1. This morning, Texas AG Ken Paxton just released a chilling new declaration: Mental health therapists, counselors, and psychologists must cease affirming trans youth - using their name and pronouns - or potentially face child abuse charges and loss of licensure. Its a horrifying escalation.

Kansas invalidated a trans woman's license even though she never changed her gender marker. It's not about the gender marker. It's about targeting trans people and making their lives unlivable.

The glibness. The indifference. The carelessness. The utter lack of planning for a war against a country of 90M. The sickness of a man who acts on whim that will kill thousands not hundreds. The horror of a regime that enables this sickness. The broken body politic that votes in such malignancy.

stop calling us nazis just because we are invalidating IDs and rounding people up based on their skin color and putting them in concentration camps and sending them off to foreign gulags and using all that nazi imagery and banning books and dont forget about all the pedophilia. so just stop alright

Remind me, when you beat up a blind old refugee and then dump him out to die in the cold, are you the good guys?

The level of rage I have towards the New York Times that enabled this while blaming us for it is indescribable.

Kansas just invalidated the drivers licenses of every trans person in the state. They’re being told to surrender their current licenses and get new ones listing their birth sex. No grace period. Get caught driving with your now-invalid license and you’re looking at jail and a fine.

Fun fact, US passports did not have a gender marker until 1977, when a rising trend in unisex fashion started freaking the government out.

Yes - until you see it firsthand, it’s hard to understand how upsetting and enraging it is to see these guys operate in your community. They are dressed for war, they beat civilians up, they openly antagonize neighbors, they’re masked, they carry people away. Everyone is livid at every scene.

I just stumbled upon featherbase, a database of feather pictures from a bunch of bird species.🪶 So pretty! www.featherbase.info/zh/home

We may be heading toward a world in which it seems peculiar or even foolish to read an article or book in its entirety. Incredibly, schools - K-12 & higher ed. alike - seem reconciled to becoming the accomplices of Big Tech by pointing us there.

One of the things that happened is that reformers + their allies shifted "HQIM" to include only materials produced by a corporate vendor. They don't believe teachers, students + communities can produce "HQIM" because they don't trust or believe in teachers, students + communities.

The best AI-detection/-avoidance software available is a well-compensated teacher who spends time getting to know their students and their work because they have small classes

So when we keep phones out of class time it works - and kids somehow still learn to use phones. I wonder if there is an attention and effort killing technology out now that we could apply the same theory too? 🧐

I'd love to talk with some teachers and students about this. DM me if you're up for it.

There’s a direct line from ‘just asking questions about women’s sports’ to criminalizing our health care, we warned you it was coming, you said it would be fine and you just had a few more questions.

They developed the "high school girl's sports" angle as a wedge issue, to lever their way up to full society-wide discrimination. What's endlessly stunning to me is how many purported liberals a) helped them when it started & b) are still helping them even after the larger purpose has become clear!

This is too much.

"Fairness in school sports" So you're controlling access to professional trainers? No? Or accounting for developmental stage differences within the same age groups? No? Creating budgets to keep every kid fairly equipped? No? So what is it that defines a fair sporting experience exactly, I wonder?

An issue we're seeing at all levels of university is that many students are simply refusing to do *anything*. They aren't reading the syllabus, aren't following assignment guidelines, aren't engaging with material, ignoring deadlines. And this might seem like old news, but it truly has ramped up.

We advocate for reading and writing in authentic ways because we know that control and lock step and excerpts and demands don’t work beyond (maybe?) a test that tests weird things. These pedagogies often stifle everything good and human about the classroom. We will not stop. I will not stop.

Wait. It’s past mid November? What is happening? What is time?

I like em dashes. Am I AI? Maybe I’m AI.

Am I intending to use Bluesky to offload my deep intense FOMO at not attending #NCTE25? Indeed.

Someone else’s curriculum will (almost) never be exactly right for your students. Your personalized curriculum you crafted this year will (almost) never be right for your students next year. We will always need to tweak, prune, fit, adjust, bend, switch, and add. #Unboxingthecurriculum

"There's never a charge to maintain fidelity to children, there is only fidelity to the curriculum."

Look if you're trans, you have to live. Do whatever you need to do to make it.

From this minister's op-ed: "People wanting to experience God are more likely to meet the Divine trying to shut down the Broadview, Illinois, ICE facility than we ever were in church...God does not live in our houses of worship, but...with those who are bearing the brunt of cruelty in this moment."

The weirdest thing about this discourse is that states with shorter school closures have the same amount of learning loss! I keep waiting for all the punditry on this to catch up with basic facts

Every time Covid and learning loss hits the news, people act like the only factor is folk staying home and learning online, rather than… Living through a global mass death event.

These Supreme Court oral arguments on conversion therapy are going to be painful. No matter what is said, know that trying to force someone to be what they're not is psychological torture with measurable negative consequences, and anyone trying to defend such efforts is a bigoted monster.

Folks, you can't report the United States to its manager. There's no superhero coming to save us. We don't need one giant act of heroism. We need millions of small acts of solidarity. Help one person in your community for nothing in return. Then, do it again. And again. That's the revolution.

Tried out Grammarly's AI grade predictor. Didn't want to use actual student work, so I had ChatGPT write a paper for one of my assignments and gave that to Grammarly. Grammarly promises to use publicly available info about your instructor to predict what they will say. The advice was *not* what I /1

ICYMI - This week's post: Build, Don't Burn Some folks are arguing that school is irrevocably broken. But if we burn it all down, where is the will or the way to build anything new in it's place? practicaltheory.org/blog/2025/08...

Today is the last day of my first (and I keep hoping only) fundraising campaign and as of today, I'm just about 4/5ths of the way there. I am enterally grateful to everyone who donated, signal boosted, or reached out with encouragement.

Hey Northeast educators - We are running our summer institute again this year, partnering with Milford CT to offer three days of focused, problem solving PD around our most urgent topics. Plus a day for coaches! Sign up and join us:)

Kurt Vonnegut man

The people that I get to meet - and share car rides with - is the joy of this job, and the time with you two one of the peaks of @TCTELA. Yall are inspiring✨

Just thinking about what the US looked like before the EPA existed

We can still prioritize diversity, equity, and inclusion if we look to the work of Zaretta Hammond, @teachbk.bsky.social, @gholdym.bsky.social, @jamiladugan.bsky.social, @nqcliteracy.bsky.social, @novakeducation.bsky.social, Shane Safir, & Common Sense Media. www.cultofpedagogy.com/dei-under-at...

Same. Download all data now before everything disappears. This is not a drill.

Judge temporarily blocks effort to deport Palestinian activist who helped lead Columbia student protests

In light of everything happening, I wrote about how the KKK in the 1920s felt unstoppable, about the people that fought against them anyway, and about how fascism always fails. dansinker.com/posts/202…

Public comment is now open for passport gender marker changes. You can go here to go to each of the three proposed passport rules, and submit comment. My suggestion: be unique, argue for trans-inclusive policies, against the constitutionality of the changes, etc. www.reddit.com/r/Passports/...