For years after becoming a classroom teacher, I wondered if I was truly a professional. People said I was a professional, but I didn’t get paid all that much and, unlike my lawyer buddies, I never had time for a game of tennis at lunch.

In 1996, with a gold Honda hatchback full of books and camping gear, I moved to New Mexico.

It’s rush hour and it’s raining. I’m on my way to Trader Joes to forage for dinner when my car decides to slip into a coma (note to self: stop buying cars at places that sell über-crappy, budget jerry-rigs).

It’ll be a few years before we know how well we’ve done in choosing Joel Boyd as our new school superintendent. Judging by the district he came from, and the people on his transition team, he seems to belong to the new generation of school reformers—a bold class of data-driven leaders who use good business practices to transform school systems into sleek, well-run learning machines.

It’s sacred coffee time on the patio, that time of day when silence is supposed to reign. I pay attention to the slow migration of the sun each day—it has begun rising each morning just a tiny bit further to the south—and watch the birds settle into the day’s routine.

I’m at the Aztec, which isn’t actually newsworthy, because I’m here every week—be it for the kale salad, the loose-leaf yerba mate or the free wi-fi (OK, and the free wi-fi). But I’m not here to milk a single glass of South American tea while rewriting my website; I’m here for the Starseed.

For this year's Best of Santa Fe issue, columnist Seth Biderman offers three of the best options for reforming Santa Fe Public Schools.

A few years ago, I stopped reporting on Los Alamos National Laboratory. I was no longer confident in my ability to remain objective when writing about the nuclear weapons facility. There’s no way I can pretend that the development and manufacture of nuclear weapons is a good idea, no matter where it’s done. And I’ve interviewed too many people whose stories turned my stomach.

Too old for Rock Camp. Too lame for Guitar Workshop. Not talented, invited or naked enough to join The Sticky. My chances of making music with others are looking imaginary, at best, which makes sense given that I can’t play any of my guitars—bass, acoustic, classical or electric—at all.

In the banter about how to improve education, you don’t hear much about homeschooling. Though it’s on the rise nationally, with three support groups in Santa Fe (including the Santa Fe Homeschool Association, with over 200 families), home schooling is often dismissed as a fringe practice of the religious and the radical, an economic impossibility, a sure path to geekdom for the kids. Common wisdom holds that parents should help with homework and Halloween fairs, but schooling in the post-industrial age is a high-stakes, complex affair, best left to officials and pedagogues.