Em-Dashed If You Do
It took 30 years, but Bill Neville finally ruined my writing.
Stories & Insights
From the classroom and the field. Teaching, production, and what I’ve picked up along the way.
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The take was perfect. The audio wasn’t.
A perfect take, wrecked by radio interference on location. Reshoot wasn’t possible. Here’s how I used ElevenLabs voice cloning to rescue the footage — and…
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Got Fired!
I can’t say as my firing was entirely unanticipated. The school system is roughly a million-and-a-half in the red. They called it a RIF. I…
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Most People Don’t Need Better Prompts. They Need Better Systems.
Newer AI models still benefit from clear instructions, but most disappointing outputs aren’t prompt failures. They’re system failures: bad context, no templates, weak tools, and…
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Your Skill Files Are Written for You (Not the AI)
Most AI skill files are written for the person who built them, not the model running them. Stripping the prose saves tokens — until you…
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You’re Starving Your AI by Overfeeding It
More context isn’t better. A bloated, noisy context window actively degrades AI performance. Here’s how I cut token usage by 75% without losing a single…
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Knowing When You Suck
The videographer who’s happy with everything he shoots isn’t going anywhere. Here’s the psychology behind why the people who worry about quality are usually the…
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MacBook Neo Setup: What They Don’t Tell You Out of the Box
The MacBook Neo runs on an A18 mobile chip — not Apple Silicon. Here’s what to do first, which USB-C port to actually use, and…
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How I Make Lesson Plans With AI (A Sunday Night Survival Guide)
I discovered early in my teaching career that I had a visceral hate for writing lesson plans. Here’s the AI workflow that finally made Sunday…
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The Long Game and the Short Ones
Not all credentials are created equal — but a lot of them are free. Here are 50 worth knowing about, ranked by how good they…
