Notes on curriculum, AI, and teaching, as I post them.

🎭 I grew up in theater, and I never really recovered.

Translation → zero shame, a permanent instinct to hold a room, and an internal volume knob that only goes to "projected to the back row."

Extremely useful in a classroom. A genuine liability in a library. 📚🙅‍♀️

I teach history like a spill-the-tea session. Less "here are the causes of the war" → more full reality-TV-recap energy, gasps included. Same content. Completely different level of attention in the room.

Ten years of that taught me the one rule that survives every curriculum framework I've ever read, most of which were clearly written by people who never had to compete with a phone for a teenager's attention span:

🎯 If it does not hold attention, it does not teach anything.

Curriculum design gets treated like a compliance exercise. Check the standard ✅ write the objective ✅ laminate something, go home. The actual job is getting inside how a mind learns something and figuring out the sequence that makes it stick, whether that's a 16-year-old in AP History or an adult sitting through a professional development session they would very much rather not be at.

I've built a UC-approved course from a blank page. I ran two years of formal action research on an AI tool before I trusted it near my students, because trust me, it's good is not a methodology. I write curriculum for subjects that were never mine to teach because someone needed it done and I am, apparently, constitutionally incapable of saying no.

None of that is separate from the theater kid thing. Same instinct → different stage → minus the jazz hands. Mostly. 🦊

I wish artificial intelligence did not exist. Students need to be taught to use it anyway.

That's not the sentence people expect from someone who talks this much about AI in education, but it's the honest starting point.

For most of human history, understanding something hard required sitting with it. Working it out. Getting it wrong, trying again, and building the kind of reasoning that only comes from struggle. AI has made that struggle optional. Ask a question, get an answer, move on. I watch what that instant access is doing to critical thinking, and it worries me.

🧠 A mind that never has to wonder is a mind that is losing practice at wondering.

That's one half of what I believe. Here's the other half.

I'm a historian before I'm anything else, and history has taught me that resisting the direction something is moving in is rarely the winning strategy. Technologies that fundamentally reorganize how people think don't ask permission first. AI isn't going away, and it isn't slowing down. It's getting stronger, spreading faster, and operating with remarkably few guardrails around it, which is its own kind of dangerous.

Wishing it away isn't a strategy. Understanding it well enough to shape how the next generation uses it is.

So yes, I believe AI belongs in the classroom. Not as a replacement for thinking, but as something students are taught to use deliberately, the way you'd teach someone to use any powerful tool: with a clear sense of what it's good for, what it costs when it's overused, and where the line sits between using it and outsourcing your own mind to it.

Students need to leave school knowing how to use AI to benefit the people around them, not just to finish homework faster.

📚 That distinction is going to define this generation the way literacy defined the last several.

What I keep coming back to is that we're not just watching a new tool enter the classroom. We're standing at a genuine precipice, one where AI is going to change how people process information at a cognitive level we don't fully understand yet. That's not hyperbole. That's a research problem, and an enormous one.

🔬 Educators are going to need new studies, new frameworks, and a willingness to be wrong and adjust as we learn what actually happens to a developing brain that grows up with an answer engine in its pocket.

I don't think the answer is optimism or alarm. I think it's rigor.

History doesn't wait for anyone to be ready for it, and neither will this. I'd rather be one of the people figuring out how to move forward with it than one of the people still arguing about whether we should.