langston hughes on walt whitman, 1953

The American Lit kids are going to cut up our first three texts tomorrow—a 1493 Columbus letter, an excerpt from De Las Casas, and a Lenape myth—to make little collage poems, using art books/photography books as backdrops. Glad I teach HS so I can do arts n crafts/curious what they do.

FWIW I managed to get class sets of two books each this year that I selected for my TX *and* US Government classes. We do weekly class discussions and reflective writing. I teach in one of the poorest public ISDs in my state. We're still out here doing our thing where we can.

at the same time, elite private k12 schools will (continue to) offer literature courses featuring paper books that teachers select while public school teachers will face very real impediments to offering parallel experiences

I hope someday someone writes up an in-depth story about what ESSA and Common Core have to do with AI in schools

She's in sixth grade this year and suddenly the platform (I Station) is AI. It's historically tracked her year-to-year, remembering her progress, but this year it's taken her off-the-charts reading levels and is asking her to spell "wall." And when she did, it asked her to spell **indistinct sound**

there are ways in which some public school teachers have more academic freedom than some professors these days

K12 too

🤔🤔

talked today in class about how ai doesn’t, can’t have a unique perspective, so it’s irrelevant to the work we’ll be doing in high school english

huh

If you're in or near Atlanta, or *super juiced* 😜 about close reading and love to travel, come to Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century: A Symposium at Emory University on Friday, November 7. And hear from these superstars...

the CLT’s developing its own AP-like program centering Christianity, they’ve really galvanized a community and are actualizing a vision

!

huh ad soliciting applications for teaching positions at success academy in the middle of this old top chef episode

thinking about teaching this poem this year, am hung up on these lines www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazi...

books

what does this even mean

“non-consensual seizure of attention, identity, and future potential”

We're off any LMS in my class. I'm printing out course packets. Assignments will be handed in in person or emailed to me.

"walden is the handbook of an economy that endeavors to…transform the round of daily life into something nobler than a mean gospel of plus and minus" vl parrington, main currents in american thought

seems like a lot of people agree that public education should tap students' unfulfilled potential while affording them opportunities to live dignified lives and i think art and contemplation should be part of that

i think a lot of people still take public schools and books in those schools for granted and it's difficult to explain how far from universal access to any kind of liberal education, at all levels, we now find ourselves

Just read a beautiful edition of *Hiawatha* I bought in the UP. It's fascinating how Longfellow seems to know the area so well just from reading Schoolcraft, setting scenes at Pictured Rocks, Tahquamenon Bay, etc., and then, later, things up there are named after the poem (Hiawatha Natl Forest).

Taking the teens this fall to the Berg collection to see his journals and his pressed plants. NYPL: nice place

common misconception

thoreau does not belong to the right wing

Taught intro to @annieabrams.bsky.social SHORTCHANGED to 1st-year college writers, fresh from prior educational experiences, and wow it really resonated! Ideas about empty form, rubrics, robotic writing take on new meaning now with AI! @hopkinspress.bsky.social www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/...

grotesque

From 1939: “Institutions of learning should be devoted to the cultivation of curiosity and the less they are deflected by considerations of immediacy of application, the more likely they are to contribute not only to human welfare but to the equally important satisfaction of intellectual interest…"

Abraham Flexner on “useless knowledge” faculty.lsu.edu/kharms/files...

mind reels

reading the aei report about building a classical teacher pipeline

seems like it really matters what we teach about culture in high school

From the archives: Student art from a NYC public-school compilation, 1854. The superintendent bragged that none of these students had a “tutor or governess, to train their intellect." Just hard-working creative public-school types.

research and writing are JOYS

there is a lot of loud talk about "cultivating ai literacy" and i would like for us to also discuss book literacy

The Appendix on an AI policy is actually quite bad. Having an AI deliver a summary before reading has major implications in terms of the experience of student learning. What we want students to do and how they do it is the question. The experience of reading is not the same as reading a summary.

AI is undeniably useful in completing school-related artifacts more quickly and efficiently, but that utility is sometimes the opposite of learning. This is why I believe we need to focus at the level of experience and only then ask how AI might be used inside that experience.

it’s sad and weird to think of depriving students of the total pleasure of writing something and having someone else really consider it

I've got an essay in there!

/important to see it’s okay to disagree with someone’s solution to a problem while agreeing with them about a problem they’ve identified. Some of the more dismissive reactions I’ve encountered when talking about this are from people who helped build/really believe in our policy context.

I think it’s a problem if old books are right-wing coded

The difficulty is that despite the elements of the movement that I think might be up the wrong alley politically/culturally, they have identified something very important that College Board and a lot of curricular movements really haven't done, and focused on it very effectively.

there’s plenty to say about the classical movement and two of those things are that it really is challenging the college board’s brands and refocusing on books

paradise lost, man

Not reading books because we have LLM summaries is like abandoning travel because we have photography.

"ChatGPT and other LLMs can approximate the average of human beings, or play at being a singular identity, but can only ever produce a statistically fuzzy image. A novel is a singular piece of perspective of an artist, that opens up new possibilities in engaging with its limitations."

am not an ai absolutist, am grateful, for instance, for cancer research, but i think a literature classroom is a different kind of project, is a place for a different form of learning