NYC people: sign this. The tech guys have convinced people that their power is inevitable—we can prove otherwise. actionnetwork.org/petitions/pl...

Wallace Stevens, pointing up at the sun, whispering “that’s a brave man right there”

I love teaching, I will very likely do it here in nyc until I’m too old to do it, but I do not love that because of my job I’ll always be a guy with a backpack on his commute.

“mushy, often unsatisfying consensus” is a great way to put it.

“it truly appears that Whitman was born with liberty in his veins and raised by bald eagles” is maybe one of my favorite phrases in 12+ years of essay grading?

New post: What happens when teachers are cut off from the discipline they teach? How is HS English becoming codified, commodified, & captured by corporate interests and administrative functionaries? Where do we go from here? #edusky #literacies #academicsky open.substack.com/pub/trevoral...

On a slide from a student presentation entitled “Mr Yeats: The Masks He Wore and Wrote”

Something fun to think about is the fact that over 180 languages are spoken by families who send kids to the school system I work for/will raise my kid through

About to kick off a unit about sad dads

3-RUN HOMER FOR ROBERT JR. 💥

they're quite serious about influencing k12 curriculum and college admissions

People reading books on the subway: boom, yes People reading library books on the subway: BOOM, YES

Quite a trio of virtue boys

Check out @presspassnyc.bsky.social too!

NYC people: sign this letter asking Mamdani to fund access to journalism in NYC schools. The lack of journalism programs in school—we’re at about 25% of schools—is one the many brutal outgrowths of misguided ed reform. nam10.safelinks.protection.outlook.com?url=https%3A...

Think it’s important for teachers to model the conviction that easier work is not necessarily better or more rewarding work, and that’s a big part of my weariness over tech, prescribed curricula, etc.

Mets opening day in an NYC classroom when the kids are “revising essays” ⚾️

Talk about a lot of big ideas-y stuff in these parts but this is actually what most of my job is like

Why

Can someone please explain to me how so many people have been convinced that “good curriculum” is a concept that has never occurred to teachers and has only recently occurred to school systems?

Going to use poems this week to teach the kids about writing sentences well—we’ll pay attention to things like thoughtful punctuation, surprising or thoughtful word choice, the creation of suspense in unfolding an idea

Grading/mets/cat

Every time I’m in Union Square I think about how Tammany Hall, the seat of power for New York for decades, is now a Petco

I forgot how funny it is that literally everyone in Dorothea’s life is like “ew lmao what dude, that guy really sucks” at the outset of her relationship with Casaubon

You ever think about how weird it is to see education as a business opportunity?

Very unlikely that my kids will go on to be English majors—but hopefully they get that you don’t need to professionalize or major in order to think like this for the rest of your life

I don’t know which system he’s referring to, but the one I’ve worked in for the past 13 years has aligned itself pretty explicitly with a mission to teach kids reading/writing skills divorced from that rich thematic content he describes. Not sure if it works.

Wallace Stevens’s titles!!

A fascinating and frankly disquieting read about the contradictions in American attempts at antifascist schooling

The teens have requested a Middlemarch book club

Hello from the City Council committee hearing on the mayor's proposed budget for libraries. I am here representing LibraryPAC. @zohrankmamdani.bsky.social campaigned on a .5% baseline budget for public libraries and what we got was neither 5% of the expense budget nor a baseline. librarypac.nyc

“Is a good life tempting people? Should we promise a bad life?”

Have spent the past 13 years teaching the children of immigrants and will continue to until I retire. Can’t even begin to explain how infuriating this thread is, but it’s worth a read.

I thought about ending with that as it's an argument I've made elsewhere!

“what should we do?…Block the data center, demand the moratorium on AI in schools, and tap into the growing backlash from parents across the political spectrum about the big tech take over of our schools.” One possible outcome of this: books, real writing, real thinking in schools.

Have a student deep in the thick of an essay about Breton, and she keeps coming to me with poems and ideas, half-written paragraphs and outlines, and it’s been a really welcome reminder of the fact that the best thing about English class is brainstorming and planning

Mom did not like Wuthering Heights

ICYMI

I’m glad that people are talking about tech being bad for student learning. The point of that, though, is not merely that tech is bad. The point is that teacher autonomy, which enables authentic relationships between students and their kids, is good for student learning.

My students have now read a 21st c American novel—The Namesake—and written about it. Now they get to pick their own 21st c American novel and then write about what the novel form can tell us about American life today. Question: what would you consider HS canon 21st century American novels?

Ha this book is so interesting! Arranged as a series of pages/scraps found in a garbage bin in an NYC school in the ‘60s.

One fun thing about the JSTOR lesson tomorrow is that a bunch of my kids are about to find out that writing about poets can be an actual job

Doing an intro to JSTOR lesson tomorrow, which feels at this point like introducing them to use a microfiche reader. They will get 7,000 sort of confusingly arranged results, and they will filter and explore until something sticks.

Endorsing this off-brand parm primarily because I ate at this deli like twice a week for almost a decade when I taught at a school nearby, and the people there take great care of the kids/the teachers www.bonappetit.com/story/artich...

My quest to explore the intersection between secondary English education & literary studies continues! In this episode, I had a great conversation with Dr. Jeffrey Lawrence about the power & potential of public humanities online. #literacies #edusky #academicsky open.substack.com/pub/trevoral...

One of the best things I’ve heard about this essay is that it was excerpted this week in a speech at a CEC (nyc school boards, kinda) meeting that included parents/teachers frustrated with these curricula.

Glad the kids know how I feel

“They need daily lessons that were rich in knowledge, writing intensive, and based on complete books of the highest quality. Creating that is a different skill set from teaching and takes a lot more time than most teachers have.” That’s my job Douggie boy. I think what he means is “more freedom.”

Would read a book-length biography of Bel Kaufman. Thinking this as I read “up the down staircase” for the first time.