(Un)conventional History Pedagogy
Hi. I’m Rimmey
20+ Years in the classroom of getting weird!
Why This Website?
Who Am I?
I spent the first chapter of my career at Topeka High School, where I taught pretty much every Social Studies course that wasn’t Psychology or Sociology (that’s not hyperbole, I checked). For nearly a decade, I also served as the Social Sciences department chair and the Director of Speech and Debate, which is a polite way of saying I spent a lot of weekends in high school spaces watching students argue about things with impressive conviction.
In 2024, I made the decision to teach closer to home because having three kids in elementary school will rapidly reorder your priorities. I started what I have lovingly called my “middle school era,” teaching Social Studies and a collection of electives that let me get genuinely weird with curriculum design.
Now (2025-present), I work as an academic interventionist and social studies teacher, which means I get to go deep on the question that has always driven me: how do we actually help students who have been left behind by the systems that were supposed to serve them?
Spoiler: play helps. AI helps. Curiosity helps. Generic worksheets, generally, do not.
What Can you expect from me?
What This Site is (and isn’t)
teacher’s plAIground is where I think out loud about the intersection of AI, play-based learning, and what it actually looks like to keep humans in the loop when technology is doing more and more of the heavy lifting.
This is not a “top 10 ChatGPT prompts for teachers” blog. There are plenty of those. This is a place for the messier, more interesting questions: how do we preserve curiosity in an era of instant answers? What does good AI literacy actually look like for a 16-year-old? Can a Funko Pop be a mastery check? (Yes. The answer is yes.)
The goal is to figure out how to keep teaching joyful, sustainable, and deeply human — even when the robots are very, very good at their jobs.
You’ll find blog posts, classroom-ready templates, resource collections, and the occasional YouTube series where I try to teach teachers to vibe code in under five minutes.
what else?
When I’m not Teaching
I have three kids, each named after a character from The West Wing, which tells you basically everything you need to know about me as a person. When I am not in a classroom or writing about classrooms, you’ll find me:
Expanding my Funko Pop collection (my classroom alone has roughly thirty of them, they are not a problem, they are a pedagogical tool, and I will die on this hill),
Reading comic books,
Getting thoroughly lost in the world of Azeroth, or
Running a tabletop RPG campaign with more lore than my students have ever seen in a textbook.
I am, in other words, exactly the kind of person who decided that the best classroom is one that looks a little bit like a toy store and a lot like a place where weird ideas get taken seriously.
Welcome to the plAIground. Glad you’re here.
