or Thomas Joseph Wilson's Blog
An English teacher’s renegotiating of our view of the learning and the classroom. In the face of AI–always in the face of AI, we are not allowed to write about something else!–here is an oddity I have been thinking this summer: Humans are DIY-ish. I’m not arguing that humans, from the get-go, develop by putting…
This summer, in lieu of so many complications in education in the 2024-2025 school year, I’m finding myself wanting to be grateful for what I know I have. My job is endlessly fulfilling, and it is only when I care too much that things are in danger of sparking and igniting, an energy-consuming path to…
I wrote a piece about the other side of what writing brings, that other side of control and grammar and communication: noise. Afterward, more evidence of such noise kept coming. And in this age of the AI writer, it makes sense. When things seem so logically together, so effortless, we are drawn to the opposite….
I have attempted to get through this essay without mentioning the reason why I am writing it. I won’t have to. You’ll know. A Rediscovery of a Book Before the pandemic, I lent my copy of The New Analog by Damon Krukowski to a friend. A couple weeks ago, he gave it back. Though it’s been five…
What can teachers really accomplish with the class sizes of today? Efficiency-Minded It took me a long time to finish my last piece of writing (“On Teacher Exhaustion”). It was difficult to really communicate what kind of exhaustion is hitting ELA teachers in 2025 without seeming like I’m outright kvetching or lamenting nebulous “good ‘ole…
How do teachers let go of a new and consequential thing we can’t control? The Profession Most teachers get the opportunity to teach their own generation at the beginning of their careers. I remember it being an exciting moment, as if I had come back to save my fellow Millennials from the obliviousness of Gen…
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…