I’ve always followed the rules.
Even as a child, games weren’t just pastimes—they were sacred rituals. Monopoly, Risk, Life, Hearts, Chess, Uno—each had its order, its structure, its codes. When I played, we played by the book. No house rules, no shortcuts. I learned early on that rules weren’t there to ruin the fun—they were there to create it; to control it. Rules gave shape to chaos. They ensured fairness. And perhaps most importantly, they promised an ending. A properly played game of Monopoly, for instance, ends as it should: with one victor, one collapse, a narrative arc that resolves.
It’s only when rules are bent—when people pool money under Free Parking, refuse to declare bankruptcy, or endlessly trade in bad faith—that the game spirals. The structure unravels. And the game never ends.
That belief in structure, in clarity, in rules that lead to resolution—it followed me. Into adolescence. Into adulthood. Into my career as a researcher. Data, I believed, was sacred. But not just data—methodology. Results only mattered if they were earned through process, through purpose. I was never interested in numbers for their own sake. I wanted to know what they meant, how they fit into the larger pattern, how they might guide us toward something true.
And yet…
There are days—too many now—when I feel like I’m not analyzing the data, but drowning with it as a millstone tied around my neck.
When I look at Ferdinand Gueldry’s The Great Rotary Press of the National Printing House, I see more than a technical marvel. I see myself. I see my work. The press is massive, relentless, glorious in its industrial precision. Workers swarm over it—feeding, adjusting, stacking. Paper flows like water. Everything has its place, its role. But the beauty of the painting is deceptive. Look closely, and the weight begins to show. The posture of the men. The sameness of the labor. The rhythm that has become routine. The press doesn't stop. It cannot stop. And so they do not stop either.
Some days, I feel like I am working in that paper mill.
But instead of paper, I process people.
I work through an online program. I do not teach in the traditional sense. I manage students—students whose names are tied to progress bars and dashboards. They log into a platform that delivers their courses. My role is to make sure they stay on track, to monitor the numbers, to nudge them forward. I am part coach, part counselor, part taskmaster. Sometimes I feel like a factory foreman. Other times, like a ghost haunting a digital hallway.
The system is efficient. Brutally so. But efficiency, I’m learning, is not the same as education.
My students come to class every day—but only as a matter of course. Most of their real work happens in the margins: on phones during work breaks, in bedrooms in the quietest hours of the night, half-asleep and wholly overwhelmed. They eek along 1% here, 1% there. Their education is scattered, stitched together from scraps of time and energy. It’s not a journey; it’s a survival mechanism.
And I try. I do. I encourage them when I can. I motivate, cajole, celebrate. Sometimes I threaten consequences. I try every tool in the box to spark something. But there are days when I don’t feel very effective.
Some students succeed. Some fail. And others… others just fade away.
They vanish into the community, into silence. They stop responding to emails. They stop logging in. Their dashboards go cold. And just like that—they’re gone. No sendoff, no closure, no final conversation. Only absence.
It is one of the quiet tragedies of my work: watching a name disappear, knowing I might never hear it spoken again.
The goal has shifted I tell myself. Quietly, almost imperceptibly. Once, we aimed to cultivate minds, to awaken curiosity, to teach students how to think, how to wrestle with complexity. Now, the goal is graduation. Completion. Numbers. We are judged not by the depth of student learning, but by how many pieces of paper we can print by May.
The diploma—a symbol I once revered—now feels hollow. What does it stand for? Achievement? Mastery? Or merely compliance and endurance?
The press keeps running. And I keep feeding it.
But I am not a machine. I know my students are not machines either. I see the wear in their eyes and hear it in there voices when they appear in my room, or speak over calls, or linger in silence behind a screen barely awake. I read between the lines of their excuses. I hear the panic in their text messages, the shame in their delays, the ache behind every “I just need to get done.”
I don’t blame them. I don’t even blame the people above me.
I don't believe there’s a single villain in this story. No corrupt official or cold-hearted administrator. If anything is to blame, it is the expectations pressed upon education by the society it serves. By the parents and voters who demand results. By the policies written far from the classroom. By the culture that measures worth in outcomes instead of effort, in numbers instead of nuance. In that way, we are all to blame. And we are all caught in the same trap.
And that means we all share responsibility—for how this system functions, and for what it becomes.
I return to Gueldry’s painting.
The lighting is beautiful. The composition, masterful. The press gleams under the skylights. But what draws my eye, again and again, are the faces. The men aren't unhappy. But they aren’t joyful either. They are resolved. Dutiful. Worn.
And that, I think, is the danger.
To become resolved to the rhythm of something that no longer nourishes you. To keep turning the crank because the machine must run, because the numbers must rise, because the rules say so.
Still, I remain.
Not because I love the machine, but because I love the people caught inside it. My students are not data. They are not dashboards. They are not paper. They are stories in motion. Souls in transition. And I will keep showing up, day after day, trying to be human in a system that forgets what that means.
Maybe that’s what resistance looks like now: not shouting, but staying. Not revolution, but remembrance.
To bear witness to those who are still here.
To mourn those who’ve faded away.
To keep the press from flattening us entirely.