i just don't think there are any shortcuts--if we want kids who are readers, we need teachers who are readers, and if we want teachers who are readers, we need professors who are readers

Why is Maryland committed to proving that "All students are College and Career Ready by the end of their 10th grade year"? blueprint.marylandpublicschools.org/ccr/

we’re there

oh man david banks www.chalkbeat.org/newyork/2025...

My child? Went to the library? Voluntarily? And got a physical paper book? And is reading it??? 🤫

I have retreated so much from even trying to hold the line on canon, diversity, and depth. Here in Bridgeport I’m down to just barely keeping AI at bay.

But this is not something a machine could do for us. The goal of all that reading is not a document full of summaries, nor a mind full of "just summaries," because a mind never reads in such an automatic or intellectually inert fashion. We draw connections, and hopefully we change in the process.

Lovely www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...

if scripted, test-aligned curriculum takes over in public schools, even if it includes whole books, there's not really any point in giving teachers time to read

doesn’t make any sense

It’s the same damn thing - the idea that successful people have less and not more time and interest for reading books.

when I interviewed for social studies at harvard my interviewer said “this is the only time in their lives the students will see these texts” and what she named opportunity, seemed to me abject failure.

we’re there

do it

Thinking about how if education is for the workforce then corporations should have to pay directly for it.

For example, one obvious and extremely important thing for which a book is far better than an LLM is validating a stable citation trail. If a book says X you can trace the claim in the citation and it never changes; if an LLM says X you can’t, it a black box. Where does X come from?

know what’s great? poems

Know that there are nobler reasons to be a teacher but staying interested in the world is probably my number 1

👇

"we always live at the time we live, and not at some other time"

it’s amazing what can make learning feel like a waste of time

being conversant in the scholarly discussions within a discipline or a field is different from reading random summaries

It is depressing how often this hope must be expressed

what a silly piece of advice this is

increasingly so, and seeing teachers this way is an explicit focus of some loud voices in ed tech

Main takeaway from rewatching A CHRISTMAS STORY is that those kids were assigned to read the entirety of SILAS MARNER in the fourth grade! cc: @annieabrams.bsky.social

I was in a high-end boutique and the salesman asked what I do for work. “I’m a writer,” I said (easier than explaining whatever it is I do). “Oh what kind?” He asks. “I write non-fiction books and for a magazine, The Atlantic.” A beat, then, “I don’t think I’ve read a book since college.”

Five seconds’ reflection reveals that what this really means is “every student should have access to an education that is about nothing and changes every five seconds at the whim of rich airheads”

not great

more adults need to grow up and admit being bad at stuff is fine. also no one even needs to know. i draw badly all the time and show no one. who cares.

People frequently characterize it as a launch pad, but here's proof that somebody can spend their whole life working for McKinsey.

still thinking about this

I don't think HQIM is the answer.

Acquaintance of mine was suspended during her first year of teaching at a poor public school for assigning a book. Not because of the nature of the book--just that she assigned a whole book instead of these snippets.

the future’s unwritten so we should teach kids how to write

THIS. I wish I could do a search/replace for the word "canon" across the whole world and replace w "works that people who've read a lot of books have liked and recommended for a long time." because that's what it ought to mean.

I think this is true but really hard work especially when those in power are pushing the opposite of something humanistic. But I think it's absolutely essential that we link scripted curricula to AI: two ways to make the teacher irrelevant and interchangeable in the classroom.

Apparently, it used to be a Chromebook activity called "Hour of Code," but it rebranded this year, and now it's about prompt engineering.

Any parents out there have kids in school who, all of a sudden, have an "Hour of AI" activity unit they have to do?

one way to tell the story is that over the past 30 years, "workforce training" became the more or less singular focus of ed policy and now we're seeing partisan splintering about art worth preserving and how and why to teach it

one perk of teaching high school is that the kids are often still earnest about learning new words, it’s fun to drop “rigamarole” into the conversation

essay writing's not obsolete

Discount! Book event! Not clips of the president yelling at us!

beautiful

books books books

am still thinking about it

Sometimes we've OVERVALUED intergenerational endurance, or made it a reason to keep texts regardless of other reasons that might militate against them. But to try to disqualify it as a reason entirely is just a silly attempt to pretend you're not actually engaged in a process of value judgements.

The lists might grow a bit stale, but that's just reason to let professional educators the freedom to set their own lists.

Me getting bored by Romeo and Juliet is a me problem.