or Thomas Joseph Wilson's Blog
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…
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 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…
Reading for a Refresh Deep into the summer, yet a few weeks before school, the professional development books I stacked on the far reaches of my home desk morph from a thing to politely ignore to a an interesting to-do list. This year, I have a book about Socratic seminars, three books about writing, one…