There is just so much out there on artificial intelligence right now. Just spending a few minutes exploring social media and what is being said by experts, armchair experts, and laypeople alike can make it hard to discern the best responses to AI’s boom over the last few months.

I started taking goal setting seriously when I started teaching K-12. I had just completed a grad program in English and was just about to finish my second degree in education and I realized that I had not read for fun in years. My life was a mess of professional goals and obligations (conferences, new courses, lectures) and lists of books that I needed to read, not wanted to read. So, after a few adjustment months, I started reading for fun again.

Gitte Frederiksen’s TED Talk “Great Leadership is a Network, not a Hierarchy” hit a deep chord with me. Leadership often takes on the role of gatekeeping with workers sharing ideas or their struggles with their leadership and the ideas being struck down or the struggles ignored.

When I received my first 3D printer on a grant in 2016, I was already fascinated with the possibilities for creating and printing objects for my classroom and students.

During the Thanksgiving break, I spent a lot of time thinking about Shankar Vedantam’s TED talk. The idea is simple: the person you are is not the same person you will be in 5 or 10 years, maybe even tomorrow. Given that we will all change in myriad ways, many unknowable to us, how can we plan for that future self? Shankar offers simple ideas: stay curious, add humility to your work, and to be brave in our choices. We often forget to look beyond the few minutes each day we have to reflect on our lives; what Shankar is proposing is that we think about the person we will become and start building towards that goal today. Simple, but not common.