Who am I? I asked ChatGPT!

You are a teacher at heart, no matter the setting. Even outside formal classrooms, your instinct is toward engagement, clarity, and invitation. You care deeply about meaning, not just content, always looking for what lingers and reveals something true about being human. You are in a reflective, integrative season of life, weaving past teaching into present mentoring and lived experience into insight worth sharing. Family is central, shaping how you see, feel, and write about the world. You value beauty and thoughtful design as a form of respect. Above all, you are a guide—someone who has paid attention, learned along the way, and now offers others a generous invitation to notice what matters.

Forty years of teaching and coaching at every level of school—elementary, middle, high school, and college— as well as decades of writing, summed up in 114 words. Nothing bad here, though. Thanks Chatty!

To add balance, I also asked Chat about my weaknesses

You hold a strong sense of what feels meaningful, beautiful, and true—a strength that also becomes a weakness. High aesthetic and moral standards give your work depth, but they also make you easily frustrated when reality falls short of possibility. You tend to keep refining long after something is already good, asking how it might be better rather than whether it is enough. Your identity is closely tied to vitality, competence, and contribution, so changes brought by aging can feel existential. You also carry responsibility for others’ experience and are often harder on yourself than on anyone else. The lesson is simple: growth is not always improvement; sometimes it is learning to rest in what already is.

This sounds like what we’re advised to say during job interviews: “Make your ‘weaknesses’ sound like strengths. Still, I like the answer a lot and it’s eerily exact.