Episode Details

🧭 Episodic Synopsis

In this return conversation (since spring 2025), Dr. Joey Weisler welcomes back Dr. Adam Wolfsdorf—English educator, scholar, and author of Teaching in the Riptide—for a deep exploration of the moments in education that pull teachers off balance and force reckoning, reflection, and growth. Drawing on vivid classroom narratives, Dr. Wolfsdorf introduces the metaphor of the “riptide”: those unpredictable, disorienting moments that no amount of lesson planning or graduate training can fully prepare educators for.

Together, Weisler and Wolfsdorf examine obstructive and constructive subversions, unpacking how power shifts in classrooms when students challenge authority, disrupt norms, or exceed expectations in profound and unexpected ways. From a graduate seminar overtaken by cupcakes and balloons to a ninth grader’s devastatingly honest poem about loss, this episode interrogates what happens when teaching collides with humanity.

At its core, this conversation asks educators to rethink control, creativity, and compliance—arguing that meaningful learning often emerges not from obedience, but from ethical risk-taking, reflective restraint, and a willingness to sit with uncertainty. For anyone teaching in today’s trauma-aware landscape, Teaching in the Riptide offers both a warning and an invitation: the work will unsettle you—and that may be precisely the point.

📝 Show Notes: Key Ideas & Takeaways

• The Riptide as Pedagogical Reality Wolfsdorf defines “riptide moments” as those classroom experiences that disorient educators—moments where control dissolves and certainty disappears, yet reflection can transform futility into growth.
• The Illusion of Preparation Graduate seminars and teacher training often simulate idealized classrooms, failing to reflect the emotional, psychological, and social complexities students bring into real learning spaces.
• Obstructive Subversion When students challenge authority in ways that derail learning—such as boundary-crossing behavior—the educator is forced to navigate power, professionalism, and self-preservation in high-stakes moments.
• Constructive Subversion Not all disruption is harmful. Some of the most transformative learning emerges when students exceed expectations, reshape assignments, and radically reframe what is possible in the classroom.
• Power, Authority, and Fear The episode explores how evaluation culture, student ratings, and institutional pressure can make educators fearful of confrontation—sometimes leading to silence as a survival strategy.
• Creativity as Ethical Practice From poetry to video games to performance, creative freedom becomes a pathway for students to engage deeply without forcing therapeutic disclosure or retraumatization.
• Resisting Compliance Culture True learning, Wolfsdorf argues, is inherently radical. Obedience may feel safe, but subversion—when guided ethically—creates thinkers, not replicators.
• Educator Subversion The episode closes by challenging teachers to examine their own subversive identities, suggesting that comfort with personal nonconformity allows educators to better support student resistance and creativity.

🔗 Learn More About Dr. Adam Wolfsdorf

🔗 Get the Book: Teaching in the Riptide