Teacher Gives Their Opinion on ChatGPT and By Doing So Answers This Question: Will Artificial Intelligence Make Writing as Easy as Using a Stapler?
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…
ELA Is a Design Class
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,…
The Magnetic Strip
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…