Education has always been a difficult field in the US. It’s underpaid, under-resourced, and underappreciated. This differs between primary, secondary, and higher ed, but less than we often think. We hear stories about elementary school teachers having to buy their own classroom supplies because of funding shortages (or lack of…

The monetization of self-hate I teach in the human development department, in the school of human ecology, in a natural sciences college at a major university. Yes, that is a mouthful. University>College>School>Department. This will be important to my story so listen up. During my first year of teaching at this institution, I encountered a…

This particular screed will be dedicated to K-12 and my experiences with my kid’s teachers, the school system, and its approach to disability. Mainly. Probably. With some references to Ru Paul’s Drag Race season 14 because it’s relevant, I promise. I want to acknowledge my experiences and my kid’s experiences…

or Why it actually does take a village A fantastic substack writer I follow, Anne Helen Peterson, has been writing about how different kinds of labor have been distributed and redistributed over the past few years, particularly childcare and eldercare. She calls this an Infrastructure of Care. My infrastructure of care is my quarantine family turned non-creepy commune…

So much crazy, so little time. I don’t have the mental capacity to write individual articles about all of the crazy going on in the world, particularly in Texas right now, so I’m going to rant in response to tweets. Enjoy. White professors: DO NOT DO THIS. This is…

I live in Austin, Texas. It is not a perfect city. We have a long, long, shameful history with segregation. But it is known as a bastion of liberalism in a red state. In reality, all the major cities in Texas are majority liberal (but the Texas leadership doesn’t want…

So this happened: Trauma-Informed Pedagogy: “Trauma-informed pedagogy adapts the trauma-informed care framework from health and human services for the practice of teaching. Trauma-informed approaches to teaching strive to understand how various forms of trauma may have impacted the lives of learners and use that understanding to accommodate learners’ needs, prevent further…

One of the great mysteries of the social sciences isn’t the way we share, borrow, and reinterpret great theories, it’s why we dumb them down. In my studies of organizational development at the masters level, we learned about the iceberg theory:

My husband and I caught the last segment on This American Life today, titled The Farce Awakens and I highly recommend it. It discusses how a Black children’s author found his books banned from school libraries in Katy, Texas. This horseshit is going on all over Texas and the south…