When people ask about navigating social media spaces as a teacher and how to make it a positive experience (really difficult to do right now!) these are the six things I tend to share:

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Having a difficult time (in the best of ways) setting this book of essays by Zadie Smith down the past two days. A reminder-to-self: one of the virtues of great writing is how the words themselves stretch your thinking. 10/10 recommend.

"What will happen when the words we encounter increasingly become plastic?" This is the wondering that remains on my mind as I close 2025. So I wrote about that wondering and why it weighs so heavily on my mind going forward. thebrokencopier.substack.com/p/a-world-of...

"What is the city saying about AI use in the classroom? What is the district saying? There’s not a lot of clarity right now.” This is what I hope we push for, forcefully, in 2026: clarity, guidance, and norms around AI in our classrooms and schools. The absence at this point is alarming.

"What are the possibilities and the limits of countervailing, as a political or an aesthetic project? Is it sufficient merely to counter? Or might a higher synthesis be conceivable?" —Zadie Smith

This thread has gone on too long but essentially—if all the power sits on one side of a "debate" it’s not a debate—& so protest is a reasonable response—if you are someone who genuinely wants scholarly discourse in such an environment, what on-ramps are you building for that discourse to happen?

agree here: 1st step would be everyone who is concerned about kids not reading enough books deciding to read 10 more books themselves in 2026 than they did in 2025

the only grading I take home over Winter Break each year is the narrative poem project that students work on in the weeks leading up to it + I am reminded every single year what an absolute privilege it is to get a front row seat to the creativity/generosity/hope that students can/do write with

Loved listening to this!

Trying to briefly (!!!) capture where different social media platforms are at from an educator's perspective. What am I wrong about?

"Both things can be true. Students are becoming more skilled at extracting value from AI while simultaneously becoming more dependent on it." A piece built entirely around conversations with students about AI? Must-read of the morning: fitzyhistory.substack.com/p/ai-convers...

"the news"

There are a lot of things out there in education that are very clearly making stuff worse and I really hope in 2026 we find a way to elevate the things that make stuff better.

A2 1/2: Returning to the witches seals his bond with the prophecy he chose to realize. He has already murdered multiple people to gain the crown. As a killer, he knows blood begets blood. He is wading in it. Seeing Banquo’s line, he must assure his reign for as long as possible. #SundayMacbethChat

Amen. To all of this. I totally understand how we got to this place and why tech seemed so promising. Yet it’s time to stop and reflect on the last … like … three decades and consider wtf we’ve done to ourselves in education and how to stop it.

"but even if good comes out of the deception, you've still violated someone's trust to get there." #SundayMacbethChat (and maybe an #AIinEducationChat simultaneously?)

That’s such a great question that’s bookended by both scenes in this Act; the witches lie to Macbeth to pump him up so that he acts rashly and fails. They lied, but it served the purpose of defeating a tyrant. Are they to be celebrated for this? Definite real world comparisons, too.

A final question for today's #SundayMacbethChat — an essential one! 🕵️‍♂️ Q5: Essential question—can deception be a means to truth?

"O Scotland, Scotland!" Q4: Macduff has quite a ride in Act IV—how do you feel about him by the end? #SundayMacbethChat

"He loves us not" 👀 #SundayMacbethChat The short middle scene of Act 4 is quite something, isn't it? Q3: Let’s talk about Lady Macduff, a show-stopper of Act 4, Scene 2. How do you feel about her?

"Infected be the air whereon they ride, / And damned all those that trust them!" Q2: Macbeth has a lot to react to in that opening scene as far as ghostly prophecy—what stands out to you? #SundayMacbethChat

"Double, double toil and trouble" 🧙‍♀️ Our first question for #SundayMacbethChat is about how Act 4 famously begins! Q1: The witches take center stage to open Act IV—how do you feel about their influence on the opening scene?

5 minute warning! 🧙‍♀️ #SundayMacBethChat

💯 there is without question a way to do this work that would elevate the voices of teachers in not just curricular design but broader decision making and the vast, vast majority of the time we choose another way and that choice says all we need to know

Quick reminder: Act 4 of #SundayMacbethChat tomorrow at 9am EST!

Struggling as a teacher to keep up with changes to make sure my assignments use actual thinking/writing. Trying, but I'm tired. Not sure non-HS teachers truly get how kids are using ChatGPT for everything. EVERY.THING. As a search engine. To do questions on assignments. Almost all students/levels.

Not to mention: when a significant % of teachers/faculty chose to offload this to AI, then it impacts those of us who are actually writing them authentically.

Okay: 2026 goal immediately is to build in "learning memos" more often and @mrrablin.bsky.social's format of mastery checks into what we're doing. This is phenomenal.

at some point I feel like I want to have a conversation about how educator spaces on social media have drastically changed the past few years—it feels like an entirely different landscape going into 2026, doesn't it?

❤️ students just submitted theirs today! we'll do our gallery walk first week of January—one of my favorite days of the year, every year

This is gonna piss some people off, but it’s really shitty to put students out there like this. It’s a tacky trend and we should let it go expeditiously. www.tiktok.com/t/ZP8yrNHnf/

This. This. This. This. This. This. This. This. This. This. This. This. This. This. This. This. This. This. This. This. This. This. This. This. This. This. This. This. This. This. This. This. This. (Sorry but this has defined my past 1.5 years and it is 🎯)

This lesson as THE last lesson of 2025 was an absolute blast and a phenomenal way to close this calendar year in the classroom thebrokencopier.substack.com/p/what-a-90-...

"I refuse." This is it. There's no reason we should accept a narrative of an already settled future which marginalizes humans and individual agency. No one wants this. No one asked for it.

🎯🤷‍♂️

It seems like more and more people want 1:1 technology out of the classroom, despite all we've invested. It also seems like more and more people want us to invest in technology/AI to prepare students for the future. Which leaves teachers...sort of in a tough spot.

This was a must-listen then and still is

“I would like to launch a formal protest about Mr. Luther’s overuse of yes-or-no discussion questions and everyone is welcome to join me.” Today in class 😂😂😂

"But the correlation between school AI adoption and personal AI relationships is clear across multiple behaviors." Ummm...this also seems bad.

Final days before break and leaning on one of the most old-school moves I know: cutting up a poem into individual lines and asking students to correctly assemble it. (Yes, of course, it will be a Shakespearean sonnet.)

Students had to go through a gallery walk of sample responses and match the correct feedback to them today and I added 2 ingredients: [1] first group back to seats with correct matchings wins + [2] Survivor challenge music in the background... The result? a very intense, very fun experience. 🤓

NEW: Without USAID funding to help buy food for refugees, the World Food Program rushed to prioritize families based on need, determining that only half the population would get food. Refugees learned which half they were in from a number stamped on the back of their ration card.

“Why should this matter to students right now?” should be a daily question we ask ourselves as teachers, I think Not “when you graduate” or “in the workforce“ Now.

The future of vouchers is increasingly opaque. They must hide data because it puts the lie to their arguments: the lie: "they rescue kids from bad public schools" the data: most go to kids already in private school the lie: "they're for the poor children" the data: they mostly go to the well-off

it's time tomorrow once again for THAT poem #cantwait

yeah, this is it. 🎯

students are ends in themselves

It remains a very, very cool thing when a student shows you their draft of a poem and asks you for feedback. Even on the hardest of days (today was one of them) there is good—and that good, so often, is 100% a result of students.

"This year, especially, feels particularly impossible and absurd." - @mrneibauer.bsky.social 🎯 🎯🎯