Months before the semester, I go for walks.
Not to draft anything. It is practically a walking meditation, in a good place, and I am just talking.
About the student, mostly. Where they actually are, as opposed to where a syllabus would assume they are. What they should really be trying to learn. What I want them to be able to communicate at the end of it, which is a different question and usually the harder one.
And then the awkward practical things that decide whether a course works. Where does AI enter — the beginning, or the middle? Introduce it too early and it does the learning. Too late and you have taught them a world that no longer exists. What exercises would actually make this land?
It is not just curriculum, really. It is everything.
Somebody is always there
What makes this possible is not a feature. It is that there is someone to talk to, all the time, for months, who is listening to every bit of it.
Taking copious notes. Remembering the thing I said in March that I had forgotten by June. Holding the whole shape of a course that does not exist yet while I wander around the outside of it.
Then, eventually, I say the only sentence that matters.
Put it all together.
And by the way — make sure I have the workbooks. I am going to need the lectures. The tests. Go ahead and write the textbook.
I can do all of these amazing things now, and I still find it extraordinary.
Why this entry is different from the other eleven
Every other row in this ledger works the same way: form an assignment, hand it over, receive an artifact. A scheduled task is stated once and runs. An analysis is a dataset and a question. Even a book begins with me asking what the best way to communicate something is.
This one is not a task at all.
It is a conversation that runs for months without producing anything, and then produces an entire course in one instruction. The work was not the assembly at the end. The work was the walking, and something was there for all of it.
The ideas you have while walking
This is the part I would want another teacher to understand.
Thinking has always happened on foot. That is not a new observation. What is new is that it no longer has to be lost.
The ideas you have while walking are the ones you used to lose.
For most of my life the good version of a thought occurred somewhere inconvenient, and the version that survived to paper was a weaker reconstruction of it, written later, at a desk, by someone slightly more tired. Most of it did not survive at all.
It is the same problem as the blog that sat empty for eight years. The thinking was never the scarce part. The capture was.
Curriculum, and method
There are roughly 12 of these — the smallest number in the ledger, and the one everything else quietly depends on.
A curriculum is a method pointed at a person. It has to work on a student who arrives with a question I never anticipated, which is the same test a method has to pass: if it only works on the example you had in mind when you wrote it, it is an instruction wearing a method’s clothes.
That is also why encoding one properly matters so much. A method engineered once and reused costs more the first time and nothing every time after. A method taught conversationally, through twenty corrections, costs every time and survives nothing — the same error as teaching five machines the algorithm in your head, and as scheduling work whose method you have not settled.
The hardest part was never writing the procedure. It was finding out what my method actually was, which usually meant discovering I did not have one. I had a habit, and a habit performs well right up until somebody asks you to hand it to someone else.
Months of walking.
One instruction.
A course.