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Category: Essay

If You Want to See a Nicer World, Carry a Baby

Posted on August 1, 2024August 1, 2024 by Thomas Joseph Wilson

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…

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Calling for an Ambulance: A Personal Story of Healthcare, Finances, Teaching, and Adoption

Posted on July 26, 2024July 26, 2024 by Thomas Joseph Wilson

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….

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How the Smartphone Panic Taught Me to Be a Better Teacher (And No, Not in Terms of Anything Smartphone Related)

Posted on July 11, 2024July 11, 2024 by Thomas Joseph Wilson

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…

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Just Checking in on a Year and a Half of Worrying about AI in the Classroom

Posted on June 10, 2024June 10, 2024 by Thomas Joseph Wilson

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…

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English Teachers Are Thinking Teachers

Posted on May 9, 2024May 9, 2024 by Thomas Joseph Wilson

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…

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ELA Is a Design Class

Posted on October 4, 2022October 4, 2022 by Thomas Joseph Wilson

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,…

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The Magnetic Strip

Posted on September 13, 2022September 14, 2022 by Thomas Joseph Wilson

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…

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ELA Is a Tech Class

Posted on April 10, 2022April 12, 2022 by Thomas Joseph Wilson

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…

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A Modest Seat in the Classroom

Posted on March 6, 2022March 7, 2022 by Thomas Joseph Wilson

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,…

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Tybee Tides

Posted on January 24, 2022January 25, 2022 by Thomas Joseph Wilson

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…

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TJ Wilson is an English Teacher who writes on the side.
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