Every year, I teach a unit on Transcendentalism. We read Thoreau. We talk about conscience. We talk about what it means to see an injustice and decide what to do about it. And every year, without fail, some student raises their hand and asks the question that I have never been able to answer as well as I wanted to. "I'm just a high school student. What am I supposed to do about it?" This summer, I went looking for a better answer. I was awarded a Fund for Teachers fellowship,

Our students aren't broken. In fact, if we look at what we as a society have trained them to do, they're performing extremely well. We handed them devices engineered by the most sophisticated attention architects in human history, we gave those devices to them younger and younger, and we stood by while algorithmic platforms spent twenty years perfecting the art of redirection. Dr. Gloria Mark at UC Irvine has the data: average focus on a digital device has dropped from two an

When Everyone Else is Scrolling: Why I'm Delaying Smartphones for My Daughters I've spent a decade teaching high school English, and I can tell you exactly when a student got their first unrestricted smartphone. Not because they tell me, but because I watch it happen in real time. The attention span fragments, the anxiety spikes, and the ability to sit with difficult thoughts disappears. I'm also a mother of two young daughters. And here's what ten years in the classroom has

Around the age of 25, I started counting the fine lines around my eyes like tally marks of distance. Each one marked a step further from the version of myself I recognized. Each birthday felt like a small theft, another year stolen from the currency I'd been taught mattered most: youth, beauty, that indefinable vibrancy that seemed to dim with each passing season. The thought that time might erode my value in ways beyond my control was unsettling. It was as though my worth co

Every day, I find that I spend more time than I am willing to admit focused on the trajectory of our society. It horrifies me. You...

When I look at my character development and try to pinpoint the years of my life which were most difficult, I immediately zero in on...

2024 was transformative for our family. Taking a leap of faith, we moved to an unfamiliar area, and I'm unbelievably grateful for that...

Education never stands still. As an undergraduate, this constant evolution both frightened and fascinated me, especially when one of my...

My college friends have started having babies, and last year, we held our inaugural moms and babies trip. This summer, the trip went to...

Another school year has come and gone, and it is time for the Swinneys to leave Starkville. I can’t even express the amount of gratitude...

I recently finished my capstone project for my educational doctorate. My research centered around teacher retention- a topic that is...

Another school year has come and crawled by… This January, I was lucky enough to end up back in a position teaching high school English....

Kids These Days You’ve heard it. Maybe, you’ve even said it. “Kids these days are so much worse.” “Kids these days don’t show any...

I have had the wonderful opportunity to work with some of the student-athletes at MSU throughout 2022. This was an unexpected turn in my...

We hear that someone has lost a loved one, so we quickly reach out to offer our condolences and to remind them that “ everything happens...

WARNING: This post is not for the faint of heart. It may be helpful to people who have a hard time with accepting Christianity. I live...

If the students ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy. I remember my first classroom. It was bursting at the seams with posters, fairy lights,...

When people look back on college, they remember friendships and freedom mixed with stress and confusion. Everyone remembers sleeping at...