READ DEEPLY.
QUESTION BOLDLY.
THINK FOR YOURSELF.

Teaching Philosophy

A legal scholar dissects Socratic dialogue as a discipline: how patient, well-aimed questions expose hidden assumptions, sharpen definitions, and lead a thinker toward conclusions they arrive at themselves -- equal parts philosophy and practical toolkit for anyone who teaches, argues, or wants to think more carefully.

The Professor’s Take

“The best teacher in the room is not necessarily the person who can give you the answer fastest. Sometimes the better teacher asks the question that makes you discover the answer yourself. We don't just teach students to find an answer. We want them asking why the answer is true. That habit of questioning is where understanding begins.”

Critical Thinking

Julia Galef contrasts two stances toward belief: defending territory versus mapping it honestly. Drawing on psychology and decision research, she argues that accuracy, not confidence, is what separates clear thinkers from everyone else, and shows how curiosity and intellectual honesty can be practiced like a skill.

The Professor’s Take

“Being intelligent does not help very much if we use all that intelligence defending what we already believe. I want students willing to ask, ‘What if I'm wrong?’ The goal shouldn't be to win an argument with reality. It should be to understand reality better. Truth-seeking requires curiosity, humility, and the courage to change your mind when the evidence changes.”

Scientific Reasoning

Physicist Clifford Will narrates the decades of increasingly precise experiments that have tested general relativity against reality, showing how a revolutionary theory earns trust not through authority, but through surviving repeated, deliberate attempts to prove it wrong.

The Professor’s Take

“If Albert Einstein can be questioned, anyone can be questioned. That's not disrespect for expertise — it's respect for truth. A great idea should survive because evidence keeps supporting it, not because a famous person said it. I want students comfortable asking the dangerous question: ‘How do we know?’ Then I want them disciplined enough to follow the evidence wherever it leads.”

Philosophy of Science

Kuhn's landmark work introduces "paradigm shifts" to describe how science advances not through steady accumulation but through periodic, disruptive reconceptions of the very questions worth asking -- a framework that still shapes how we talk about intellectual change today.

The Professor’s Take

“We should be careful with two opposite mistakes. One is rejecting established knowledge merely because questioning authority feels exciting. The other is treating today's consensus as though no better explanation could ever exist. Progress requires both discipline and courage: preserve what the evidence supports, but never become so comfortable with a framework that you stop noticing the evidence that doesn't fit.”

Learning Science

Cognitive scientists overturn the intuitive rules of studying, showing why rereading and highlighting feel productive but rarely stick, while spaced practice, self-testing, and mixing problem types feel harder yet build durable, transferable knowledge -- a rigorous, evidence-based case for embracing difficulty rather than smoothing it away.

The Professor’s Take

“One of the biggest mistakes we make in education is confusing familiarity with mastery. Rereading something until it looks familiar can feel like learning — right up until you have to produce the answer yourself. Real learning requires retrieval, application, and sometimes a little struggle. Difficulty is not always evidence that learning is failing. Sometimes it is evidence that learning is finally happening.”

Learning Science

Willingham answers nine deceptively simple questions about how children think and learn, reframing common classroom frustrations as predictable features of cognition rather than failures of character or effort.

The Professor’s Take

“When a student struggles, it is easy to label the problem: lazy, distracted, unmotivated, not a math person. Those labels are usually less useful than asking what is actually happening inside the learning process. Is the foundation missing? Is working memory overloaded? Is the challenge too easy, too hard, or simply presented the wrong way? Before judging the learner, understand the learner.”

Learning Science

Cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham explains why studying often feels productive without being effective, translating memory and attention research into concrete strategies students can actually use, while staying honest about why no single method works for every learner.

The Professor’s Take

“A student can work incredibly hard and still spend that effort on the wrong things. I see this all the time. More hours do not automatically produce more learning. Part of becoming a stronger student is learning how your own mind works — what deserves your attention, how to practice, how to test yourself, and how to recognize when you don't understand something as well as you thought you did.”

Education Research

John Hattie updates his massive synthesis of education research, ranking the interventions with the strongest evidence behind them and reminding readers that impact, not intention, should decide what a classroom actually does.

The Professor’s Take

“Education has no shortage of traditions, habits, theories, and strongly held opinions. But the question I keep coming back to is simpler: what is actually helping this student learn? Good teaching requires evidence, feedback, adjustment, and the willingness to change course. That is why our approach is built around watching progress and adapting instruction rather than blindly following a predetermined script.”

Learning Science

David Epstein marshals evidence from sports, science, music, and business to challenge the cult of early specialization, arguing that breadth, sampling, and delayed focus often produce better long-term problem-solvers than narrow expertise acquired too soon.

The Professor’s Take

“Students are often encouraged to put knowledge into separate boxes — math over here, science over there, writing somewhere else. But some of our best thinking happens when ideas from different worlds collide. Learning broadly gives us more tools for solving unfamiliar problems. The connection you don't need today may be exactly the one that unlocks tomorrow's problem.”

Mathematics Education

A working mathematician's provocative essay-turned-book argues that school mathematics has been drained of the curiosity and creativity that make the subject worth doing, and imagines what teaching math as an art form might actually look like.

The Professor’s Take

“Sometimes a student doesn't hate mathematics. They hate what mathematics has been reduced to. Math isn't supposed to be an endless collection of procedures someone else invented and you have to memorize. It is pattern, reasoning, imagination, and discovery. When students begin asking why something works instead of merely memorizing what to do next, mathematics starts becoming mathematics again.”

Reading & Attention

Writing before smartphones or social media existed, Sven Birkerts worried aloud about what electronic culture might cost readers in interiority and contemplation -- an early, still-relevant meditation on the tradeoffs of a media transition that was only just beginning.

The Professor’s Take

“What makes this book fascinating today is that it raised the alarm before smartphones, TikTok, AI assistants, and most of the technologies we're now debating even existed. The details changed. The underlying question didn't: what happens to us when information keeps getting faster but contemplation keeps getting harder? Progress gives us new capabilities. Wisdom requires asking what those capabilities might quietly cost us.”

Reading & Attention

Nicholas Carr's Pulitzer Prize-finalist argument traces how the internet's built-in incentives toward interruption and skimming may be reshaping attention and memory, questioning whether constant connectivity trades depth of thought for breadth of access.

The Professor’s Take

“The danger isn't that technology gives us too little information. It's that it gives us so much, so quickly, that we begin mistaking exposure for understanding. Knowing that an answer exists somewhere is not the same thing as knowing it. Search is extraordinarily powerful. But a search engine cannot build the structure inside your mind that allows you to recognize what an answer means.”

Reading & Attention

Mark Bauerlein's deliberately provocative title frames a real question: what happens to a generation's intellectual habits when technology continuously competes for their attention? A useful foil for debating where genuine concern ends and generational complaint begins.

The Professor’s Take

“I don't believe this is a dumb generation. That's exactly why the problem concerns me. We have placed enormously powerful technology in front of enormously capable young minds and then designed much of that technology to interrupt them, entertain them, and compete for every spare second of attention. The question isn't whether today's students are intelligent. They are. The question is whether we're building an environment that gives that intelligence enough uninterrupted time to develop.”

Reading & Attention

Cognitive neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf examines what happens to the reading brain as screens replace print, weighing genuine benefits of digital reading against the quieter cognitive habits -- patience, reflection, deep attention -- that sustained reading uniquely builds.

The Professor’s Take

“We have access to more information than any generation in history, and I'm not convinced that means we're understanding more. We scroll, skim, swipe, summarize, and move on. But comprehension requires something technology increasingly encourages us to avoid: sustained attention. Reading deeply means staying with an idea long enough to understand it, question it, connect it, and sometimes struggle with it. If we lose that ability, having the world's information in our pocket won't make us smarter. It may simply make us faster at not thinking about it.”

AI & Education

A practical field guide for educators navigating generative AI in the classroom, covering everything from redesigning assignments to verifying AI-assisted work, with an emphasis on using the technology to deepen student thinking rather than quietly replace it.

The Professor’s Take

“AI is neither the savior of education nor the end of education. It is a remarkably powerful tool — which means how we use it matters. I want students using AI to extend their thinking, challenge their assumptions, explore ideas, and become more capable. I worry when it becomes a substitute for the very struggle through which thinking develops. Technology should amplify intelligence, not outsource it.”