Celebrating My Sweet 60th!
Taking a moment to reflect on my writing
🎉 This is my 60th article on substack since I started writing in 2023! 🎉
Sitting down and writing for this platform is one of the things I most look forward to each month. I’m so grateful for anyone who has read, liked, and/or commented on my writing. Ultimately, I write for my own entertainment, but it’s been nice to have other people along for the ride too.
Here are some of my favorite articles so far. Unsurprisingly, they are some of the weirdest ones: ideas that feel like they could only come from my brain and this strange little niche I occupy.
Frankenstein's Montessori
I just got back from watching Yorgos Lanthimos’s latest film Poor Things, a sort of feminist rewriting of Frankenstein, and I have lots of tenuous connections to make between the themes of the film and Montessori philosophy.
The Teacher as Host
Priya Parker’s idea of generous authority helps to clarify something I have been working through in previous articles: the authoritative presence I believe a teacher should bring to their classroom environment. I propose that to be a great teacher, you must be a great host.
Shaping the Future We Long For
I couldn’t stop thinking today of the connections between Montessori philosophy and Octavia Butler’s Earthseed series. Anyone else have this issue?
Montessori as a Colonizing Force
What if Montessori schools reframed their role to actively dismantle privilege rather than reinforce it?
Loving the Unloveable Child: Part I
“Our job is to love the child even when they are at their most unlovable” - Margaret Stephenson
Conformity is Not Resilience
We need to stop settling for fine. We need to reimagine secondary school not as a survival experience, but as an environment that fosters growth, curiosity, and joy.
Radical Joy (Revisited)
I'm a huge fan of using joyful design as an act of resistance against the ever-encroaching dullness of adulthood.
What’s Next?
I’ve noticed my writing has become a little preachy recently. I feel like I spend too much time critiquing “mainstream” education or trying to hold Montessori to account. Moving forward, I want to cut back on all the proselytizing. I also feel that my writing has become too much about self-promotion and “content creation”, which drains the fun out of it for me. I want to write because I want to write, not because it is part of my LinkedIn strategy.
Also, I have been experimenting with using ChatGPT to provide editing support, and I feel like my writing voice has become more predictable and boring because of it. I see that in a lot of the writing I read online, especially over the last 6 months or so. You can tell who’s been using AI because everyone’s now got the same perfectly formed sentences, subtitles, and perfectly clipped transitions/conclusions. I’m swearing off of it. Let messiness reign.
Those are a few simple goals for my writing moving forward. Thank you again to everyone and anyone who has read and shared my work. Here’s to 60 more!
Some absolute bangers in here. Frankenstein and Host would have been my top 2!