anyone in education who supports this needs to leave right now and not look back

What’s most annoying about this is it assumes economic insecurity is a product of individual “skills gaps” as opposed to a structural condition of our political/economic systems. So now Ss are trapped in a system obsessed with job prep at a time when every company is gutting their future jobs.

When we were talking about Iran in class, someone brought up the name - Epic fury - and two students nodded approvingly, saying, "oooh that's tough" **THEY WERE 16 YEAR OLD BOYS** That is who this whole campaign is designed to appeal to. This guy is narrating a video game but with human lives.

👇👇👇🧵🧵🧵

I’ve seen a growing number of articles / conversations about being a warm demander lately and I really feel that this conversation was actually emblematic of two rather significant things that are often left out of the discourse. (🧵1/6)

In the ed program I TA’d for, a prof came in and told students, “Every action you take has a theory. If you tie your shoelaces into a bow, you’re acting on a theory about shoe tying. However you choose to teach, it’s based on a theory. Our job is to help you articulate it.” I think that’s valuable.

"—the privilege of describing a thing vaguely, incompletely, dishonestly, is inseparable from the privilege of looking away" —Omar El Akkad Never more true than the past few years, right?

Read it again. We killed 85 schoolgirls this morning.

not enough people understand that we're in a place where this is subversive

It is 1991. I am 15 years old. The US has gone to war in the Middle East. It is 2003. I am 27 years old. The US has gone to war in the Middle East. It is 2026. I'm too old for this shit. The US has gone to war in the Middle East.

Sing this from the top of every hill.

I know nothing about Alaskan politics, but this sadly echoes what’s been going on in California, across the nation and even across professions … “You cannot have a world-class system when your leaders treat people like a disposable commodity or are actively working to destroy it.”

Great summary of a strong teacher organizing strategy happening — we have GOT to get to the point of addressing state level policy/funding because districts are legit struggling to function…

A possibly related hot take that has been on my mind all week: People often talk about how great teachers don’t necessarily make great leaders, but the bigger issue is that the districts I’ve experienced have incentive structures that reward technocratic careerists over organic leaders. (1/2)

democrats should internalize that this is what their colleagues think of them and act accordingly

Let's spread the bookstore love!📚 These are some California-based Black-owned bookstores to support all year long February is #BlackHistoryMonth, and these stores can be supported by following them on social, shopping online, or visiting in person!🩵

Again, I know it feels good to send a donation to someone who is finally going to send Mitch McConnell or Lindsey Graham packing, but you're going to see a *lot* more bang for your buck with less exciting but much more meaningful state legislative races. This is a great way to do that:

People say all the time that budgets reflect values. When the public institutions responsible in large part for the welfare of our society’s children are facing a fiscal scenario this bleak, what does that say about our society’s values?

Love this! Something I’ve been thinking a lot about a lot lately is “emotional capacity” as an alternative to words like “self-regulation” and “resilience” — end goals that can *feel* static — and this adds concrete routines to help build emotional capacity in the classroom.

By the way, the way some white disabled people are responding to this thread by acting as if the N word isn't itself a disability issue for Black people is a great case in point of how it is taken as a given that Black people must simply tolerate everyday racism as the price of being in public

There’s some valuable context to this that both adds nuance and makes it more heartbreaking: Coming out of the 90’s, there was a major (valid) concern about the digital divide (both in terms of access and participation). As much as industry pushed this, it was also thought to be an equity issue 🧵

Columbia economics professor telling students they *must* use AI for reading assignments, for coding assignments, for lecture supplements. Why not just let AI run a simulation of a college education and call it a day? You can get a little NFT diploma and show it off to your ChatGPT girlfriend too.

The really naive move of the past 20 years was to entrust the private sector with the direction of public education—and to assume that the purpose of school is to prepare kids for that sector.

Genuine question about this: What does it actually look like to “augment thinking” using AI in a way that actually enhances a student’s intellectual growth? In my personal experimentation, AI short-circuits the kind of thinking that allows for building knowledge and reflection on worldview … 🤷🏾‍♂️

🔥🔥🔥

Please stop telling me how these guys are geniuses when every interview with them sounds like a 12-year-old who was held back a grade.

Look at The Bay on the world stage! Nobody better than MT2 to write that story!

Exactly … Not only are the people pushing these ideas completely out of touch with the reality of schooling, but they’re obviously afraid that the ideas they espouse simply wouldn’t stand up to even minimal scrutiny. We shouldn’t all have to suffer from their paranoid delusions …

💯 We have to be intentional about how we connect humanly with the kids in our schools and it’s simply not enough to say that’s not in the job description. Learning requires emotional capacity to wrestle with new ideas/perspectives…and sometimes that means addressing problems beyond the classroom.

Alysa Liu telling 60 Minutes “I love struggling, it makes me feel alive” is a legit revolutionary statement from a Bay Area native in a time when copious amounts of time and resources are being put toward convincing us to opt out of experiencing struggle, friction and self-actualization

“… it forces practitioners to be data-deferent rather than data-driven.” I love this framing—puts words to something I’ve always felt. Data deference forces a narrowing of our focus in a messy human ecosystem containing TONS of data, quantitative & qualitative. We need to interpret ALL of that.

This for me is a key point about that 'biologically primary and secondary' thing. It's just not true that children pick up language easily. It's a trope which betrays a lack of knowledge about language development but also an attitude towards the mostly 'women's work' of early child development.

People born in the 2000s will never understand a nation once so innocent that an ice skater kneecapping another ice skater sent us into an existential crisis.

The Supreme Court, like every time they've bucked Trump before, will quickly fall back in line with a massive decision in his favor. Anyone writing a take this naive must not have mastered object permanence.

Any discussion of “what works” needs to be grounded in “for what”. Excellent analysis of the goals of the Alpha Schools.

For whatever reason, I have been inundated with AI initiatives at work this week and was basically forced to sit through a training for someone else this week … … so can we talk about AI’s use in mental health settings? Because I find the very idea of this horrifying for myriad reasons … (1/2)

I don’t think enough attention is being given to how and why strikes are spreading across California — yes, salaries don’t meet the cost of living, but charter schools have also just decimated public school populations to the point that districts can barely function. We can do better than this. 🤬

As I prepare for what will be the *fourth* strike of my teaching career, I keep thinking -- we are a deeply unserious, myopic, selfish people who fail to understand the most basic action/consequence logic. Just fully fund public education, losers.

Empower is one of those buzzwords that I sorta bristle at … but I love that statement otherwise!

love to be looted by our criminal president

“Is there a technology the left is excited about?” High-speed rail! MRNA vaccines! New cancer treatments! Solar and wind energy collection! Better and longer-range EVs! That wood that's harder than steel! New apples! Fibermaxxing! Buldak Swicy ramen! Muppets! Muppets are too a technology, shut up!

One of the counterintuitive things about ed policy stuff is that it’s possible to raise kids’ test scores while giving them a terrible education

My siblings and I will often joke about how my dad would say, “If you can believe, you can achieve.” He said it often enough that it became a running joke. I will never forget how Jesse Jackson inspired my dad with words that he in turn wanted to inspire us with. RIP Jesse Jackson. Miss you Dad.

Enjoyed two points from this podcast: 1. School leaders need to actually invest time in teachers to build a successful school. 2. When a leader asks for feedback, they should be ready to actually respond and show they listened (goes for students too!). Small points, that can’t be ignored.

This was really good. The observations that a lot of the CogSci purists are a) focused on math/science and b) in search of what can bs quantified were spot on. But most of all, I appreciated the way it challenged the false dichotomy between inquiry and explicit instructions. Worth a listen!

A former Democratic colleague of hers once told me that Susan Collins is “usually there when you don’t need her and never there when you actually do.” The moderate brand she projects is entirely performative. It’s always surprised me that Maine voters don’t seem to care.

Musk is a malevolent force in American life, driven by white nationalism and incredibly influential given his obscene wealth. He's a supervillain. But people get that. He's deeply unpopular, with an approval rating in the mid-30s with Trump. We just need political leaders willing to take him on.

This is about music, but the part (starting at 52:32) about “trusting your instinct before the data” are amazing educational aims: 1️⃣ Knowing how to be still and listen. 2️⃣ Being in touch with what moves you. 3️⃣ Learning to recognize and hold a feeling. 4️⃣ Being honest with oneself about all of it.