About

I refuse to stay in one lane.

These days, my primary role is as a high school French teacher in the southwest suburbs of Chicago, although I don’t allow myself to be wholly defined by that position. My path here was a bit unusual.

Academia

While I had played with the idea of becoming a teacher when I was in high school, the subject matter was history or English. I never took seriously the prospect that I might be here.

I went to university and studied for a history degree, without knowing what I really intended to do with it. I loved spending time with people from long ago; I loved thinking through the creation of the structures that make up our world; and I loved sitting for hours with a single text, learning everything I could from it. Nonetheless, I knew that the two places I loved the most were the classroom and the library. The logical solution, I thought, was to become a professor. Then, I could teach students and have all the time I wanted to sit with my books.

I went off to grad school, made my way through the better part of a Ph.D. program, where I specialized in French colonial history, especially in the Maghrib. However, I refused to pigeonhole myself: I read widely across different areas of specialization–colonial Latin America one semester, modern Africa the next–even beyond comprehensive exams. I conducted archival research in France and Tunisia; I taught undergraduates; I also wrote a dissertation about extreme-right settler politics in colonial Tunisia, which was unique for its status as a French colonial that–for much of its history–had more Italian settlers than French.

Meeting academics, and reading those who I never might have the chance to meet, was a great way to learn about how knowledge is actually produced. I supplemented my historical reading with literature and work done in other disciplines. While historical scholarship was very important to me, the works that formed me at a deeper level more often came from elsewhere.

Tunisia

Before completing the Ph.D., I took on a job coordinating programs at an American Overseas Research Center, which allowed me to take my strong research, writing, and teaching skills, and see how they might be applied in practice. That position was an eye-opening experience, and I rapidly learned all sorts of things that are important to all the work we do but–for most of us–remain invisible: grant compliance, funding streams, complicated personalities, alliances and coalitions, and threading the gap between American academia and Tunisian academia.

I didn’t realize, before this, how much support work is necessary to bring research to life. Every grant and fellowship acquired by a researcher must first be fundraised: from foundations, from governments, from numerous other donors. Every event must be financed, and logistics must be put together by people. When the work is done well, it is invisible to beneficiaries and recipients. This taught me a fair amount about how the world really works.

In Tunisia, I also solidified my French and learned Arabic. In Tunisia, I met my fiancée.

Teaching

In short, I moved to Tunisia to take an academia-adjacent position, but I departed with a fundamentally transformed life. I also left the Ph.D. program, interestingly enough.

When I returned to the United States, I moved back to the Midwest–where I’m originally from–after a decade away. I went through a period of transition and, as I made sense of my direction, I realized that the highlights of my career all took place while I was teaching.

Teaching in a high school is startlingly different from teaching in a university. In teaching university, I found that most of my attention was given to subject content, and I expected a baseline level of knowledge, which was gate-kept for me by the admissions team at the university. Teaching high school, while the content is important, I spend time tending other skill sets. Questions I frequently ask myself include, “How do I ensure that students leave my class with a sense of curiosity toward the world around them?”

Now, I primarily teach French.

Service

I also work in local government. I never expected a position like this: so much of my life had been directed at the world outside or beyond the local. Even so, in Tunisia, I had done grant-writing, collaborated with diplomatic officials, managed programs, and took care of knowledge systems. I also learned how to translate between the world that we think we know–the human-facing “content” work–and a world that is, for most of us, alien–the world of bureaucracy, compliance, and so on.

This latter world is strange, but it’s the foundation of most of our societies. Essentially, I’ve come to learn that institutions do not see the way that humans do. They are alive, as much as you or I. But, they do not have “senses”: they cannot see, they cannot hear, they do not know what “community” means, nor the meaning of intimacy, nor anything else that we might see as specifically human. Institutions require a different kind of legibility: data, metrics, statistics, and more. Even though they don’t know what it means to “be,” they do know that they need the sort of information that can only be found in Excel spreadsheets. They don’t know what the data in those spreadsheets actually “mean” in a larger sense–or that the data is “created” rather than “gathered”–but it matters nonetheless.

I became skilled at moving in the latter world without losing the humanity that we need in day to day life.

So, I work for a township part-time to supplement my teaching. I also volunteer each week, which acts as a great reminder of what the work I do is really for.

Hobbies

In my free time, I like to put my mind to work.

This website is a way for me to engage deeply with ideas, slowly. While it is my personal website, it refuses to be a portfolio or a blog. It also doesn’t generate revenue. I prefer the model of the digital garden–the idea that a website is made up of pages that are curated and tended over time. This website is entirely a hobby, and it’s a way for me to see how my own ideas develop. The style and design was inspired by Giorgio di Chirico’s pittura metafisica.

I spend a lot of time tinkering with my computer, trying to build out systems that might improve my life. I refuse to accept the premise that my personal life should be “optimized.” While there may be a place for optimization in the private sector–where the profit-motive is sovereign–our lives are not a private sector. So, my personal systems are, in essence, about automating the parts of life that I find important but detract from what really matters to me.

For instance, I like to take notes by hand, writing as I go, especially when I read or think. But, I also need these notes to be accessible to me. The best way to access these notes, I find, is through search–which is better done by computers than by people. I don’t want to create a card catalog for my own notes. So, I’ve created a pipeline where I scan my notes and print documents and have them transcribed by AI. I’ve found that, with a few samples, generative AI can deal with a text and make remarkably few errors. I take a few minutes each day to clean them up, rather than the more than an hour it would take to transcribe by hand, or unimaginable lost time by sifting through my notes physically.

Many of my other hobbies circle around communication.

I love learning languages, for example. I began French in high school, learned Arabic over a span of several years, and taught myself Spanish during the Covid-19 pandemic. I also studied German in university and learned to read Italian in a course on Italian for reading and translation–but don’t test me on the latter two, I will fail.

I also am a member of Toastmasters International, where I develop my public speaking capacities. I love to put myself out there and trying to speak about some complicated subject to a crowd. I think that this is part of the reason why I love teaching so much, although teaching–as an art–is more about developing students’ abilities so they can teach themselves than it is about lecturing and rote memorization.

None of these are separate lives. They are the same refusal, running in different rooms.

For what I’m up to this month, I keep a /now page.