Day One

First, I'm a social worker.

• A decade with people in hard moments — detox, youth services, families in crisis.
• So I care about people before machines — and about your agency.
• 10+ years in New Orleans classrooms; taught math across the city; certified coding instructor.
• Featured on Fox 8 & WDSU for bringing AI into a New Orleans classroom.

When AI arrived, schools split two ways: ban it, or let it do the thinking.

Both fail you.

I built a third way. You are a sophomore. You have three more years of school ahead of you, and the tool that lets you skip all of it is one tab away. This class teaches you to work well anyway — using the same tool everyone else is using to work badly.

The goal was never to make you AI users. It's to give you a study habit that survives every tool you'll use for the rest of your life.

I build with AI that runs on my own machine — not rented from a company.

That's power with (local) versus power over (cloud).

We'll get into the real difference next week — how it works, and why it matters for your privacy and your power.

I build the tools I use — not to sell, not to scale — and I share everything I make.

The power of AI to learn faster than you could alone — and to still know what you learned when the tool is gone.

You will not be expected to write a line of code from scratch, if you don't want to. You will be expected to think.

What do you expect from this course?

Capture (optional) → Google Form (primary) · looseleaf backup — same prompt either way.

Now the rules — and they come directly from everything I just said.

No-tolerance cell-phone policy.

Your attention is the one thing no tool can give back. A phone that runs you is power over you.

Devices and AI, used with intention — instruments you direct, with your data protected.

Local-first is why I can promise your work stays yours.