Essays on Development & Education
Regenerative Developmental Theory
Regeneration is development that leaves both the individual and the larger relational field with greater capacity for future participation.
Regenerative Developmental Theory explores how children grow through embodied participation, relationship, symbolic meaning, and meaningful contribution. It asks how education can cultivate capacity without requiring children to abandon their bodies, perceptions, emotions, or inner sense of self in order to belong, succeed, or be understood.
Children Are Paying for Our Abstraction
Children Are Paying for Our Abstraction
We built systems optimized for speed, scale, and symbolic exchange — and then we handed them to children. This essay argues that the cost is not appearing in intelligence or academic performance but in something harder to measure: the capacity for integration. The ability to stay present in a body, tolerate discomfort, and develop a self through direct encounter with reality. Drawing on thirty years of teaching children through movement and the experience of raising children inside one of Massachusetts' lowest-performing districts, this is an argument that what we are witnessing is not failure — it is precise adaptation to environments built for scale rather than for becoming human.
Thinking in Verbs
The Grammar of How We See
Language is not neutral. The way we grammatically construct experience shapes what we are able to perceive within it.
A noun fixes. It says: this thing has edges, it is bounded, it is this and not something else.
A verb moves. It says: this thing is in process, it is mid-action, it has not yet resolved.
When we describe human experience — and especially the difficult, charged, intimate territory of human relationship — we almost always default to nouns.
The Stack: What Your Brain Actually Is and Who Is Currently Driving
We have been convinced to live in the wrong part of our own brain.
This is not a metaphor. This is anatomy. And it is costing us everything.
Phase Change, Collapse, and the Role of Contact
AI doesn’t know what’s true, meaningful, or wise—but it is very good at producing language that sounds coherent under pressure.
Without a way to assess structure—load, capacity, thresholds—it’s easy to mistake pattern density for insight.
Physics doesn’t make AI smarter.
It makes readers more oriented.