Jamie Banks

How I Learned to Love Photography and Art Museums with a Visual Processing Disorder: From Disability to Ability to Delight

December 1, 2025

I used to think I just wasn’t a visual arts person. This limiting belief was scientifically proven, I insisted, when I was diagnosed with a disorder of visual processing. Brains, of course, are plastic. Whatever my brain’s true visual limitations, I surely haven’t reached them. So I got back into the visual during the pandemic, … More How I Learned to Love Photography and Art Museums with a Visual Processing Disorder: From Disability to Ability to Delight

I speak Latin to read and connect

October 29, 2025

SPEAKING Latin? What an obnoxious party trick. Or are you a priest? Sounds fake. Anyway, we’re serious scholars in this department. That’s all wrong. I learned to speak Latin so I could read it more fluently. I teach Latin through spoken immersion when I can for that reason: it’s effective. And more fun–even BECAUSE it’s … More I speak Latin to read and connect

The Humanness of Whizardry

August 27, 2025

That Pi Day a 2nd grader beat out 12th graders in the school-wide recitation contest and left the auditorium with a mouth full of pie. I’d known of the child–a whiz with numbers, his Lower School teachers said. We can’t get him into our class stories the other kids love. After Tim’s big upset win … More The Humanness of Whizardry

Teach Them Fighting Words

August 16, 2025

One day it had gotten to that point and I was in the German School director’s office big mad about racism. We’re allowed to speak in English if we absolutely need to: if it’s urgent, say, medically or emotionally. It might have been easier for barely-intermediate me…but dammit, I was gonna show her I was … More Teach Them Fighting Words

Earn Your Judginess (On Reading Ginsberg’s “Howl”)

October 17, 2023

Ewwww, Ginsberg? Kerouac? They were so blasé in their politics, if you can even say they had any. Counterculture just because. Horny, spoiled white bros playing at radical leftism. Hard pass. I’d carried around that knee-jerk reaction to the Beats for over a decade. I’d heard classmates I couldn’t (wouldn’t) take seriously rave about them, … More Earn Your Judginess (On Reading Ginsberg’s “Howl”)

Ars Poetica Topologica

September 30, 2023

I come back and back to a sense of my writing as topology, traveling the Möbius strip to confirm yet again that it is one and not more ways I write. An article is a directed graph, mostly from A to B, its degree limited. We start and have way stops and end, if we … More Ars Poetica Topologica

Free Mathing, like Free Writing

September 17, 2023

Yesterday afternoon I found myself sprawled on the couch, eyes half open, the concepts of dot product, cross product, projection and determinant swimming around in my head. It’s worth noting here both that I studied up through a MS in math and that I’m no longer a mathematician professionally. I came upon these concepts idly … More Free Mathing, like Free Writing

Deutsch: meine Sprache zum Tanzen

April 2, 2021

Es ist nicht falsch: die deutsche Sprache besitzt ungeheuerlich lange Wörter. Kann jemand wie ich, der an ADHS litte, sogar mich aufmerksam halten, wahrend „Aufmerksamkeitsdefizit-Hyperaktivitaetsstoerung“ ausgesprochen wird? Das Word „Kühlschrank“ ist ja cool, aber es klingt nach etwas eher bei einem Tatort als in der Küche. Solche zusammengefügte Wörter haben den Ruf der Sprache bei … More Deutsch: meine Sprache zum Tanzen

Scientific methods, not method: going back to the sources for Francis Bacon

April 1, 2021

The natural philosopher Francis Bacon is well-known (among historians of science…) for his Novum Organon that rejected much of Aristotle’s theoretical method (the Organon) and sought to establish methods of investigation that intimately bound empiricism and abstract reasoning. In the blitz history of science given in science classes, he’s one of the people cited as … More Scientific methods, not method: going back to the sources for Francis Bacon

Maria Popova: A Dear Mentor I’ve Never Met

February 17, 2021

Maria Popova is a thought-hero of mine. She’s not an idol—rather, at my best thinking self I try to be her apprentice. No, we’ve never met. And yet, as is manifest in her writing on years of written correspondence between women who admire each other intimately, we can seem to ourselves to know a soul … More Maria Popova: A Dear Mentor I’ve Never Met

Jamie Kenneth Banks

Teacher, Coach, Polyglot, Storyteller

Author: Jamie Banks