Exhibit A · Teaching
Curriculum with a global lens
Project-based humanities units that treat 13-year-olds like the real thinkers they are.
I teach middle school at the school I attended as a kid. (A full-circle story or a failure to leave, depending on the day.) My classroom runs on one bet: hand thirteen-year-olds Esperanza Rising, Great Zimbabwe, and a properly complicated world, and they'll out-think most adults you know.
The road here ran through stranger country. A Fulbright year in Kolomna, Russia. Daily intelligence briefs at a war-studies think tank. AI strategy at a company with "Space Age" in its legal name. Every stop was the same lesson wearing a different badge: people understand each other when someone builds them a room to do it in. A middle-school classroom is that room at its smallest and loudest.
This chapter is loud and a little chaotic, and it's the first one I've written on purpose. I'm stubborn about building things that work for most every kind of brain, because I own one of the interesting ones.