The kids went out last week—to Union Square, Madison Sq Park, elsewhere in the city—to record interviews w people about Death of a Salesman. Going to do a listening/discussion party today. The kids are all shocked at how basically everyone they talked to had read or heard of it.

Don’t know what’s up but I’m too old now to eat an entire bagel in one sitting? Is this a thing?

Fun old book. First elevated “train”, some squatters, cows grazing in bucolic upper Manhattan

And some powerful people do not think experience matters—in fact, they think the opposite. There’s a fantasy that teaching can be so standardized that experience doesn’t really matter—now that I’ve taught long enough, I get how bonkers that is, but I found it persuasive myself for some time.

Yes—take the lead of @aimoratoriumnyc.bsky.social and know that you’re entitled to much more than a faceless survey asking you to tell leadership how you feel about a decision they’ve already made.

Something interesting about the AI-in-schools thing is that, because of how quickly it has all unfolded and because of the novelty of this stuff, the conversation will need to be led by parents, teachers, and students—those of us who have seen everything firsthand.

This just in — District 15 becomes the SIXTH CEC to pass a resolution calling for a moratorium. And a little birdie tells me more are on the way this month. @mayor.nyc.gov when will you listen to the folks in this city?

Think next year I’ll have all in-class, hand written except that at the end of the term they beef their favorite one up into a gorgeous take-home typed. Have been doing primarily in-class stuff but need revision and deeper thinking to live on in some form.

Friendly May reminder to myself and others that the best thing to do at this time of the school year is to try not to let the mayhem of this time get in the way of enjoying the time you have with a group of cool young people, many of whom you may never see again

Thing about these guys is that what drives them crazy is that they’re up against a stunning, moving achievement of liberal democracy—free, public, accessible education. They can’t compete with that, so they compete instead with one of the parasites on that achievement. It’s debasing from the outset.

Designing a program to produce more written feedback than teachers have the time to make shows that you are (a) exploiting teachers’ anxieties in order to sell a product and (b) not really aware of how good pedagogy works

I don’t think it’s a radical position to find it really disturbing that a button now pops up on the software everyone my district uses—Google Classroom—offering to do my job for me

Moving soon so I have gotten rid of all the clothes I’ll never wear but I will never get rid of the books I’ll never read

Knowing how to use a new technology responsibly is not literacy. I don’t have, like, kitchen appliance literacy. I don’t consider knowing how to drive a form of literacy. People should have to use language well when they’re arguing about what schools ought to do with kids.

the language of policy, testing, bureaucracy can obfuscate what’s elemental to public education—what adults owe children sometimes it’s important to put it plainly

Really something, by the way, to have this hasty closure of public comment to happen on the same day as a systemwide data breach. Realize this sounds improbable because it’s so obviously stupid, but current leadership is entertaining the use of AI for K-2 instruction.

Statement from DSA’s tech action working group on the hasty rollout of NYCPS AI guidance: “This lackluster approach for collecting feedback…is especially frustrating considering their $44.6 billion budget and thousands of central staffing personnel.” techaction.nyc/posts/statem...

If this sort of thing creeps you out, if you want to put the public in public schooling when it comes to stuff like this—and if you’re an NYC parent or teacher—you should join this call tomorrow tr.ee/U0_VAjmmYs

Whichever English teacher did weekly vocab quizzes to young Gary Cohen is feeling real proud. “A pulchritudinous play!” sports.yahoo.com/articles/gar...

You too can be part of the AI rebellion - join our mass organizing call on Tuesday!

Parents, students, and teachers coming together to make the case against tech’s incursion into schools—and to articulate a humane vision for schooling. Pretty good evidence that public schools are an essential part of our social fabric. www.chalkbeat.org/newyork/2026...

Can a Think Tank-type do us all a favor and do a study that compares student outcomes in schools that have restrictive AI policies with those that do not—just need the data to support the thing that everyone already knows

I think the most interesting and important school problem is to figure out why, if you ask kids what school is for, hardly any of them will say that learning is an intrinsic good. People have other problems, but I like this one—touches a lot of big issues.

I've been covering tech, and tech industry influence, in schools for more than a decade. And I've never seen this kind of rapidly scaling effort by parents pushing for more oversight of the laptops and learning apps that schools give kids. www.nytimes.com/2026/04/29/t...

Man, got to see a presentation about this today—so cool. Enlisting young people to help build historical materials that teachers will then be able to use in a forthcoming citywide curriculum about AAPI experiences here. There are right ways to make curriculum happen. localizedhistoryproject.org

Here’s to caregiver-educator coalitions against Big Tech! And as @alliethrall.bsky.social and I begin analyzing survey responses for our caregiver edtech resistance study, we’re seeing some caregivers attuned to building relationships *with* teachers rather than seeing them as adversaries.

There’s a picture of me in this article, so I feel compelled to comment: it’s important to get that this is about curriculum and the consolidation of power in determining what and how kids learn, not just “tech” in the abstract. www.nytimes.com/2026/04/29/t...

Getting kids to love poetry seems like a more important thing to do now than it has in my 13 years in the classroom. Weirder stuff, especially—just convincing them that it’s good and fun to encounter someone doing something genuinely new with language.

Happy to have arrived at “everyone is dressed for a different day” weather. Total sartorial free-for-all out here

Hah man I love Susan Howe. Maybe when I have time again I’ll write an essay no one will read about how she’s such a critical reminder of what original reading and writing means. This reference in a prose poem to her walking though a library and seeing AI pedagogy stuff kind of stunned me just now.

Because cars inevitably will be a part of kids’ lives, I think we should get all schools really expensive Hot Wheels sets and develop Car Literacy programs starting in Kindergarten

Don’t tell my students this, but when we’re done with “death of a salesman” I’m going to have them walk around a park nearby and find someone there who’s read it/interview them about whether or not the play can teach us anything today

A student points at my lunch (leftover veggie pasta thing), says “That’s not enough food. My parents eat two, three times that much food.”

Hot spot for ~summer curriculum planning~

I'm so behind on @haveyouheard.bsky.social episodes, but this one featuring @jaustinedu.bsky.social, @johndownesangus.bsky.social, @annieabrams.bsky.social, & Nora De La Cour might be the best of the year. A Dream Team of tackling this exact dilemma: soundcloud.com/haveyouheard...

Humanities profs, I know there are a lot of you on here: encourage those talented seniors of yours to consider teaching high school. It’s fun and intellectually enriching and we want them. It’ll make what you taught them matter in ways that not many other fields will.

Think in education stuff it’s particularly important to remember it’s okay to criticize people with good intentions. The well-meaning mission to ensure every kid masters all the same skills has had some really terrible unintended consequences in schools, for example.

I have a good friend who said that he reads best on the subway because the forward movement of the train matches the inward movement of his head, and I think about that every time I read on the train, which is when I do my best reading. So glad I have a train commute.

so many people who don't read for pleasure have control over what and how children learn to read

This rebuke is great, and it will eventually be the standard position parents take as they realize what is at stake. This is why our unions need to take an aggressively skeptical position: we risk feeding into the stereotype that teachers’ unions do not serve in the interest of kids and learning.

I know this is obvious, but worth keeping in mind that when a little widget thing offers to write for you, it’s offering to think for you. This “help me write” button just spits feedback out for teachers—a huge betrayal of our basic social and intellectual function. Don’t do this

Similarly: wish that teaching jobs incentivized things like writing and having an influence on the broader conversation about schools. The most talented people in education don’t have time to explain themselves.

“The mandates contained in science of reading legislation are not scientific.” Good piece framing the science of reading movement as a power grab—resonates with what @annieabrams.bsky.social and @jaustinedu.bsky.social talked about on @haveyouheard.bsky.social progressive.org/public-schoo...

For reference, the SAVVAS home page. If you think forcing people not to teach books sounds insane, then it’s important to watch out for the buzzwordy trends that work to sanitize this move.

Excited to sink my teeth into this stuff. Don’t know about you, but have found myself lately feeling a desire to return to core first principles about writing—what a good sentence looks like, how to teach doing that, why it matters that we teach it well

Recommending this not only because my wife’s university press published it—look at this ~design~

Worth keeping in mind that the vast majority of people telling teachers that kids need to know how AI works have no idea how AI works. This is not at all the same as educated adults telling us that kids need to understand how to read well.

What’s the best book/article/essay people have read about teaching writing? Am working on something and I’m curious what others have read that have shaped the way they think about their work—can be practical, theoretical, even only tangentially related to pedagogy.

The petition is still live, by the way. If you’re an NYC person who’d like to see a two-year moratorium on student-facing AI in schools, sign! actionnetwork.org/petitions/pl...