I am an English teacher with 20 years of experience in an urban high school in the East Bay. I love teaching, and one of my goals is to celebrate what teachers do because I don’t hear enough about US. Teaching is the best job I’ve ever had, but perceptions about teachers are often mixed with pity and sympathy. I want more of us who are in the classrooms to be able to show off the great work we do. So first and foremost I want this to be a place where people see a teacher who is loving it-whose heart is just as deep as his curriculum.

When I had been teaching a few years I began to publish articles about my experiences. My writing was recieved well and I started a blog called Teach 4 Real. As I wrote over 150 articles in places like The Huffington Post, Ed News, Care 2, and Teach Hub, I began selling curriculum as PDFs for teachers who needed some quizzes, handouts, final exams and essay prompts for books they were teaching. It was fun but my success got the better of me. My writing went viral. Dear Steph Curry Please Don’t Visit My High School was a constroversial article that had me on the front page of yahoo. Channel 2 News came into my classroom and filmed me teaching and interviewed me about my work. It was crazy, but it was also stressful. And my wife and I had just welcomed our second child. I had a decision to make. I shut down my website, all my articles, my curriculm packets, and I focused on being a Dad and a Teacher, in that order. No more moderating comments and posting articles on weekends. I didn’t want to be hunched over a screen while my kids grew up.

That was a decade ago. I have lived a good life, and teaching has been one of the reasons that is so.

But I have heard the calling to write, to share, to engage. My kids are older now and busy with their own lives. I think I have time now to be a Dad, Teacher, and Writer.

So join me if you like this kind of thing. I don’t use AI–only for images, because you always need a cover image. My focus is on writing and designing curriculum that works in REAL classrooms. AI can’t do that, and I’m not sure it ever will. AI can’t stand in front of a classroom of kids, look them in the eye, make them laugh, get them reading, and writing and CURIOUS about the world. We live in interesting times. I’ll tell you how it looks to me from here.