June Newsletter: Welcome to a summer of introspection

Join me on the Artist's Way, an upcoming plein air workshop, and using technology instead of letting it use me

Jun 01, 2025

Hello, friends!

In just a few short days, school will be out and my teacher’s summer will begin. I am at the end of my twenty-third year as a high school English teacher! That doesn’t feel possible, but the math doesn’t lie.

I’ve spent a lot of time in the past few years thinking about what the next act of my career might be. Will I continue teaching, or am I ready for a change? I still love working with teenagers. If you want to stay young at heart, nothing beats surrounding yourself with kids full of big dreams for their futures.

That said, teaching has certainly not gotten easier in the past two decades. When I began teaching, my classroom still had chalkboards. If I wanted a computer projector, I had to sign out a cart and rearrange the desks to fit the cart in the middle of the room. Teachers had laptops, but students generally did not. We were years away from smartphones and iPads. We had the internet, but not the internet we know today. No YouTube. No meaningful social media. Certainly no large-language model, generative AI.

And for all the promises of technology to make our lives easier, it has in many ways made teaching harder. While tech makes some tasks easier—like the quarterly submission of grade—on a daily basis, it only adds more items to my daily to do list, not fewer. For instance, once upon a time, I could just tell students what was for homework at the start of class and then move on. Now I have to tell them AND post the assignments in our learning management system. It’s not a big deal, but it easily takes 5-10 minutes of my morning to make sure I’ve included all the necessary info and gotten all the settings right in the portal. Add a few of these little 5-10 minute tasks over the course of the day, and suddenly I’m asking where did the time go.

And then there’s the fact that being an English teacher in the age of AI means being a digital sleuth. Every time I read a well written essay, I am immediately suspicious. Did my student write this, or did AI? Let the detective work begin. Digging through Google doc histories and using third-party AI-detectors, almost always to prove what I already know, my student took the easy way out. And then the hard conversations with that student and follow up with disciplinary procedures. Talk about sucking the joy of my job.

Some sketches from my 100 Day Project! I've been sketching from life for at least 15 mintues a day.

And yet, I am not ready to throw the towel in yet. Rather, I find myself asking the same old questions I’ve asked for twenty-three years, but now with new urgency: How can I instill a sense of intrinsic motivation in my students?

When education is transactional—I teach, students repeat, I grade—the motivation is extrinsic. The focus is on the grade, the outcome, and it’s no wonder they might choose the easy way out. But when students have their own internal motivation to learn—to understand themselves and life better, to express themselves well and understand others with empathy and compassion—there is no such thing as cheating, as cheating would be counterproductive to the aim.

These are not new thoughts—to me or anyone who has pondered the true nature of learning—but they are more important than ever. And with the free time afforded to me with my summer break this year, I plan to spend some quiet time thinking about them.

For my students’ sake and my own, I am ready for a summer of introspection. Not only to think about how to be a better teacher in our crazy modern world, but to think about how I want to inhabit my days. I’ve written about this before and I surely will again, but knowing how I want to live and actually living that way are two very different things.

This summer, I want to put more focus on living my values. Less time online, more time with those I care about. Less time scrolling, more time being present in my daily life. Less time consuming content, more time creating art, music, and joy.

To that end, I’ve decided to take on the twelve-week journey of The Artist’s Way. I’ve owned it for years and I have never completed it, but I have a feeling this summer will be different. For one thing, whenever I’ve attempted it before, it was during the school year. When I’m in the midst of teaching, I don’t have the mental and emotional bandwidth for the deep work The Artist’s Way requires. In addition, I’m going to keep myself motivated this summer by committing to weekly blog posts about the experience here on Substack, and I hope some of you will join me!

If you want to complete the journey with me, you can follow along and participate in the discussion in the subscriber chat I’ll be hosting to accompany the posts. Just check your subscription settings and be sure you have opted in to getting blog posts from my Substack in addition to this monthly newsletter. It is completely free to subscribe. My first Artist’s Way post will be Sunday, June 8!

My plan of attack will be to read each chapter on Saturday to prepare for the week ahead. On Sunday I’ll share posts looking back on the previous week and ahead to what’s next, and I’ll moderate a chat so we can all discuss our experience of the program.

In addition to working through The Artist’s Way, my summer of introspection will also include a serious pulling back on social media. In fact, I’m planning to step away from Instagram entirely once my 100-day project is over tomorrow, June 2. This is partly a function of the desire to be sure I’m making the art I want to make this summer without worry about sharing it, but more importantly because I’m tired of being advertised at all the time.

One the questions I am constantly asking myself as I try to align my actions and my values is, “Am I using technology or is technology using me?” When it comes to social media, it’s using me. The ads are frankly just too good and I have to be constantly on guard against getting sucked in my compelling promotional posts. Or, instead of constance viligance, I could just tune out.

I’m not going to be completely off Facebook because I am part of several local groups that coordinate in-person events via Facebook groups, but I am planning to limit my Facebook use to those groups.

That said, I am planning to be more active here on Substack—a platform that is not driven my ads! Hooray! And long may it stay!—so if you like following along on my art adventures, you are in the right place.

Upcoming Events

I will be teaching a one-day plein air workshop on June 14 in Shrewsbury, MA. Click here to register. If you want a sense of my approach to working outdoors, check out the short YouTube videos below (apologies for the audio on the beach sketch video—it was super windy out!).

Other than that, I am taking the summer off from teaching, but stay tuned for information about fall watercolor classes. I’ll be teaching on Thursday nights again!

Studio News

My watercolor/mixed media collage “News of the Day” will appear in the Fitchburg Art Museum’s 89th Regional Exhibition of Art and Craft. I am so honored to have my work in this show! You can catch it from June 21 through September 7. This is a big first for me—my work in an exhibit at a museum! It’s also my first juried acceptance of 2025 after a little streak of disappointing rejections, so it feels extra sweet.