I didn’t plan to become the person schools call when they don’t know what to do about AI. But honestly, I didn’t plan most of my career — and I’ve come to see that as a feature, not a flaw.
I started college in 1998 studying computer engineering. I thought it meant working with computers all day, which sounded great — until I realized I wanted to work with people. I’d always naturally talked to friends and family about health and nutrition, so I switched to a nutrition degree on a pre-med track. Medical school seemed like the logical next step.
Then life moved faster than the plan.
I ended up selling mortgages — mostly on commission — during what felt like a stable, even exciting time in the housing market. But by spring of what should have been a strong year, something felt off. Months went by with almost no commission checks. The crash that made headlines in 2008 was already quietly happening for people like me, long before it had a name. I had a toddler, I was a single mom, and I needed to figure out what came next.
Nursing school made sense on paper — my degree transferred well and the pay was good. But the hours were impossible for a single parent. So I pivoted again, this time to teaching. Best schedule for a mom. That was the logic.
What I didn’t expect was how much I would learn.
One of my nursing instructors had told us early on: problems are always multifactorial. If you truly want to help someone, you have to look at the whole picture. That idea stuck with me — because it turned out to be how I already thought. In nursing, I learned that the difference between medical and nursing philosophy is that nurses are trained to see the whole person, including their family, their community, everything that shapes who they are. That felt natural to me in a way I didn’t yet have words for. I was a systems thinker before I knew that was a thing.
In 2011 I got handed a math class — my license was for biology, but the school had a need and I said yes. And I loved it. Math had always felt like a puzzle to me. But I quickly saw that for many of my students, it felt like something closer to a source of shame. I also saw, up close, how a well-intentioned curriculum reform could fail in practice — not because the ideas were bad, but because implementation is its own problem entirely. A program that can’t meet students where they are isn’t really a program yet. That lesson would come back to me many times.
Eventually I burned out. I left teaching in 2015 and started Solvent Learning — first as a tutoring business, then as a space to build the kind of math resources I wished had existed for my students and their families.
And then in 2019 — just a few months before the world turned upside down — I started homeschooling my son.
That experience changed how I think about learning more than anything else in my career. What I discovered is that learning is natural. Kids will learn without curriculum, without structure, sometimes without much intervention at all — when they’re encouraged to explore their curiosities and given the space to be creative. I started saying it out loud: parents are kids’ first and most effective teachers. What I also learned is that my years as a classroom teacher were actually a hindrance at first, not an advantage. I had to unlearn a lot of what school had taught me about what learning is supposed to look like. That process — deschooling, it’s called — was humbling and clarifying in equal measure.
As he moved through high school, I started studying economics seriously — day trading, markets, the forces shaping the labor landscape he would be entering. The two of us would talk about it regularly: what was actually changing, what it meant for his future, what skills and knowledge would matter in a world that looked less and less like the one we’d planned for. By the time he graduated in 2024, AI was at the center of every one of those conversations.
I’d actually been using AI writing tools since 2021 — nothing dramatic, just practical experiments in my curriculum work. But in 2022 I was watching Bloomberg and they were covering this new chatbot called ChatGPT. Something about the way they were talking about it made me stop. This wasn’t the usual tech hype cycle. Something was actually different this time.
I went to go see what it was.
That was the beginning of a few years of hands-on experimentation — using AI in my curriculum work, watching it evolve in real time, learning its limits as much as its capabilities, developing workflows that actually held up. And the more I learned, the more I kept thinking about the schools, the districts, the administrators trying to navigate this without independent guidance. About the parents assuming schools had it figured out. About the communities with the most at stake and the least support.
I knew this territory. I’d spent over twenty years in it.
About This Site
During my years working in schools, I spent time as a District Wellness Manager running a federally funded health initiative. It was my first real view of how policy moves through a district from the inside — and what I learned there has never left me. When the grant wasn’t renewed — not because the work didn’t matter, but because no one had built in the right accountability structures from the beginning — I understood something fundamental. Without the right frameworks in place, institutions end up getting rid of good programs and keeping bad ones. Not out of malice. Just out of the absence of evidence.
That lesson is more relevant now than it’s ever been.
AI is moving faster than the guidelines, faster than the research, faster than the curriculum, and faster than most of us were prepared for. Nobody has the complete picture yet — not parents, not schools, not policymakers. That’s not anyone’s fault. It’s just the reality of living through a shift this significant, this fast.
My job is to stay close to what we do know — the research, the emerging policies, the frameworks being built in real time — and make it useful for the people making decisions right now. Not because I have all the answers. But because someone needs to be paying close attention, and I’ve spent a long time learning how to translate what I find into something that actually helps.
I also believe — and this doesn’t come up enough — that AI has the potential to level the playing field economically in ways we haven’t seen before. The returns available to an individual with a device, an internet connection, and the right knowledge are real. But only if the people who stand to benefit most have access to clear, honest, independent information. That’s the gap I’m trying to fill.
This site is my lab and my notes. It’s where I share what I’m reading, what I’m thinking through, and what I think it means for the families and communities navigating all of this in real time. Some posts will speak more to parents. Some will speak more to educators. Most will be for anyone paying attention to the world our kids are already living in.
At the heart of everything here is one question:
How can we make sure the next generation is ready for the future that’s actually arriving?
Where to find me:
💼 LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/miaprimas
☕ Discord — for the ongoing conversation, the half-formed ideas, and the community: [link coming soon]