or Thomas Joseph Wilson's Blog
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…
Virtual Tools, Real Classroom When you are stressed, practicality is a religion. At the beginning of the 2020-2021 school year, after we went totally virtual when the pandemic hit in March 2020, I was a bit unsettled. We were all starting to live with the virus. Still, the memory of full-on pandemic anxiety–memories like studiously…
Age and the “New Tech” Fallacy Fourteen years ago, when I was a student-teacher and still using a personal computer hijacked to run Linux instead of Windows, I did a lot of campaigning for Google Docs. This was wasted effort: Google conquers better than its creators. When I was officially hired as a licensed teacher,…
I. My Brazilian friend had never seen snow. I couldn’t fathom such a perspective, watching him gawk out the window of the bus that was driving us from the airport to a hotel in Switzerland. We all lived in England, attending the same American school, though many of us were not American. It was February,…
Floating Specks Large swells of water bobbed the boat as it made its way out into brackish water of Tybee Creek. The Atlantic horizon before them was interrupted by one last mass of land that was their destination–Tybee Island proper, with its popular shops and beach. Lisa and Greg Smith normally wouldn’t have gone out…
I. No one needs to ask the origin of my neighborhood’s name: Deer Park. Deer walk the streets of Deer Park, Ohio, like humans have yet to take over. They are the living ghosts of nature, sleeping in front yards, staring at you with a tense readiness when you walk past. The penance the deer…
When the Paperless Movement was in full force, I was fatalistic. Going totally digital was inevitable. And like anyone who needs to prepare for a new world, I started readying my supplies, or, in this case, getting rid of them. As we now know, the Paperless Movement didn’t quite take. Though cardboard boxes are the…
I got into teaching because I was an educational rebel. I was a late bloomer, and while I was a curious person interested in many things, I didn’t put much stock into formal education. I blinded myself to keeping my eyes open for anything by keeping my eyes open to only a bubble’s worth of…