One Year Later

It has been one year since I have been on Substack

One year ago this week, I published my first Substack.

I didn’t really know what I was doing. I knew the framework I was bringing: behavior, reinforcement, environmental contingencies, grounded in years of working in classrooms. But I didn’t yet know what it meant to apply that thinking publicly, in writing.

Initially, I wrote about how I changed after October 7.

Underneath that, I was reacting to something harder to name: the realization that the systems I had trusted were not functioning the way I believed they were.

So I started writing. What I didn’t expect was how much the writing would change me.

I came in with a framework: the science of how environments shape what people do, think, and become. It was a lens up until recently; I had spent my career applying it in classrooms.

After October 7, I started applying it everywhere.

The question that drove me then is the same one that drives me now:

What is being reinforced?

What behaviors are rewarded? What behaviors are protected? What quietly disappears when no one is watching?

That question followed me through conversations about literacy and institutional failure. It followed me through harder conversations about antisemitism, radicalization, and what we are actually teaching the next generation.

The surface issues changed. The reinforcement patterns didn’t. But here is what I didn’t expect to find: my voice.

A way of looking at the world that is mine, built from the science I know, the things I’ve witnessed, and the willingness to say what I actually see rather than what is comfortable.

Finding that took longer than I thought. There were stretches where I went quiet. Not because I had nothing to say, but because I needed to be sure I was saying the right thing for the right reasons.

I needed to read more, test my assumptions, and understand opposing arguments on their own terms. I never want to become reactive in the very ways I critique.

That discipline of slowing down and looking beneath the surface at the incentives is now part of how I write. It is part of the voice.

How people learn to process information does not begin in adulthood. It begins in classrooms.

A year ago, I was questioning whether the systems I trusted were functioning as intended. Now, I see the patterns more quickly, and I understand the incentives driving them.

I am clearer about what I am doing here. The science holds. It always holds.

Systems select behavior. Institutions reproduce what they reinforce. Cultures stabilize around repeated contingencies.

Understanding that is a map, and maps allow you to build. I am still learning to use it in public. But I am using it. Year two starts now. Thank you for being here for year one.

Photo by Nick Morrison on Unsplash