I spent the first chapter of my career at Topeka High School, where I taught pretty much every Social Studies course that wasn't Psychology or Sociology (that's not hyperbole, I checked). For nearly a decade, I also served as the Social Sciences department chair and the Director of Speech and Debate, which is a polite way of saying I spent a lot of weekends in high school spaces watching students argue about things with impressive conviction.

​In 2024, I made the decision to teach closer to home because having three kids in elementary school will rapidly reorder your priorities. I started what I have lovingly called my "middle school era," teaching Social Studies and a collection of electives that let me get genuinely weird with curriculum design.

​Now (2025-present) I work as an academic interventionist, which means I get to go deep on the question that has always driven me: how do we actually help students who have been left behind by the systems that were supposed to serve them?

Spoiler: play helps. AI helps. Curiosity helps. Worksheets, generally, do not.

I run a website called the Teacher's plAIground where the goal is to figure out how to keep teaching joyful, sustainable, and deeply human — even when the robots are very, very good at their jobs.
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You'll find blog posts, classroom-ready templates, resource collections, and the occasional YouTube series where I try to teach teachers to vibe code in under five minutes.