I teach students who have been worn down by systems to the point of giving up.
Many of the students I work with have learned—through repetition—that effort does not always lead to reward. School, healthcare, legal, and social systems have often treated them as problems to manage rather than people to understand. Motivation, in that context, doesn’t disappear. It erodes.
So yes—I teach motivation. But not the poster kind.
Motivation, for my students, is not about enthusiasm or compliance. It’s about rebuilding the belief that effort can still matter. That their voice can still land somewhere. That what they think and notice has value beyond survival.
A core part of that work is vocabulary.
Vocabulary is power. It gives students tools to name what they’re experiencing instead of absorbing it silently. We build words deliberately—academic, emotional, technical—not as memorization, but as equipment. The more language you have, the more precisely you can think. The more precisely you can think, the harder it is for systems to flatten you.
I also teach students to tell their own stories.
Not just through writing, though writing matters. But through audio, video, and visual media as well. Some students find their voice on the page. Others find it in a microphone. Others only begin to speak when a camera is pointed somewhere else and they’re allowed to narrate from the side.
Storytelling is not an add-on to the curriculum. It is the curriculum. When students learn to structure a story—where it begins, what it leaves out, how it ends—they are learning how meaning is made. They are learning how narratives shape outcomes. They are learning how to resist being reduced to someone else’s version of events.
I use project-based learning because it creates room for revision without punishment. I emphasize feedback over grades, clarity over compliance. I am explicit about expectations, and flexible about paths. Trauma-informed teaching, to me, is not about lowering standards—it’s about removing unnecessary harm so learning can happen at all.
Most of all, I try to be honest.
I tell students when systems fail. I tell them when frustration makes sense. I tell them when an assignment is difficult on purpose—and why. I don’t promise that education fixes everything. I promise that language, motivation, and story give you leverage inside systems that would rather you stay quiet.
Teaching, at its best, is not about forcing outcomes.
It’s about helping people believe they are still allowed to try—and giving them the tools to do it.
That’s the work I do.