About Us
Why Modern Teacher? Why Now?
This project began in a classroom in Chicago’s West Side, a place where brilliance, pressure, joy, austerity, and structural abandonment collide every day. As a CPS math and physics teacher working in North Lawndale, I have watched students navigate systems not designed for them, shoulder burdens they did not create, and still show up with resilience that no standardized test will ever measure.
At the same time, I found myself tracing the ideological infrastructures beneath the surface of “best practices”: the rise of algorithmic learning systems, the displacement of teacher judgment by corporate “innovation partners,” and the expanding reach of philanthropy into public governance. I began asking uncomfortable questions:
What exactly is the curriculum designed to do, and for whom?
Who benefits from the rhetoric of rigor, data, and evidence-based practice?
Why do so many reforms feel like autopsies of learning instead of its amplification?
It became clear that this was part of a larger struggle over the meaning of public education: whether it will remain a human right grounded in dignity and collective flourishing, or whether it will be hollowed out by efficiency metrics, privatization, and the dead weight of compliance culture.
Our Story
rigormortis.org is the archive and evolution of that struggle.
It gathers essays, action research, surveys, reflections, and provocations produced across the course, tying them back to lived reality in the classroom. It is part portfolio, part research notebook, part political intervention.
This site is for teachers who feel their agency shrinking beneath the weight of pacing guides, data dashboards, and algorithmic personalization;
for scholars who understand that curriculum is always ideological;
for students who deserve learning that nourishes them rather than disciplines them;
and for anyone fighting to keep public education public.
In North Lawndale, and across CPS, rigor has too often meant something done to students and teachers, not for them. But rigor in its truest sense is vitality: intellectual struggle with purpose, creativity, community, and freedom.