Ranking things that will expand the #CFL fanbase: 1. Having tix for all games available the second the schedule drops (they aren't) 2. Making sure every team has holiday ticket packs people can buy as Christmas gifts (one team has one offer) 179. Axing the 55 yard line

Every time there's some sage admonition to "prepare students for the future" that inevitably entails adding things to a teacher's work, I think back to all the pandemic preparedness we did in 2016. The cool confidence that we know what the future will be must be met with the deepest skepticism

For never-resting time leads summer on / To hideous winter and confounds him there Sonnet 5 #ShakespeareSunday

Say what abridgment have you for this evening, / What masque, what music? How shall we beguile / The lazy time if not with some delight? A Midsummer Night's Dream, 5.1.43-45 #ShakespeareSunday

Things that helped me escape the feeling that 2025 was a hall of mirrors dystopia: 1. walks 2. bike rides 3. staring at trees and water for a good long while 4. buying volumes of poetry from small presses

AP Language -- or, when Presidential speeches actually rewarded analysis

Pleased to be the recipient of the inaugural FIFA Teacher Just Organized Enough to Get Through Another Week Award Trust me, I deserve it 🏆

Have never felt less ego-attached to school. It's just a job; I do my best and let the outcomes and feedback go. Whatevs, not bothered. This is a great thing. Wish I'd arrived at this point, like, 20 years ago

Teacher life: in the course of a single week, you can oscillate between "this is the best job ever" to "had enough, gonna quit" a startling number of times

Good listen and discussion starter for high school students

An audiobook does not count as reading. It does count as listening, and listening is a complex, intense process that doesn't need to take a back seat or be seen as second rate. There is no need for reading to be treated as the dominant term that subsumes and erases the other

The entire argument still hinges on "It is inevitable" which is less an argument than a sales pitch

There's no I in AI It's just A, all A all day

A sad tale's best for winter: I have one / Of sprites and goblins. The Winter's Tale, 2 1.33-34 #ShakespeareSunday

Barren winter, with his wrathful nipping cold Henry VI Part Two, 2.4.3 #ShakespeareSunday

English class warmup activity: hey kids, does this qualify as an oxymoron?

The challenge emerges from the degree to which the rhythm, the tempo of classroom activity is driven by an online gradebook, by the expectation that there must be a constant, stock market stream of data

Important to keep in mind that people have been saying "kids these days" for as long as there have been days, and "students these days" for as long as there have been schools

This will become perfectly normal and often much colder, but the first dip into the deep minus teens is always a bit bracing

Always that tension between marking writing and working with writers. Always startling how the rhythm of the system makes the latter more challenging than it should be.

For American Thanksgiving: Thanks to all the American teachers, writers, and others I have crossed paths with here. In a time when the Canada-US relationship is in, shall we say, a bizarre place, your generosity of spirit is much needed and much appreciated. Thank you!

For American Thanksgiving -- very thankful for all the educators on this platform, for the heroic work you do, often in challenging conditions, and for the ways you contribute to my thinking and learning here. Thank you!

The Ghost of Christmas We're All Dead Inside

For American Thanksgiving -- so thankful for all the writers on this platform. What a rich source of poems and voices that has brought several new volumes to my shelves. Thank you!

Misconceptions about teacher life, clarified: No, I don't get paid to do that, no, I paid for that myself, no, I made that lesson handout project quiz exam myself, no, it's not all in the textbook, no, there isn't a budget for that, no, I don't get paid to do that, no, I paid for that myself, no, I

a fragile ripple of ice freezing the lake in place -- the first of many, many waves of cold to come

An indirect but valuable takeaway from this article is just how much energy and effort goes into trying to prevent these models from acting in incorrect and inappropriate ways, with varying success at best. They simply cannot be described as intelligence in any meaningful sense of the word.

Thanksgiving is just around the corner in America, but really the holiday festival known as Black Friday Boxing Day Week Month is already well underway

Yeah, safety or untrammeled growth, it's such a thorny dilemma (one of the ads that appeared mid-article was a link to download OpenAI)

This cold night will turn us all to fools and madmen. King Lear, 3.4.77 #ShakespeareSunday

Teacher life: deals like this are the highlight of your weekend

Friday night for young teachers: let's go out Friday night for middle-aged teachers: let's go nap

Attending NCTE Pittsburgh in 2005, the most tumultuous year of my life, was a great stabilizer. Saw Dael Orlandersmith's play Yellowman, saw the Penguins (Lemieux AND Crosby), sat in a restaurant by the window and filled a notebook. Conferences are about way more than the sessions. #NCTE25

The first NCTE conference I attended was Denver 1999. As a young English teacher, knowing there was an army of people who were doing the same work was just a revelation. It was a pivotal point in my career. Hoping everyone at #NCTE25 leaves as inspired as I was way back then.

Wednesday night marking music. Yes, it certainly is.

The English teacher's struggle: positioning the act of reading literature as experience and reflection as opposed to mining and extraction

No, it isn't. No, it won't. No, they shouldn't.

Working to get English class into a position where it can ask as much of students as STEM courses do

English teacher life: that class where a poem sneaks up on you, you're discussing it and kids are making observations and before you know it you're fighting back tears, so you lean into that and tell them why, you tell them that poetry is real yet magical, that it can transform pain into beauty

Poetry is here to help -- not in a self-help kind of way, but in a taking your sadness and wonder and lacing it with bracing beauty kind of way

And it's officially I would dearly love to be heading to #NCTE25 week. Like, dearly love. But crossing the border is an absolute non-starter, which is still just incomprehensibly weird and sad, but here we are. Summer conference in Toronto? Please? If you're going, enjoy. It's five-star awesome.

Motivation for every day and week of school: be the ruler of the peanut slinky

A Ken Burns documentary is a reminder that I would be completely mesmerized by Peter Coyote reading out pages from a dictionary, the owner's manual for a coffee maker, anything

Riders 25, Alouettes 17 Saskatchewan wins the Grey Cup, and from beyond the grave grandma is smiling for her team

Possibly the last bike ride of the year -- ice chunks in the river indicate that I'm biking on borrowed time, but really all time is that, so get out and ride while you still can

You will 100% meet players, coaches, and CFL legends in the team-run party rooms at Grey Cup, but the Prime Minister hanging out with the football fan hosers on a Saturday night? What a great country 🍁

The emperor has AI-hallucinated clothes

Now is the winter of our discontent Richard III, 1.1.1 #ShakespeareSunday

Did we rename November Black Friday when I wasn't looking? My heaven all these ads