Teacher Side Hustles That Actually Fit Your Life (From Someone Who Gets It)

This post contains affiliate links. If you buy something through one of them, I earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.

The national average teacher salary is $74,200. That sounds okay until you account for the fact that most teachers spend hundreds of dollars out of pocket on classroom supplies each year, work 50+ hour weeks, and bring a graduate degree to a job that still can’t cover the rent in most major cities.

I’ve been in education long enough to know: the pay conversation isn’t changing fast enough. So this post isn’t about waiting for the system to fix itself. It’s about what you can actually do right now, in the margins of the life you already have, to build some financial breathing room.

A few things this post will do that most side hustle lists don’t:

  • Be honest about what these hustles actually pay (not just the best-case ceiling)
  • Help you figure out which one fits your schedule, energy level, and personality
  • Address the stuff nobody mentions — union rules, burnout, and the fact that you’re already exhausted
  • Point you toward the tools and gear you’ll actually need

Let’s get into it.

First: The Most Important Concept Nobody Explains

Before diving into the list, understand the difference between active income and passive income. It matters more here than anywhere else, because teachers are already time-poor.

Active income means trading your hours for dollars. Tutoring is the clearest example — you work an hour, you get paid for that hour, and when you stop working, the income stops too. It can pay well and start quickly, but it doesn’t scale.

Passive income means building something once that keeps earning. A resource you upload to your own store in August can sell every September for years. A blog post with affiliate links can earn while you’re sleeping, grading papers, or staring blankly at a faculty meeting. It takes longer to build but compounds over time.

The best strategy is to start with active income (faster money, lower barrier to entry) while building passive income in parallel (summer is perfect for this). Most of the hustles below are labeled so you know which type you’re looking at.

The “Start Here” Guide: Which Hustle Fits You?

Before scrolling the full list, answer these honestly:

You have 2–5 hours a week during the school year → Tutoring, freelance writing, building a resource store slowly

You’re an introvert who doesn’t want to talk to anyone → Selling your own resources online, selling printables on Etsy, blogging, curriculum writing

You want money fast → Tutoring, substitute at another district on days off, test administration

You have summers mostly free → This is your superpower. Launch a resource store, build a course, start a blog, do curriculum consulting — dedicate June to building something that earns through the school year

You want something totally unrelated to education → Freelance writing (non-education topics), voiceover work, reselling

Your district has a moonlighting policy → Read it carefully before tutoring students from your own school or district. Some contracts restrict this. The hustles that are always safe: anything online, anything not connected to your school community.

The Hustles

1. Sell Your Own Resources — On Your Own Terms

Type: Passive income (eventually) | Startup time: Medium–High | Earning potential: $100–$5,000+/month

Here’s something the “sell your lessons!” corner of the internet doesn’t like to say out loud: the big teacher resource marketplaces have real problems. Quality control issues, intellectual property concerns that have put some districts on alert, and commission structures that take a significant cut of every sale you make.

There’s a better approach, and it starts with owning your own storefront.

Payhip is what I’d recommend to any teacher who wants to sell their original resources. You set up your own store, upload your materials, and keep 95% of every sale — Payhip only takes a 5% transaction fee. There’s no monthly cost to get started, digital delivery is fully automated, and you can sell everything from worksheets and unit plans to full online courses and memberships from the same place.

More importantly, you’re building your brand, not feeding someone else’s marketplace. Buyers follow you, not the platform.

What to sell: Unit plans, assessment packs, rubrics, sub plans, behavior charts, parent communication templates, writing prompts — anything you’ve already made that solves a recurring problem. The materials likely already exist. You just need somewhere to put them.

One important note before you sell anything: Check your district’s contract. In many cases, materials you create specifically for your classroom during your contracted hours are considered works for hire, meaning the district holds the copyright. Materials you create on your own time, independently, are generally yours to sell. When in doubt, ask your union rep — not your principal.

Summer strategy: Use June to build 10–15 strong resources around your subject area. Get your Payhip store set up, write clear product descriptions, and have inventory ready before back-to-school season in August.

Tools you’ll need:

  • Canva Pro — the standard for making professional-looking resources
  • Microsoft Office — for layout-heavy materials
  • Canon PIXMA printer — for testing your own resources before selling (also has really great ink cost thanks to Megatank)

2. Online Tutoring

Type: Active income | Startup time: Low | Earning potential: $25–$80/hour

You’re already good at this. Tutoring is the fastest way to turn your credentials into cash, and certified teachers can command higher rates than uncertified tutors on most platforms.

Platforms worth looking at:

  • Wyzant — you set your own rate, keep 75% after their cut. Good marketplace for finding clients.
  • Varsity Tutors — pays per session, handles scheduling and matching.
  • BookNook — specifically hires K-8 reading and math tutors, pays $15–22/hour, fully remote.
  • Outschool — you create and run your own live online classes for kids. More setup, but you keep a higher percentage and build an audience over time.

The contract question: Before tutoring students from your own school, check your contract. Many districts restrict teachers from privately tutoring their own current students — not as a punishment, just as a conflict-of-interest policy. Tutoring students from other schools or districts is almost always fine.

What you need to tutor online professionally:

  • Blue Yeti USB Microphone — your audio quality is your first impression (Amazon affiliate link)
  • Ring light — makes you look like you know what you’re doing (Amazon affiliate link)
  • Wacom Intuos drawing tablet — a game-changer for math tutoring online; write out problems naturally instead of typing (Amazon affiliate link)
  • Portable second monitor — one screen for your student, one for your notes (Amazon affiliate link)

3. Selling Printables on Etsy

Type: Passive income | Startup time: Medium | Earning potential: $50–$2,000+/month

Etsy gives you access to a much broader audience than education-only platforms — buyers include parents, homeschoolers, and general consumers, not just other teachers. You can sell habit trackers, budget planners, classroom decor, parent communication templates, and anything else a creative educator might make.

The tradeoff: Etsy buyers aren’t always searching for education-specific content, so discoverability takes more work. It pairs well with a Payhip store — use Etsy for discoverability and traffic, Payhip for your full catalog and higher-margin direct sales.

Canva makes the design side very approachable. Design once, sell infinitely. Digital delivery is automated on both platforms.

4. Freelance Writing

Type: Active income (transitioning to passive over time) | Startup time: Low–Medium | Earning potential: $50–$500+ per piece

Teachers are strong writers. That’s actually a differentiator in the freelance market, where much of the content is thin and generic.

Education-specific opportunities:

  • We Are Teachers pays roughly $150/article and actively recruits teacher contributors
  • Curriculum companies (Amplify, Curriculum Associates, Khan Academy) hire freelance writers and curriculum developers — search LinkedIn for “freelance curriculum writer”
  • Education trade publications like EdSurge, Education Week, and Edutopia accept pitches

General freelance writing:

  • Fiverr — set up a profile, start with competitive rates to build reviews, then raise them
  • Upwork — better for longer-term client relationships, more competitive to break in
  • PaidWritingJobs – search for current, open writing jobs, updated frequently with new offers

The honest timeline: Freelance writing takes a few months to build momentum. Your first pieces will likely pay less than you want. Stick with it.

5. Online Courses

Type: Passive income | Startup time: High | Earning potential: $200–$5,000+/month

This is the highest-ceiling option on this list, and also the most work upfront. The idea: you know something deeply — your subject matter, classroom management, a specific teaching method, a skill you have outside school — and you package it into a course that people pay to take.

Platforms:

  • Payhip — yes, the same platform for selling resources also handles full online courses with videos, quizzes, and completion certificates. If you’re already building a store there, it’s the simplest starting point.
  • Teachable — well-designed, easy to use, good for beginners. Their affiliate program pays 30% recurring commission if you want to recommend it on your own blog.
  • Udemy — larger built-in audience, lower prices, but more discoverability for new creators
  • Outschool — specifically for live classes aimed at K-12 students. Less upfront work than a full recorded course.

Summer strategy: Build the course in the summer. The school year is when it sells. A well-made course on a specific topic — teaching fractions to struggling learners, running a high school debate team, ESL strategies — can sell to other educators for years.

6. Curriculum Consulting and Writing

Type: Active income | Startup time: Medium | Earning potential: $30–$100+/hour

If you have deep subject-matter expertise or experience in curriculum design, there’s a real market for your skills outside the classroom. Nonprofits, edtech companies, and publishers regularly hire teachers as consultants and freelance writers.

Start by updating your LinkedIn with specific curriculum accomplishments. Search for “curriculum developer freelance” or “instructional designer remote.” Platforms like Upwork and Contra are good places to build an early client base.

The pay range is wide — entry-level curriculum writing can pay $20–30/hour, while experienced instructional designers with a track record can command $75–100/hour or more.

7. Blogging with Affiliate Marketing

Type: Passive income (slow build) | Startup time: Medium | Earning potential: $0–$8,000+/month

This is the longest game on the list. It also has the highest ceiling for truly passive income, because a well-ranked blog post earns money indefinitely without additional work.

The basics: you write about things teachers care about — classroom tools, side hustles, books, professional development — and you embed affiliate links. When readers click and buy, you earn a commission. Amazon Associates is the easiest starting point. Programs like Teachable’s affiliate program, Canva’s affiliate program, Payhip’s partner program (50% lifetime recurring commission), and Grammarly (which pays $20 per premium signup) can meaningfully add to that.

Realistic timeline: most blogs take 12–18 months to generate meaningful income. A handful see results faster if they hit a good niche. Either way, you’re building an asset that compounds.

If you’re going to start a blog: Use WordPress with a reliable host. Install the Thirsty Affiliates plugin to manage all your affiliate links in one place — it makes updating links across your whole site simple when programs change.

The Tools: Your Home Office Side Hustle Setup

Whatever hustle you choose, these are worth having:

ToolWhy You Need ItApprox. Cost
Blue Yeti USB MicTutoring, recording courses, podcasting$100–$130
Ring LightAny video calls or recordings$25–$50
Wacom Intuos TabletOnline tutoring, annotating PDFs$80–$100
Portable MonitorSecond screen for multitasking$120–$180
Sony WH-1000XM5 HeadphonesFocus, grading, recording$280–$350
Canva ProResource design, printables, course graphics$15/month
Grammarly PremiumFreelance writing, course content$12–$30/month

All Amazon links are affiliate links. Purchasing through them supports this blog at no extra cost to you.

What Nobody Tells You

Burnout is real. You are already working one of the most emotionally and cognitively demanding jobs that exists. Adding a side hustle on top of that without intentional boundaries is a fast track to resentment and exhaustion. The hustles that work best for teachers are the ones with flexible schedules and work you actually enjoy — not just the ones that pay the most.

Start with one thing. The biggest mistake is trying three side hustles at once. Pick one, give it 90 days, and evaluate honestly before adding anything else.

Summers are your leverage point. If you have relatively free summers, that is a genuine competitive advantage most non-teachers don’t have. Use that time to build something — a resource store, a course, a blog, a consulting client base — so that when school starts again, you have income flowing without much active effort required.

Tax note: Side income is self-employment income. Set aside 25–30% of whatever you earn for taxes, especially if you’re pushing past $600/year on any platform. You’ll thank yourself in April.

The Bottom Line

There is no perfect side hustle. The best one is the one that fits your schedule, plays to your strengths, and doesn’t require you to give up the few hours of rest you actually need.

If I had to pick a starting point for most K-12 teachers: tutoring to build immediate cash flow, your own Payhip resource store to build passive income, and a real summer project — a course, a blog, or a consulting push — to build something with a longer ceiling.

You’ve already got the skills. The question is just where to point them.

What’s your side hustle? I’d love to hear what’s working — or what hasn’t — in the comments.


The Eclectic Educator is a free resource for everyone passionate about education and creativity. If you enjoy the content and want to support the newsletter, consider becoming a paid subscriber. Your support helps keep the insights and inspiration coming!

Book Review – The Lies of Locke Lamora

There is a moment early in The Lies of Locke Lamora where Father Chains — the blind priest who is not actually blind, and not actually a priest — explains to a young Locke Lamora exactly what kind of criminal he’s going to become. Not a common thief. Not a hired blade. Something more specific and considerably more dangerous: a con artist who targets the nobility of Camorr, the one category of victim that the city’s organized crime syndicate has quietly agreed to leave alone.

The Gentleman Bastards Secret. That’s what Lynch calls it. And the audacity of it — stealing from the most powerful people in a city run by criminals, hiding that fact from the criminals themselves — tells you everything you need to know about whether this book is for you. If that premise makes you grin, buckle in. If it makes you anxious about what happens when it inevitably unravels, also buckle in.

What It Is

The Lies of Locke Lamora is Scott Lynch’s 2006 debut novel, the first in the Gentleman Bastards series. It is set in Camorr, a fictional city that is essentially Renaissance Venice run by the mob — canals, ancient towers of alien glass left by a vanished civilization, a rigid criminal hierarchy, and enough filth and beauty coexisting in the same frame to make you feel like you’re actually there.

Locke Lamora is an orphan who becomes the most gifted con artist in Camorr. His crew, the Gentleman Bastards, pulls elaborate long cons against the city’s wealthy nobility — a category of victim so off-limits in the criminal underworld that nobody would think to look for thieves there. The book follows two timelines: the present day, where Locke is running his most ambitious scheme yet, and a series of interludes tracing his childhood and how he became who he is.

The comparison that keeps appearing in reviews is Ocean’s Eleven meets The Godfather. That’s accurate as far as it goes. I’d add: with the warmth of a found-family story underneath all the deception, and the gut-punch of grimdark fantasy when the plot decides to stop playing nice.

Why It Works

The thing everyone who loves this book mentions first is the voice. Lynch writes dialogue the way someone who genuinely enjoys language writes dialogue — it’s witty and foul-mouthed and character-specific in a way that feels earned rather than performed. The Gentleman Bastards bicker and insult each other constantly, and you understand their loyalty to each other precisely through the texture of how they argue. Nobody’s monologuing their feelings. Nobody needs to.

The dual-timeline structure is handled well. The interludes into Locke’s childhood do what flashbacks are supposed to do — they recontextualize what you’re reading in the present without dragging the plot sideways. By the time certain things happen in the present-day story, you’ve been prepared to feel them much more deeply than you would have if Lynch had told the story straight through.

Jean Tannen deserves particular mention. He is Locke’s best friend and the beating heart of the crew — a big, quiet, book-loving man who happens to be extraordinarily violent when the situation calls for it. The relationship between Locke and Jean is what gives the novel its emotional stakes. You root for the heists because they’re clever. You root for these characters because you genuinely care whether they survive.

The world-building is immersive without being oppressive. Lynch doesn’t stop the story to explain his world to you — he trusts the details to accumulate naturally, and they do. Camorr feels lived-in. The Elderglass towers feel genuinely strange. The criminal hierarchy feels as if it has a history that extends well before chapter one.

The Honest Part

The beginning is slow. This isn’t a controversial opinion — almost every review of this book, including the glowing ones, mentions it. The first fifty or so pages are dense with world-building and character setup, and the plot hasn’t found its footing yet. Lynch is laying track, not racing on it. If you trust the process, it pays off enormously. If you need momentum from page one, you might not get there.

The violence, when it comes, is not cartoonish. This is grimdark fantasy. People die suddenly and badly. Some of the deaths are genuinely brutal in a way that’s meant to be felt, not just processed as plot information. This is not a book that treats its violence as consequence-free, which I consider a feature. But it’s worth knowing going in.

There’s also the series situation, which I’d be dishonest not to mention: Lynch published The Lies of Locke Lamora in 2006, Red Seas Under Red Skies in 2007, and The Republic of Thieves in 2013. Book four has been in progress for over a decade with no confirmed publication date. If starting an unfinished series is a dealbreaker for you, that’s worth knowing. If, like me, you’ve long since made peace with the reality that some authors write slowly and the books that do exist are worth having, the first three are genuinely excellent.

The Verdict

This is one of the best fantasy debuts I’ve read. Lynch wrote a book that is simultaneously a heist thriller, a crime novel, a coming-of-age story, and a meditation on what friendship and loyalty actually mean when you’ve chosen a life built on deception. The pieces shouldn’t fit together as well as they do. They fit together perfectly.

The quote image I’ve kept from the original review captures the book’s energy better than most descriptions:

“When you don’t know everything you could know, it’s a fine time to shut your fucking noisemaker and be polite.” (Scott Lynch, The Lies of Locke Lamora)

“When you don’t know everything you could know, it’s a fine time to shut your fucking noisemaker and be polite.”

— Scott Lynch, The Lies of Locke Lamora

That’s the book. Clever, profane, self-aware, and ultimately warmer than it has any right to be.

Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars. (I bumped it up from my original 4 on reflection. The slow opening earned the half-star deduction; everything that follows earned it back.)

Get The Lies of Locke Lamora →

If You Liked This, Read Next

Red Seas Under Red Skies — The immediate sequel. Locke and Jean, new city, new con, new catastrophe. Different in tone (nautical heist rather than urban), equally entertaining.

The Republic of Thieves — Book three, and the one that finally explains the backstory of someone the first book only hints at. The most emotionally complex of the three published novels.

Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo — The most common recommendation for readers who loved Locke Lamora. Morally grey crew, elaborate heist, excellent found-family dynamics. Younger in tone — less grimdark — but equally compelling.

The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss — Lynch and Rothfuss debuted within a year of each other and were constantly compared in the mid-2000s fantasy scene. Rothfuss is lyrical where Lynch is propulsive, but both center on a protagonist who is the most gifted person in the room and knows it. Also an unfinished series, alas.

The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie — If the grimdark edge of Locke Lamora is what hooked you — the sense that consequences are real and survival is not guaranteed — Abercrombie is the natural next stop. Darker, bleaker, absolutely brilliant.

Filed under: the pile of books recommended to me by multiple people who know my taste, and whose recommendations were entirely correct.


The Eclectic Educator is a free resource for everyone passionate about education and creativity. If you enjoy the content and want to support the newsletter, consider becoming a paid subscriber. Your support helps keep the insights and inspiration coming!

How to Read and Take Notes Like a PhD Student (From Someone Near the Finish Line)

study hall
Photo by Lina Kivaka on Pexels.com

I wrote an earlier version of this post in 2023, partway through my doctoral program. Looking back at it, I can see the problem immediately: it reads like a summary of advice I’d read somewhere, not advice I’d actually lived.

Four years into my dissertation, near the finish line, I want to rewrite it properly. Not a listicle of tips. Not a summary of what PhD students are supposed to do. An honest account of what actually works — for reading comprehensively, retaining what matters, and building the kind of knowledge base that holds up under the pressure of original research.

Some of this applies only to doctoral work. Most of it applies to anyone who reads seriously and wants to remember what they read.

The Problem Nobody Talks About

Here’s the dirty secret of academic reading: nobody reads everything. Not the students, not the professors assigning the reading, not the scholars whose bibliographies look like small libraries.

The volume is genuinely impossible. A serious doctoral seminar can assign 300–500 pages a week. A comprehensive exam reading list might run to 150 books and several hundred articles. No one reads all of that cover to cover and retains it. The people who try to are usually the ones who burn out.

The skill isn’t reading everything. The skill is reading strategically — knowing what you need from a text before you open it, finding it efficiently, and processing it in a way that makes it retrievable and useful later.

That’s the entire game. Everything below is in service of it.

Three Modes of Reading (And Why They’re Different)

Not all reading has the same purpose, and trying to use one approach for everything is where most people go wrong. I work in three distinct modes, and switching between them deliberately has been one of the most important adjustments I’ve made.

Reading for Understanding

This is your slowest, most deliberate mode. You use it on texts that are foundational to your work — the sources you need to actually understand, not just reference. Dissertations are built on a handful of these. Everything else is commentary.

For this mode:

  • Read the introduction and conclusion first. For a book, this tells you the argument before you encounter the evidence for it, which makes the chapters comprehensible in a way they wouldn’t otherwise be.
  • Read chapter by chapter, pausing at the end of each to write a single paragraph — not a summary, but what I now think because of this chapter. That’s the difference between reading and learning.
  • Read footnotes selectively. They’re where scholars conduct their real conversations with each other — where they agree, dispute, complicate, and qualify. Some of the best sources I’ve found were in footnotes.
  • Write in the margins. I use Blackwing pencils for this — erasable, smooth, and they force me to be deliberate because space is limited. I use sticky flag tabs to mark pages I know I’ll return to.

Reading for Retention

This is reading you do with the explicit goal of remembering it months or years from now — for comprehensive exams, for situating your research within a field, for the kind of conversational fluency about a body of literature that you need to have by the time you defend.

Retention is not a passive process. Passive reading produces passive forgetting. What actually builds long-term memory:

Active recall over re-reading. After reading a section, close the book and write from memory what you just read. Not copying — reconstructing. The effort of reconstruction is what encodes the information. This is uncomfortable, and that discomfort is the point.

Note to your future self, not to the text. Most students write notes that are essentially paraphrases of the source. These notes are almost useless for retention because they still require the source to be meaningful. Write instead what you think the argument is, why it matters, and how it connects to things you already know. This takes longer and produces fewer words — and those words are worth ten times as much.

Spaced return. Come back to your notes on a source a week after you wrote them, then a month after. Add anything that wasn’t there before. The gaps reveal what you didn’t actually understand.

Reading for Research

This is your fastest, most surgical mode. You have a specific question. You need to know if this text addresses it. You don’t have time to read everything.

The tools here are underused by most students:

The index is your first stop, not the text itself. Establish your key terms before you open the book, then go directly to those entries. A 400-page book might have four pages that are genuinely relevant to your specific question. Find them in five minutes instead of reading everything, hoping to stumble across them.

Ctrl+F/Command+F for PDFs. Academic articles as PDFs are searchable. Use it relentlessly. The phrase you need is in there somewhere.

Introduction and conclusion first, always. Most academic books make their central argument in the first and last chapters. Read those before anything else. If the argument isn’t relevant to your project, you’ve saved yourself hours. If it is, you now know what you’re looking for in the middle.

Citation backward. When you find a source that’s directly relevant to your project, look at its bibliography. Follow the citations backward. This is how you map a field efficiently — one key text leads to the three texts it’s in conversation with, which each lead to three more, until you’ve traced the lineage of an idea.

The Note-Taking System That Actually Works

I’ve tried most things. The Cornell method, plain Word documents, elaborate Evernote hierarchies, and more. What I’ve landed on is a hybrid system that I’ve described in more detail in my Zettelkasten post, but the core principle is this:

Notes should capture what you think, not what the source said.

When I read something worth keeping, I write a note that answers three questions:

  1. What is the argument?
  2. Why does it matter — to the field, to my project, to how I think about this topic?
  3. What does this connect to that I already know?

That last question is the one most people skip. It’s also the one that determines whether the note is useful six months from now or just another thing you vaguely remember reading.

The Physical Layer

I use 4×6 ruled index cards for permanent notes — one idea per card, written by hand. The physical act of writing slows me down enough to think about what I’m actually trying to say. A date stamp goes on every card when it enters the system. Cards live in a card box organized by loose topic clusters.

For quick capture — ideas mid-reading, thoughts in a seminar, connections that occur to me in the car — I use a Field Notes notebook in my pocket. These are temporary. Their job is to get the idea out of my head. I process them into permanent notes later.

The Digital Layer

Notion is where my system lives at scale. Every permanent note that survives the physical card stage gets entered into Notion with tags, source references, and links to related notes. The search capability is what makes this invaluable — finding a note about a source I read two years ago takes seconds. (Affiliate link)

I’m currently experimenting with Obsidian as a complement, specifically using it with Claude Code to surface connections across my note vault that I haven’t made manually. If you want to go deep on this, Andrej Karpathy recently published a pattern for this — the LLM Wiki — that’s one of the most interesting developments in personal knowledge management I’ve seen. More on that in the Zettelkasten post.

What to Do With Academic Articles (The Specific Workflow)

Articles are different from books, and they get short-changed in most reading advice. Here’s my workflow for a journal article that matters to my project:

  1. Read the abstract, then the introduction, then the conclusion. In that order. This tells me the argument, its context, and its implications before I’ve read a word of the actual analysis.
  2. Skim the section headers. Most academic articles are structured to be easy to navigate. The headers tell me where the argument lives and where I can move faster.
  3. Read the parts that matter. For most articles, this is 40–60% of the text. The literature review often rehashes things I already know. The methods section may or may not be relevant. The analysis and discussion sections are almost always.
  4. Write the note immediately. Not after I’ve read three more articles. Right now, while it’s fresh. The note I write in the twenty minutes after reading an article is worth more than the note I write a week later from memory.
  5. Record the full citation before I close the tab. This sounds obvious. It is obvious. I’ve spent more time tracking down sources I didn’t fully cite than I care to admit.

The Tools

Physical:

Digital:

  • Notion — for the searchable permanent note archive
  • Obsidian — for graph visualization and the LLM Wiki experiment (free)
  • Zotero — free reference manager; essential for tracking citations across a large project

Books:

The Honest Part

Here’s what nobody who writes these posts usually says: the reading load of doctoral work is genuinely brutal, and no system makes it easy. There are weeks when I’ve read 400 pages and felt like I retained almost none of it. There are other weeks when a single 30-page article reshapes how I think about my entire project.

The difference isn’t usually reading speed or technique. It’s engagement. When I’m reading something I’m genuinely curious about, my retention is dramatically better. When I’m reading something I’ve convinced myself I “should” read, it evaporates.

This isn’t an argument for only reading what you want. It’s an argument for finding what’s genuinely interesting in even the readings that feel like an obligation — the question that hasn’t been answered, the argument you disagree with, the footnote that opens a door you didn’t know was there. Active curiosity is better than passive discipline every time.

Four years in, near the finish, what I’ve learned is that the reading never stops being hard. You just get better at finding the parts that matter, connecting them to what you already know, and making something out of them.

That’s the whole skill. Everything else is tools.

The physical tools I use for reading and note-taking — notecards, Field Notes, Blackwings, date stamp, highlighters — live on my Favorite Gear page. The deeper dive into the Zettelkasten system I use for organizing all of this is here.


The Eclectic Educator is a free resource for everyone passionate about education and creativity. If you enjoy the content and want to support the newsletter, consider becoming a paid subscriber. Your support helps keep the insights and inspiration coming!

You Can Just Print An Air Purifier

I don’t have the time right now, but when the ol’ dissertation is done, I can easily see a 3D printer getting heavy usage around these parts…

3D printers are one of the few pieces of technology in the last 30 years that are as revolutionary as they were pitched. It is easy to miss that fact, in part because 3D printing itself is a dorky little habit that produces a lot of embarrassing trinkets with visible layer lines, a technology that launched a thousand Iron Man cosplay masks. But the quality and speed of these machines improves yearly, and you can get a fantastic printer that handles multiple colors for less than $600 dollars and even cheaper if you go with eBay or know someone who is moving at just the right time. Access to a 3D printer can be a great way to repair an existing device, replace something you would otherwise buy commercially, or create something that the commercial market would never provide you.

Want to try this yourself? The printer the article is describing is real, and the current best-in-class for an enclosed home machine is the Bambu Lab P2S ($549 direct from Bambu). It’s the evolution of their best-selling P1S — fully enclosed, quieter, faster, AI-powered print monitoring, and built-in filament drying with the AMS 2. It handles engineering-grade filaments that open-frame printers can’t touch, and it sets up in about 15 minutes. Pair it with some HEPA filter material and you’ve got a DIY Corsi-Rosenthal box that actually works. The barrier to entry on serious 3D printing has never been lower.

Source: You Can Just Print An Air Purifier

3d printers

Artemis II Astronauts Witnessed 6 Meteorites Colliding With the Moon

The shock and awe on the face of the folks at Mission Control as they chatted with the astronauts as this happened…

  • During their flyby of the far side of the moon, the Artemis II astronauts aboard the Orion spacecraft saw as many as six flashes emerging from the lunar surface. Surprisingly, they were witnessing small meteorites impacting the ground and producing brief flashes of light.
  • NASA’s control room recorded the team’s surprise during the mission livestream, although the cameras did not pick up the flashes. According to the astronauts, the flashes were white or blue-white and lasted less than a second. The cameras they were using to document the moon weren’t fast enough to record them.

Source: Artemis II Astronauts Witnessed 6 Meteorites Colliding With the Moon | WIRED

moon and earth

The World’s Longest Outdoor Escalator Just Opened in China

More impressive infrastructure coming out of China…

The longest outdoor escalator system in the world is now running in Wushan County, China. At nearly 3,000 feet long, it carries pedestrians up 800 feet in elevation—around the height of an 80-story skyscraper.

The system is known as the “Goddess” escalator, and it’s made of 21 individual escalators, 8 elevators, 4 moving walkways and several pedestrian bridges. Riding all of them takes roughly 21 minutes.

“As far as I know, there are no similar projects nationwide, either exceeding or equal to ours, either under construction or already started,” project design lead Huang Wei, an engineer at China Railway Eryuan Engineering Group, tells the Financial Times’ Thomas Hale and Wang Xueqiao. “It’s the first of its kind.”

AI doesn’t write well, but neither do most people

Giles Turnbull has some thoughts on AI-generated writing:

First of all, I’ll come clean about where I stand, generally speaking: I’m an AI sceptic, especially on using AI for writing. I can see it being useful for other things – but that’s because I’m a writer, right?

I see AI generated text and most of the time, I think it’s rubbish. It’s dull, it’s derivative, it always sounds like a thousand other things I’ve read before. Because the AI has been trained on those thousands of things, all now easy to find on the internet.

But: do I think AI is quite good at making simple software, or basic web tools? Well, yeah, I have tried it for that, and I thought: “Hmm yeah this isn’t too shabby.”

And of course I would think that, wouldn’t I? I don’t know better. I’m not a software engineer.

I have a feeling that everyone likes using AI tools to try doing someone else’s profession. They’re much less keen when someone else uses it for their profession. I fall into the same trap as everyone else. I recognise, and admit to, my own bias.

Yes, using AI to do a job someone else does is fun. Ultimately, generative AI is an efficiency tool. Writing a first draft, especially for students who don’t have a lot of experience, is absolutely something AI can do for you. It will give you structure. It will help you overcome the blank page.

Should you then take up the writing task on your own? Sure. The only way to get better at writing is to write, whether it’s a human or AI.

Write more. Use whatever tools you have to get it done.

Source: gilest.org: AI and the human voice

Artemis II Mobile Wallpapers

Fear not, true believers. We can take our fascination with all things Artemis II on our phones. NASA has made a dozen mobile wallpapers available.

Here are a couple I enjoyed:

Earthrise from Artemis II
Solar eclipse from dark of the moon

Source: Artemis II Mobile Wallpapers – NASA

If these images gave you the itch to look up more often, a decent beginner telescope doesn’t have to cost a fortune. The Celestron NexStar 5SE is what I’d point someone toward — computerized, easy to set up, and will absolutely ruin you for earthly concerns. For something more affordable, the Celestron StarSense Explorer uses your phone to help you find objects and is genuinely magical for beginners.


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Never Ending School Reforms..

From Larry Cuban..

As students, professionals, and parents, in the 20th and early 21st centuries, I, and most readers, have been the objects of these reforms, their implementers, or simply observers. School reform, then, is not something distant or far removed from our lives. We have experienced school reforms repeatedly.

So, for me, school reforms have been as normal as breathing, eating, walking, reading, and writing posts for this blog.

Source: School Reform Again, Again, and Yet Again | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice