Shaping the World

by following Ta-Nehisi Coates, Tom Brown, and my Grandmother

For most of my teens and young twenties, my Grandmother - a Montessori teacher, trainer, and school leader, would corner me at family gatherings and ask if I’d finally looked into getting my Montessori teacher training. I did my best to respectfully appease her by hearing her out, but I had no interest so it was mostly internal eye-rolls and in-one-ear-out-the-other kind of listening.

After 15 years of working in Montessori schools as a teacher and administrator, I guess it’s safe to say she was right.

Although he’s much younger than my dear Grandmother, Tom Brown has been equally persistent in encouraging me to do more writing. I’m pretty sure at one point last summer, his exact words were, “You need to be writing. Why aren’t you writing?!”

Luckily, I was less resistant to Tom than my Grandmother and had fun writing about some of Maria Montessori’s books with Tom and our friend Chelsea Roberts.

I thought I was done with that writing exercise until watching a favorite author, Ta-Nehisi Coates, being interviewed recently. He was asked about why he writes. Coates said most people write to process their surroundings internally but that he writes because it helps him shape his world.

I just love that - writing as an active, powerful exercise that has an almost magical ability to change how we experience our world.

So in 2025, I resolve to publish more writing here.

In thinking about how to structure these posts, I’m reflecting on two key elements in Montessori education: following the child (observing and supporting each individual’s unique path of growth and learning) and the interconnectedness of all things (“All things are part of the universe, and are connected with each other to form one whole unity”).

This substack will be an experiment in putting these two principles into practice. A place to follow and explore the interconnectedness of my passions through writing intended to shape my world.

Come for the writing tightrope of integrating these topics:

• montessori

• sports

• education

• equity and social justice

• movies

• organizational leadership

• pop culture

Stay to be in dialogue, share insights, push back, and help co-shape an interconnected world.