No relief quite like realizing all I have to do is smush the trash into the can—no need to take it out into the bitter winter air

Would say that at least 1/3 of my “grading” time is actually just organizing a mess of papers after 6 hours of daily teaching into neat little stacks

Really interested in Hayden’s use of restraint to depict violence

Anyone know of good books/essays specifically about Du Bois on education? Du Bois himself on education is obviously good, but curious about secondary/research stuff.

Says that federal detention facilities are “nicer than some of the elementary schools” that educate the kids he’s elected to represent, and says that to help support his case that it’s okay to detain five year olds. Just fully lobotomized.

Realize this is English teacher cliché stuff but it is remarkable how many different things poems can be/do

Worth keeping in mind that “the left doesn’t care about classics” is a decades-old straw man, but what’s new is that this line of argument is now being used to dismantle public education

He even has a poem, “[American Journal]”, spoken by an alien from outer space who has some concerns about America but is ultimately drawn to them. I love an author worthy of deep diving.

Taking the kids on a Robert Hayden deep dive next week for Black history month—feel lucky to be the person who likely gets to introduce them to him

There isn’t a single coherent argument here about literary merit, because the author isn’t qualified to make one. But these are the people ed policy decision makers listen to and use to justify the choices they make about what American kids should read. fordhaminstitute.org/national/com...

People love to make school about anything but school. “I think from an anti-poverty standpoint,” he added, his voice rising with excitement, “this might be the single most important thing we could be teaching.”

Also has this great stanza about lending a Tomas Tranströmer book to an internet technician, and I know exactly which one it is—the New Directions selected. This book is really good, I mean both of them are.

Bianca Stone’s new book has flames and this fantastic stanza about snow

Wonder what Irving Howe would have to say about classical schools’ distortion of the liberal arts into a program of “soul cultivation” rooted in a nationalist discourse

In #AHAPerspectives, @drkyliesmith.bsky.social shares how she approaches teaching history to her nursing students. “Students need to learn a broad conception of history that explores the economic and political forces that shape their patients’ lives, as well as their own profession.” 🗃️

Latter day “Ageometretos medeis eisito”

Know it sounds a little silly to say but this is actually one step to ending (cooling off?) the crisis of the humanities! 16 million HS English classes daily. Yes—structural changes, too, but changing public ed is a structural change.

Johanna Winant and I talked with Trevor Aleo about why close reading matters now, and about our book, Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century @johannawinant.bsky.social @mraleosays.bsky.social @princetonupress.bsky.social trevoraleo.substack.com/p/drs-dan-si...

The education section of this is INSANE: "Education Schools should emphasize literacy, numeracy, civic knowledge and career readiness, not ideological instruction." And that's it. That is apparently all that matters.

How do we make people realize how many teachers don’t assign books not because they don’t believe in kids but because they’re literally not allowed to? www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

Reminds me of this—a 1940s round table of English teachers discussing what to do in our classes during WW2. Some good/relevant ideas for countering fascism.

Kid assigned to pick a poem for the class to read this week went pretty hard with this selection

One fun thing about it being February is that I’m about to be the proud and delighted recipient of lots of lunar new year snacks from my students.

“calling our current public-education policy ‘progressive’ is, read most generously, imprecise” great essay about what progressive education ought to aim for—one that hopefully clarifies things not only for the Tates of the world, but also for those of us who aim to do this kind of work ourselves.

We shouldn’t make it seem like bad practice, for example, to let kids read quietly in your classroom for 30m and take some notes. Classrooms could be where we teach kids to inhabit the silences reading requires—instead we turn them into another form of pressure and noise.

Actually think it should be the left position that kids like the ones we teach here in NYC are especially entitled to this inheritance.

NYC kids don’t disappoint hellgatenyc.com/brooklyn-tec...

Neighbor’s kid is getting quite good at drumming and I love that no one on my block has told him to stop. We can all hear it loud and clear.

Bluesky magic: just reconnected with @drmcgettigan.bsky.social, my 5th grade teacher who taught me how to write paragraphs about 27 years ago ✨

1. Medieval women writers 2. Melville 3. American Realism and the urban environment 4. Modernism (with a prof who told me the only way to read Ulysses is to “care about the characters”) 5. Contemporary American fiction: not realism -these shaped basically my entire teacher playbook

Baffler has exactly the right amount of magazine for a print edition — like I will actually finish this thing

Book clubs! This essay was so interesting—and I can’t wait to read the book. More convos about reading and what it means for all of us.

I annotate my class books on the train to get ready for our discussions, and I do wonder if my regular commuter crew thinks I’m some guy frantically trying to catch up on all the stuff he should have read in high school

Cold War era had a lot of good lines: “The most glorious vision of the intellectual life is still that which is loosely called humanist: the idea of a mind committed yet dispassionate, ready to stand alone, curious, eager, skeptical”

Do love seeing my kids cover local politics 411press.net/2725/showcas...

HMH calls books “long reads” and people need special permission to teach them. Chatted with a kid about this today and she rolled her eyes, saying “that’s so dystopian!”

Happy to report that the kids like Frederick Douglass

All sorts of ways to do book banning, in other words

Think Proust’s claim that “every beautiful work of literature is written in a kind of foreign language” is something that I’d like to guide my teaching more—this stuff is good because it’s strange, foreign, etc even when it seems familiar

Whole morning city navigation pattern thrown off this morning by having to actually cross only at crosswalks

I want my district (largest in the US) to run PDs that are like “how to start a lit mag at your school” or “poems nyc kids should all read” instead of, like, “leveraging high inference metacognitive techniques for access and utility of force”

Those of us familiar with what happens to learning when it’s processed through the standardized test grinder will not be surprised to see the prep materials for this exam, btw m.youtube.com/watch?v=odk0...

Intro’d the 2.5 yr old to chips with queso dip and when asked if she liked it she just whispered “yes”

Why do you guys think he instinctively figured it was necessary for him to add “Frederick” there

Re. Ed tech’s grip on education: I don’t think there’s a better metaphor for the weirdness of schooling right now than the fact that there will be some NYC administrators going into their teachers’ zoom rooms tomorrow making sure kids’ cameras ARE on and that they are working

imagine if all that money had gone to teachers instead

Worth mentioning that the book he was reading here, The Columbian Orator—a popular rhetoric textbook—was banned in Southern states for endorsing divisively republican, antislavery views

Deep in Frederick Douglassland as I tinker with this unit—going to have kids read 6 of his speeches and the “narrative.” I do think every American kid should get to read this paragraph in context; I think it’s the best English language para about reading.

“we ought to have our government so shaped that even when in the hands of a bad man we shall be safe”

Seems like it’s time to re-center the technology the bad guys don’t understand or control