On teaching and learning…

Learning is remembering how you fixed a mistake.

That idea sits at the center of how I teach. Whether the subject is statistics, social theory, criminology, or the history of ideas, learning happens when we realize that our first understanding was incomplete, superficial, or wrong, and then work through the process of correcting it. If you remember how you did that work, you’ve learned something real. If you only remember the conclusion, you haven’t.

Because of this, my classes are built around doing the work of thinking, not performing fluency. Students are expected to struggle, rethink, re-read, and try again. I design courses so that confusion is visible and productive rather than private and paralyzing. Learning is uncomfortable, but it doesn’t have to be humiliating.

I don’t treat students as deficient or broken. I treat them as people navigating real constraints, like limited time, uneven preparation, paid work, debt, family responsibilities, health, and exhaustion. Especially in the American university, learning is materially and emotionally costly. Those costs are unfairly distributed, and pretending otherwise doesn’t raise standards; it just hides power. My responsibility as an instructor is to work honestly within these constraints while refusing to naturalize them.

I guide students through difficult material, but I don’t walk the path for them. I can suggest useful routes and warn against dead ends, but learning requires risk: making mistakes, exposing uncertainty, revising one’s thinking in public. This requires resilience and care, not just intellectual discipline, but attention to the body and mind doing the work. Self-care is not a buzzword in my classroom; it’s a practical condition of sustained thinking.

Two norms structure my courses from the first week. The first is the principle of charity: interpreting arguments in their strongest, most reasonable form before criticizing them. This applies to readings, classmates, and to me. It makes disagreement sharper, not softer, and it prevents critique from sliding into caricature. The second is care for oneself and others: recognizing when material is difficult, when emotions run high, and when support is necessary to continue engaging rather than withdrawing or lashing out.

My teaching emphasizes close reading, synthesis, and accountability to evidence. Students learn to track arguments, identify assumptions, and connect ideas across texts rather than treating readings as isolated opinions. I use collaborative reading tools (i.e. Perusall) and structured discussion not to reduce rigor, but to make the labor of interpretation visible and shared. When students arrive in class, they are prepared not just to repeat what they read, but to complicate it.

Assessment in my courses is designed to measure intellectual growth, not compliance. I experiment carefully with formats that minimize busywork while still requiring real engagement. Evaluation is unavoidable, but it should be fair, transparent, and aligned with what actually matters: whether students can think more clearly, more critically, and with greater care than when they began.

People sometimes note that it’s hard to tell what my own views are in class. That’s intentional. My role is not to produce agreement, but to model how arguments are built, challenged, and revised. Authority in the classroom should come from preparation, clarity, and honesty, not from intimidation or performance.

Teaching, for me, is continuous with my other work. Like sound art, it involves attention, structure, repetition, interruption, and listening. Like political analysis, it involves refusing easy answers and staying with complexity long enough for something sharper to emerge. And like all meaningful labor, it takes place inside imperfect systems that we can neither ignore nor fully escape.

If you were a student in one of my classes, my hope is that you remember not just what we studied, but how you learned to think differently—and how you learned to fix your own mistakes.