This is the personal website of Christopher Shoup
I'm Christopher Shoup, a former world history teacher, nerd and optimistic curmudgeon. I'm currently working in retail; I'd like to grow and have an impact on my community and my world while being the best friend and person I can be. These are my thoughts
I deeply love learning. This website is where I will share with the world any updates I find interesting, or updates about my own path through the major projects I've started on.
The projects on which I've started tend to fall into a couple of buckets. My first career, one to which I may return one day, was as a high school social studies teacher. A substantial part of my life and intellectual energy has been spent on both the subject matter on which I was expected to be expert - world history, economics, politics, etc - and the science and practice of pedagogy, that is, how we teach and learn. While I am not currently teaching, I remain interested as ever on this topic. I hope to learn more about these topics, and to create things which are useful to those still in the field.
Related to that, as a social studies teacher, I am deeply interested in the ongoing evolution of our society, and how we can make it better. It's not enough to learn from the past and about how people learn and think and grow, if one doesn't have a keen interest in making sure that knowledge and information is put to good use. As such, I am constantly fascinated by what makes good policy, and what makes good politics, things unfortunately, there is not always tremendous overlap. But I hope to explore the ideas of good policy, and share what I think is right and ought to be done when I can. I am not so grandiose in my own estimation of my own reach to think I'll have much impact, but it would be nice to do what I can. I'm sure I'll embarrass myself, I'm sure I'll be wrong about many things, and I'm sure I'll take controversial stances, to which some might object. I hope only to do so in ways that are in keeping with an ethos of trying to do what I can to make the world a better place for all its inhabitants and to enhance the liberty of the individual and the stability of society
Additionally, I love technology. If I hadn't ventured into obsessing at an early age about history and politics, I think there's a very good chance the last 20 years of my life would have been focused instead on information technology and computer systems. This is something I'm still interested in and why you're reading a website I'm coding entirely myself. It's one of just a few projects more in the technology space than the social sciences space on which I'm always tinkering. I hope to turn this website into somewhere to host my long form thoughts about things, but also to chronicle my work towards building some interesting, accessible things with technology. These interests will certainly all coalesce and bounce off each other now and then but they break down into four buckets into which I'll largely separate my thoughts.
This whole space is a work in progress, but keep an eye on it. It's bound to grow, and, hopefully, be interesting.