As a pediatric endocrinologist and a mother, I care about the same things every school leader cares about: children who can think clearly, focus deeply, stay safe, build strong relationships, and grow into capable young adults.

The question I find myself asking isn't whether children should learn technology. Of course they should. The question is whether technology should be shaping so much of childhood.

Parent-teacher conferences move fast. You get a folding chair, a glance at their school projects, and about twelve minutes before the next family is up next. In this limited time, most of us ask what we can measure: How’s her reading? Is he keeping up in math? Anything I should know about? These are all good questions, but they don’t address the part of school I care about most, which is whether my kid is learning to live well among people whose lives look nothing like hers.

Here’s the sentence I’d tape to every family’s fridge and every teacher’s desk: fifteen minutes a day, every day, outlasts a themed activity or month every single time. Why? It's the power of compounding.

A “Countries of the World” week in April is a lovely photo op. What actually shapes a kid’s intercultural being is the small, repeated practice, the map that stays up, the question that comes back around, the habit that becomes a reflex.

Teachers can make classroom time fun. They can turn a story into an interesting debate. Or a worksheet into a game. Still, there’s only so much energy a classroom can hold. Four walls become small when kids’ curiosity gets big.

Field trips give that energy somewhere to go. They give students a break from the classroom. At the same time, they keep learning alive. Kids get to see and touch real spaces. It wakes something up in them. A kind of excitement to learn that doesn’t always show up during desk work.

Thriving as our true selves—fully present, not halfway—is how we grow into who we are meant to be. When we show up wholeheartedly in each moment, we plant the seeds of the skills that lead to fulfillment and happiness. Throughout my career in education, I have explored varied teaching methods, searching for what truly nurtures a child’s growth. Over time, I have learned that effective teaching is not only about strategies; it is about people.

This morning, I stood at the kitchen counter with a bowl of blueberries we'd just picked, holding warmth from the sun, dappled with raindrops, still. Deep purple-blue, dusty with that silvery bloom that tells you they came off the bush and went nowhere else first (we are NOT mentioning the many that were sampled while picking. IYKYK). 

Picking blueberries today (the best kind of grocery run)

After almost two decades of publishing Wandering Educators, I can usually tell by the second paragraph whether a submission was written by a person or created by a machine.

It is rarely one big thing that stands out to me. It’s a series of smaller things, stacked up and causing unease in my brain: the rhythm, tidy paragraphs, sentences that all land at the same length, like fence posts. There is a complete absence of anything you could point at.