The Firefly and the North Star
Exploring Vitality, Visibility, and the Quiet Power of Influence
“The best fame is a writer's fame:
It's enough to get a table at a good restaurant, but not enough that you get interrupted when you eat.”
— Fran Lebowitz
There is a difference between what glows and what guides.
In the hush of summer evenings, fireflies rise from the tallgrass like sparks from a forgotten flame — brief, bright, and pursued. Their flicker stirs something in us: awe, wonder, delight. They are beautiful not despite their impermanence, but because of it. To witness their light is to hold a moment of magic that resists permanence, to reach for something knowing it cannot be kept.
In the ecosystem of attention, the firefly reigns — a sovereign of spectacle, dazzling in its timing, captivating in its scarcity, impossible to ignore, and just as impossible to hold.
Above, in the deep expanse of the sky, the North Star holds its place not by force, but by rhythm — unchanging not because it resists movement, but because it rests at the axis around which the entire northern sky appears to turn. It is not the brightest point above us, nor the loudest, nor the most adorned by story. Its power lies in constancy, much like love. Long before coordinates or compasses, generations of seafarers, seekers, migrants, and dreamers set their course by its steadiness — trusting not in its spectacle, but in its refusal to disappear.
In a world of shifting light and noise, the North Star is not a performance; it is a promise — of freedom, of home, of hope, of presence.
This distinction between what demands to be seen and what endures is not simply poetic, it is pedagogical. Our students are not growing up in a vacuum of values; they are coming of age inside of an algorithm. They are asked to present their identities before they have had time to inhabit them, to translate their inner worlds into pixels and posture, to turn every moment of curiosity or connection into something quantifiable, consumable, and sharable. They are taught, in a thousand silent ways, that the measure of their worth lies in metrics, that to be unseen is to risk being irrelevant, and that influence is something you accumulate rather than something you cultivate.
This is not a crisis of technology.
It is a crisis of meaning.
And yet — beneath the algorithms and the endless scroll, beneath the curated performances and the quiet ache of comparison — there remains something older than the feed that many of our students can already sense. It rises in them as a kind of homesickness for a place they have never lived and a nostalgia for a world they have only heard about in fragments (the closest definition I can think of for this sensation would be found in the German language, a feeling called fernweh or “far sickness,” where a person has a longing for a distant place they have yet to experience and a desire to leave the familiar and experience the unknown), one where connection did not arrive with a ping, where presence did not demand proof, where friendship was not counted but felt.
They speak of it sometimes with longing they cannot fully name: a desire for the kind of life where people knocked on each other’s doors unannounced, where joy was not captured but embodied, where boredom gave way to creativity rather than content.
And when they speak it aloud, something stirs in those of us old enough to remember.
We remember what it meant to wait by the phone and to miss someone. We remember walking to a friend’s house just to see if they were home. We remember long stretches of summer with nothing to do but become ourselves. We remember laughing until our stomachs hurt and having no footage of it, no proof it ever happened, only the memory etched into who we became.
And we remember, too, the first time the glow of a screen began to replace the glow between us.
Slowly.
Subtly.
A trade of depth for convenience.
A shift we did not know how to name.
That memory — that ache — is not trivial.
It is the whisper of another way of being.
When our students carry it without having lived it, it means the longing lives on.
It means something in us still knows how to come home.
And home, in this sense, is not a destination fixed on a map, but a way of being remembered by the body — a rhythm that lingers beneath the noise, a deep knowing that predates the feed and outlives the scroll, a kind of presence that asks nothing of us except that we return to ourselves. It is the sacred quiet of being with others without the need to perform closeness, the slow unfolding of time measured not in images or analytics, but in shared breath, in laughter that leaves no record, in the kind of connection that cannot be captured because it was never meant to be consumed.
For centuries, across shifting borders and open seas, through war zones and wilderness, people have looked to the North Star not because it dazzled or demanded attention, but because in a sky of constant motion it remained — a steady, unwavering point around which the night quietly turned. Its power was never in spectacle, but in presence. It did not command or compete; it simply endured — long enough, faithfully enough, for those who were lost or wandering or exiled to find their way back to what mattered.
That kind of light does not push us toward chaos or consumption; it draws us toward alignment, toward a deeper kind of freedom.
Not the illusion of doing anything at any cost, but the liberating clarity of becoming who we are without letting go of where we are going.
This is the inheritance our students deserve — not the relentless pursuit of attention, not the disorientation of curated selves, not the pressure to package their humanity for a moment’s approval, but the quiet, vital knowledge that:
There is still a light that guides
without needing to be chased,
still a way to return
to what is true,
still a kind of influence
that does not burn out,
but
burns on.
Our students are stardust — not figuratively, but physically — made of the same elemental matter that once burned in the hearts of dying stars. As a huge Carl Sagan nerd myself, the realization that “we are made of star stuff” truly blew my tiny brain watching PBS in the afternoon as a kid eating sugary cereal and it has never left me. In the language of astrophysics, nearly every atom in the human body heavier than hydrogen was forged in the nuclear furnaces of stars that lived and died long before our solar system came into being. The carbon in our cells, the oxygen in our lungs, the calcium in our bones, the iron that carries oxygen through our blood — all of it was created in stellar cores under immense pressure and unimaginable heat, then scattered across the galaxy in supernova explosions that seeded the universe with the beginnings of life. This means our students carry within them the remnants of celestial fire, the ash of ancient light, the physical imprint of the universe's earliest acts of creation (just remember that the next time the teenager in your life rolls their eyes, says you don’t understand, slams the door, and declares you’re ruining their life — you are in the presence of sassy hormonal stardust). They are, quite literally, composed of continuity — born not into isolation, but into the long, unbroken story of matter becoming life, and life reaching back toward meaning.
There is nothing performative about their being.
Their existence is not content; it is cosmic.
The work of becoming vital instead of viral — of choosing resonance over reach, presence over performance — is not about retreating from the world, but about remembering how to walk through it without losing ourselves.
It asks not for silence, but for discernment.
It invites students to ask not only “How do others see me?” but “Who am I when no one is watching?”
What kind of light do I want to be?
This post is not an argument against wonder. It is not a dismissal of beauty or joy or shared moments of digital connection. It is an offering to those who feel the ache of impermanence, who sense the difference between an audience and alignment, and who long to help young people remember the kind of influence that does not rise and vanish, but deepens and endures.
To turn from the firefly is not to reject its light. It is to lift our gaze to something steadier.
If we are to educate and inspire students who do not merely perform their lives but truly live them — who do not just chase visibility, but shape culture from a place of deep integrity — we must begin with different questions.
Not “How can I be seen?” but “What do I stand for?”
Not “How many followers do I have?” but “What kind of future am I making with my presence?”
Not “How do I shine?” but “What guides me when the glow fades?”
This work was never meant to move at the speed of the scroll (but perhaps, as adrienne maree brown says, we were meant to “move at the speed of trust,” which is difficult to do when we know the highlight reels never reveal the truest stories), nor was it designed to please the algorithms or echo through hollow metrics of virality.
The work we are called to do hungers for truth, not trends. It asks nothing of spectacle and everything of presence. It is the kind of work that resists compression into soundbites or templates because it lives in the pauses, in the long-held questions, in the sacred, unquantifiable labour of helping young people name themselves in a world that constantly tries to rename them.
What follows is not a framework or a deliverable, not a tidy answer to a systemic ache, but an offering shaped by wonder and rigour, built for those of us who still believe that education is not the rehearsal of performance, but the remembering of wholeness.
What follows in this post are reflections, provocations, and field notes gathered for those who know that the most enduring influence does not blaze its way across the sky for all to see, but lingers softly above — a constellation stitched from memory, presence, and care — ready to be followed not for its brightness, but for its trustworthiness, for the way it holds us steady when everything else is spinning, for the way it leads us back to what is real.
“We are a way for the universe to know itself.”
— Carl Sagan
This, too, is the work of education — not to create stars that burn briefly for others’ applause, but to help each learner remember that they are already made of light, that their brilliance does not exist in isolation but in relationship. To remind students that they are not here to be singular and consumed, but to take their place in the constellation of all who have come before and all who will come after. The North Star is not the brightest beacon in the sky, nor the most admired — it is meaningful because it holds its place.
It is not followed because it demands attention, but because it provides direction.
It is not powerful because it shines alone, but because it orients everything around it.
And in a society increasingly untethered by the pull of performance and the false promise of constant connection, it is no wonder we feel lost.
After all, the tools we are given to be seen are not the same as the tools we need to be found.
This is where we turn now: from spectacle to orientation, from stardom to constellation, from fleeting glow to the light that guides.
Our students were never meant to become content.
They were meant to know what it feels like to be contented.
To feel the quiet joy of knocking on a friend’s door unannounced.
To ride their bikes without tracking the distance.
To be fully present in a moment that leaves no digital trace,
yet lives on forever
in the body
as a feeling
called
home.
For Students: The Light You Carry
To be a young person today is to come of age inside a mirror — each moment framed before it is lived, each gesture shaped by the possibility of reaction, each thought carrying the subtle weight of being seen.
The line between visibility and identity has grown so thin it is difficult to tell which came first: the self, or the image of it.
In a world lit by a thousand screens, even silence has become a performance; even presence must prove itself.
And yet beneath the noise, beneath the filters and algorithms and pressure to perform, there is something you feel at your core — a sense of deep knowing and a light.
There is a firefly flicker within you that whispers look at me — a beautiful longing to be witnessed, to be celebrated, to matter.
And there is also something older, deeper — a pull like the North Star — that does not beg to be seen, but simply offers direction.
It says, come with me and stay true. Walk this way, like RUN DMC featuring Aerosmith…
All jokes aside, it is important that you remember one thing:
You carry both.
You always have.
No app, no platform, no audience can determine which one you will follow. That is the sacred work of becoming — not of creating content, but of cultivating self-trust, of listening inward before broadcasting outward, of remembering who you are without the filter. In the stillness between notifications, between the scroll, and in the quiet spaces where you are no longer being watched, you are free to ask: What kind of light do I want to be? What kind of world do I want to help create?
These questions are not easy.
They are not designed for likes.
They may not impress anyone (the horror, Marlon Brando, the horror!).
…But they will shape everything.
This is where we, as educators, must stand beside you — not to shame your longing to be seen, but to honour it and expand it.
Not to pull you away from fireflies, but to remind you that you are made of stars.
To offer you spaces where your worth is not calculated in clicks, but felt in the depth of your presence.
In our classrooms, we can help name the North Stars that guide you and create the kind of community where your light does not need to compete in order to belong.
So we ask you — not for the sake of a post or a grade or a performance, but for the sake of your becoming:
When do you feel the pull to share something online? What are you truly reaching for in those moments — connection, validation, joy, relief? And what do you need that cannot be found in a comment section?
Have you ever changed something about yourself — how you dress, how you speak, what you believe — because of what you thought would be most accepted or admired?
What is something meaningful you have done that no one saw, that exists only in memory, in feeling, in impact?
How does it feel when someone sees you — not because you’re trending, but because they were paying attention with their whole heart?
Do you want to be followed, or do you want to walk beside others who are building something that lasts?
What would it mean to carry influence that does not vanish — but settles in people like warmth, like clarity, like something that stays?
You are not here to be branded, to shrink yourself into something that fits neatly into another’s narrative, to be reduced or re-shaped to fit the contours of an algorithmic void. You are here to live a life that echoes with authenticity, to craft meaning that cannot be contained in the confines of a digital square.
Your worth is not in the number of eyes that catch your light, nor in how brightly you flicker in the midst of a hundred others.
You were not made to chase the fleeting glow, but to carry something deeper, steadier — something that endures beyond the next scroll or click.
In this moment, and in every moment that follows, you can choose to remember:
You were not made to be caught or consumed.
You were made to belong to something far greater, far more enduring.
And that something,
that guiding force,
is already in you,
quietly leading you home.
Field Notes for Educators: Holding the Sky Still
To teach in an age shaped by performance is to stand at the edge of a current that moves faster than language, a current that tells our students — quietly, constantly — that who they are is only as valuable as how they appear, that attention is affection, that to be known they must first be noticed, and that to disappear from view is to risk being forgotten.
Each morning, they arrive having already been measured — by algorithms, by timelines, by platforms that do not love them but depend on their hunger and insecurities.
They come carrying a mirror that was handed to them before they had time to know their own reflection.
And still, they come.
And still, we teach.
The work before us is not to pull them from the world they know, but to widen it. Not to shame the architectures of performance, but to carve space where something else might take root — reflection that precedes reaction, integrity that does not demand an audience, connection that resists the need to be proved or posted. We are not here to lecture about attention spans or decry devices. We are here to return to what was always true: that education is not the practice of producing, but of becoming.
That a classroom can still be a constellation.
That teaching can still be an act of resistance against the narrowing of what it means to be human.
The notes that follow are not instructions but invitations towards a pedagogy that remembers the long game.
Normalize the Pull of Performance
To come of age in this moment is to inherit a culture where being visible is often confused with being valuable, where the need to be witnessed becomes entangled with the need to be worthy, and where the constant pressure to appear becomes a substitute for the slower, deeper work of becoming. Within our classrooms, we are not tasked with condemning this impulse, but with naming it — gently, truthfully, and without shame — so that students might begin to see it clearly for themselves.
When we acknowledge the hunger to be seen not as a flaw, but as a longing for recognition that runs as old as story, we open the door to reflection rather than reaction. We create the conditions for students to explore what lies beneath the scroll — the desire not to impress, but to connect; not to be liked, but to be understood. And from that place, we begin the real work: not of disconnection, but of deeper connection, with themselves, with their values, and with the kind of presence that does not require performance to be real.
Reclaim the Language of Influence
The digital landscape has altered the lexicon of connection, teaching students to speak in a language shaped by algorithms, where leadership is often reduced to like-ability and intimacy is indexed through metrics that offer the illusion of proximity without the labour of relationship. When we use words like “followers,” we are not merely describing a digital function — we are reinforcing a narrative of hierarchy, control, and spectacle. In our schools, we can begin to loosen that grip. We can invite students to interrogate the words they have been given, to notice how these terms frame their understanding of self and other, to ask who gets to lead and why, and to imagine alternatives — co-conspirators, collaborators, co-dreamers — words that do not flatten power, but redistribute it.
In reclaiming language, we offer students not only new vocabulary, but a new vision of influence: one grounded in reciprocity, rooted in care, and committed to the slow, steady work of mutual transformation.
Model the Unseen Work
In a culture obsessed with optics, we risk forgetting that some of the most radical forms of leadership live in the realm of the invisible. The pauses before we speak, the conversations we hold off the record, the decisions we make not for attention but for alignment — these moments do not generate metrics, but they shape the moral architecture of our classrooms.
When we share these stories with our students — the times we chose to tell the truth even when it cost us, the moments we held a boundary with compassion, the invisible scaffolding of care that keeps a classroom intact — we reveal a version of success that is grounded not in image, but in integrity.
Our students are watching, always.
They notice when we walk away from what is easy in order to stay close to what is right.
And when we make that visible, we teach them that influence does not have to be loud to be lasting.
Create Rituals That Centre Reflection
In systems structured around production, we must create counter-rhythms that honour stillness, inwardness, and depth. Reflection is not an afterthought or a luxury — it is a form of resistance against the speed that strips us of ourselves. When we make space for students to pause — not to evaluate their output, but to trace the arc of their presence — we offer them a way back to themselves.
These moments of reflection do not need to be elaborate.
They might begin with a single question, such as:
When did I feel most aligned with who I want to be?
Where did I lose myself and how did I return?
Over time, these moments become more than check-ins; they become touchstones. They become the soil in which discernment grows.
And in that soil, students begin to understand that their interior world matters — not because it will be graded or viewed, but because it will shape the way they move through every other world they enter.
Reimagine Storytelling as a Collective Act
The culture our students navigate teaches them that stories matter only when they are singular, sensational, and self-contained — something polished, packaged, and ready for consumption.
But storytelling, in its oldest forms, was never meant to serve the self alone.
It was meant to bind, to teach, to braid, to share, to honour, to belong.
In our classrooms, we can return to this understanding by creating environments that centre co-authorship over ownership. Group projects become opportunities not just for collaboration, but for co-creation, for relational shaping, for discovering what emerges when we stop asking “who did what” and start asking “what changed in us because we did it together?”
When students begin to see that story is not something we tell alone, but something we build in relationship, they begin to recognize that meaning is not found in the spotlight — it is found in the shared light we carry with and for one another.
Offer Experiences That Ground Their Light
Every day, the world outside our classrooms demands that students shine in ways that are extractive — ways that drain rather than nourish, that measure rather than understand, that burn fast and leave ash.
Inside our classrooms, we have the opportunity to offer another kind of light: one that is rooted, relational, and restorative.
This might look like inviting students to keep an invisible impact journal, recording acts of kindness or courage that live outside the reach of social media, but remain imprinted in memory. It might look like designing projects that must be done anonymously, where the meaning lives not in recognition, but in the quiet satisfaction of having done something that matters. It might look like gathering in circle and naming the values that hold us upright when the ground feels unsteady, or examining together who gets to be seen in the world and why, and how we might expand our definitions of influence to include those who lead without needing to be followed.
These are not enrichment activities.
They are the architecture of belonging. They are the groundwork of liberation.
They are how we help students remember that the light they carry was never meant to be consumed — it was meant to be trusted.
Teaching from the heart will rarely ask for the spotlight and it will not reward urgency; it does not arrive with fanfare and it will not deliver the instant feedback loops that modern culture has trained us to crave. Still, it remains the kind of work that steadies everything else. It is slow, intentional, relational. It happens in the pauses between lessons, in the glances that say “I see you,” in the questions that do not seek right answers but deeper truths. It happens when a student begins to trust that their worth does not depend on how many people are watching. It happens when a moment of silence becomes a turning point instead of a void.
Our role is not to compete with the scroll; it is to offer an atmosphere where students can return to themselves. We are not here to keep up. We are here to hold a centre that does not simply flicker but fosters, to model what it looks like to shine without spectacle and lead without being followed.
In a world that confuses visibility with value, we become the quiet reminder that influence is not something you chase — it is something you carry.
The students who walked beside us through that remembering may not have had the language for it in the moment, but they felt it — they felt what it meant to be seen without needing to be spectacular, to be held in a space where their worth was never tethered to their output, their performance, or their proximity to a screen.
I have watched students lay down the weight of their social media identities not because I demanded it, but because something quieter began to rise in them — a clarity, a calm, a deep sense that they were already enough.
Some of them would later tell me that they still think about those years, that they left our classroom with a different relationship to attention than their peers, that they scroll less, compare less, want less. They told me they could not believe someone could live a life so full — wild adventures, famous people, extraordinary experiences with photos and videos shared only with the people it was intended for in the room where their shock, laughter, and reactions were exchanged in real-time instead of the obligated click of a “like” from someone unknown, somewhere afar, behind the glow of a screen. A person who lived it all while living it up and never posted about it, which made it feel all the more real and even more true.
Seeing a classroom of forty sixteen-year-olds simultaneously have their minds blown as it all clicked — that was something else entirely.
That was sacred…and hilarious.
Then came the questions: But how are you so well-informed without social media? How do you even know these people? I saw a picture of you performing on stage, Ms. K! What is happening?!
I would laugh and tell them that I came from a different generation — one still glowing from the ‘80s, no Wi-Fi required, powered by mixtapes and after-school walks, a generation that had street lights instead of ring lights and bought a movie once on VHS for $2.99 and can still watch the same VHS tape decades later with my family at our cabin on the lake without paying a monthly subscription, a generation whose “followers” were their little siblings and who logged off by going outside, never needing to announce when they were having a good time. But the students, always sharper than some adults give them credit for, would quickly point out that their parents — many of whom were close to my age — were as tethered to their devices as anyone, just scrolling through their feeds while warning their kids about “screen addiction.” They spoke often about the hypocrisy of being told to unplug by the very people who couldn’t look up from their own phones to make eye contact while lecturing them.
I remember one student saying that my life was made to “go viral,” but that it was “cooler” that no one knew. I laughed and said that in a world where attention was cheap, privacy was a luxury — joking that the word “viral” sounded a little gross and it was better to be vital. The parties were better — learning about it through a network of phone calls and flyers, nowhere to be but in the moment with the people there. The concerts were better — with hundreds of lighters in the air instead of the show being framed by a hundred screens, which begs the question of why someone would pay money to watch a concert through their screen instead of what was happening in real-time. After all, we could never have moments now like Queen performing “Radio Ga Ga” at LiveAid because no one would clap their hands together in unison since they would have to drop their phones.
I also mentioned that if they ever wanted to end up backstage, on the guest list, or asked to join in on the wildest, so-called “coolest” adventures, they had better ditch the phone — because no one interesting wants to hang out with fans or followers, only friends. Friends who know how to just be present, be real, and know how to have a good time without expecting anyone to be posing, posting, or “on” — preferably the kind of friend without content-creator energy or self-assigned paparazzi duties, please and thanks. All joking aside (again), what that student was trying to name was not “coolness.”
It was wholeness.
It was the kind of influence that does not glow for applause but radiates because it is real. The kind of presence that does not ask to be seen, but helps others feel seen. The kind of life that does not require documentation to leave an imprint. They recognized something that could not be duplicated, replicated, filtered, finessed, or curated: that there is a different kind of influence, a different kind of presence, a different kind of freedom that comes from living a life that does not ask to be seen in order to matter.
They felt it in that room.
And they carried it forward.
What stays with me is the thought that those students, now grown and rooted, are not holding devices in front of their faces, but carrying a light in their hands — not a phone lifted to capture the content-curated moment while they miss present moment, but a torch held steady to brighten and (en)lighten the way for those still coming up behind them. There is something deeply comforting in knowing they got a glimpse of the good stuff of what life was like before the scroll swallowed everything and that this life could be possible — the slow joy, the sacred stillness, the unposted life that is well-lived — even with the pressure to conform, perform, post, and curate.
In that small, steady glow — in the choice to leave their phones behind on camping trips, to show up fully at gatherings, to protect something sacred from being flattened into content — I saw something that felt like freedom. Not the kind of freedom we are sold in endless scrolls, advertisements, sponsorships, and curated feeds, but the kind that lives in quiet resistance, in relational clarity, in presence that does not need to be proven. The realization that every time you leave the house without a phone, you find the whole world.
Some of them became North Stars for their own circles — choosing alignment over attention, choosing to guide rather than perform, inspiring peers and siblings to commit to the ultimate #ThrowbackThursday by using their phone as only a phone. Students expressed that their friends and families would comment about how the beauty of this shift was not just in the reduction of screen time, but in the reclamation of something far more precious: their own lives.
What they witnessed in these moments was not only a break from technology, but a reclaiming of time, of joy, and of real connections.
We would have deep conversations after-school about how these digital spaces, which often feel like harmless entertainment, are actually undermining the very foundation of our democracy and how you could see the evolution of how the algorithm shaped a person’s identity in the “real world” by locating their first post and pinpointing the moment they made a conscious (or unconscious) decision about what, how, and who they would post next depending on what received the most engagement or likes. Social media culture cultivates a world of performative connection, where we exchange likes and emojis instead of thoughtful words, and where curated identity becomes a mask worn for the digital crowd. The very notion of influencers — those who make their lives a public spectacle for profit — has been normalized to the point where we overlook its emptiness.
The students and I would discuss how those small choices, those little hints of validation, start to dictate everything that follows. What began as a single, authentic moment quickly gets distilled into a brand, a carefully curated image and how we are all susceptible to it. As Tristan Harris, a former Google design ethicist, points out in his talks: we are all social primates and social media has created a “race to the bottom of the brain stem.” The students would comment on how they watched documentaries about the impact of social media and were surprised (and a little offended) that the creators of these platforms did not permit their own children to use them because of the long-term impacts and side-effects psychologically and physiologically, but had no problem exposing the children of others to the harm. My students, many of whom were idealistic and believed in the power of people to make change, were surprised by how easily the system had been corrupted. They understood, in a way that I had not fully anticipated, that the platforms built on the need for likes, followers, and engagement are the same ones fuelling political unrest, crimes against humanity, environmental apathy, mental health crises, and the spread of hate speech.
The students could see the dangers clearly: the quiet erosion of critical thinking, the way certain voices rise to the top while others are drowned out, the manipulation of young minds who are still learning how to engage with the world. For many, this realization was not simply an intellectual curiosity — it was a call to action. They recognized the power they hold as the next generation of leaders, creators, innovators, educators, and activists. They began asking: How do we reimagine spaces of connection that aren’t built on division, surveillance capitalism, and performance? How do we push back against a system that rewards superficiality over substance? They began to see that true power lies not in the number of people who follow us, but in the number of lives we touch in meaningful ways beyond the static of spectacle.
In doing so, they showed the people around them that a beautiful life does not need to be broadcast.
Because when your life is already lit from the inside,
you don’t need the flash.
For those of us in education, this is the work we have been called to do — no one signs up to become an educator in order to be influencers or to gather followers. We have been drawn to this profession out of a deeper responsibility to educate, inspire, and cultivate young humans into learning, becoming, and finding who they are and explore the infinities of who they could become. To help students recognize the expansive possibilities inherent in their spirits and to foster minds that think critically, that connect deeply, and that are capable of showing up fully in the world. In order to do that, we must first model what that looks like.
What we offer in our classrooms, in our communities, in the quiet rituals of presence and the everyday courage of showing up with integrity — it may not always be seen, but it is always felt. We may never know which words lingered, which pauses mattered, which unseen choices became someone else’s compass, but that is the nature of real influence: it does not demand recognition. It simply moves through the world with intention, reshaping the atmosphere it enters.
Perhaps that is the quiet revolution at the heart of this work —
not to go viral,
but to go vital.
To live and lead in ways that do not centre visibility, but meaning. To help our students grow into people who know how to walk away from the noise, who know how to stay soft in a hard world, who do not need to be watched to be whole. People who know that their presence is not a product, their story is not a brand, and their light — steady, grounded, true — is more than enough to guide them forward.
Not all light is meant to be chased.
Some is meant to be trusted.
The kind that does not flicker for approval, but holds its place even when no one is looking.
In a world that teaches our students to brand themselves before they have even met themselves, let us offer another way. We are not here to teach them how to perform their worth; we are here to help them remember it and to name the difference between attention and care, between applause and alignment. To show young people who look to us for guidance that being followed is not the same as being valued and that going viral is not the same as being vital.
To become people who do not simply glow, but guide.
After all, some lights lead not by shining the brightest, but by never fading.
The firefly may catch our eye.
But it is only the North Star that brings us home.
No likes, no followers, just vibes and long bike rides,
Ms. K
P.S. for Nostalgia Overload: Explaining Napster to students brings me a joy I cannot possibly express in this blog post — 10/10, would absolutely recommend dropping it into class just to witness their reactions if the opportunity presents itself. Consider it a pro tip from the major leagues, from yours truly.
Their minds were blown when I told them I still have files from back in the day — the kind of bootleg B-side from an out-of-print album that only existed in one guy’s record collection somewhere in New Orleans and has never, and will never, appear on Spotify. These uploaded files of vinyl tracks traded on forums that felt more like potlucks than platforms. The files that would end their evolution mislabeled as “Track 01,” burned to a CD with Sharpie, tucked into a binder in your car. This blending of analog and digital, community and catalogues, was wild for students to comprehend for one particular reason.
They couldn’t believe the Internet was once so...folksy.
…Minus the dark web.
…And a lot of pixelated flame graphics and suspicious pop-up ads.
If you were there, you remember: waiting twenty-seven minutes for a single song to download, praying no one picked up the phone. The heartbreak of a corrupted file. The joy of a perfect mix burned for someone you really liked.
Before “Do Not Disturb,” we had “BRB”…and people actually just left you alone until you were back without multiple texts waiting for you or notifications? Wild.
Somehow, without apps or algorithms, we still found each other.
Still made playlists.
Still had parties.
Still had presence.
Still had magic.
No followers. No clout.
Just vibes, viruses, and very questionable file names and email handles.
This post-script is for every wistful elder millennial who still thinks burning a CD is a love language.
Aux-cord or bust! 🙌🏽
