So who's next? Stitch Fix? They stop selling clothes and just pivot to supply-chain AI claptrap?

People saying that LLMs "know" anything bothers me so much. It's like saying a room full of (stolen) books with all the pages ripped out and stacked in piles "knows" more than someone. It's an exquisitely sophisticated paper stacker. And that's cool, if you're into that, but it's not knowing.

Portuguese is the "official" language of Brazil. Portuguese is not the same as Spanish. This is not closely-guarded knowledge. Is this some kind of multi-layered dunk on his part, or is he just that poorly informed about facts that 7th graders have to memorize? How does he have this job?

Well, this is... jarring. I almost took a job at the early college in Cleveland years ago (I even did some PD there). I didn't take the job for a host of reasons, but now I'm, um, feeling extra okay about that decision.

I've just never found a peer review method that works well for developing writers that isn't completely prescriptive or a formulaic checklist. And the writing they do in their What-How-So work just crackles, even for my students who really, really, really struggle with writing at the sentence level.

I've been incorporating What-How-So responses with my freshmen to surprising success, and now I'm contemplating trying a modified version as a peer review method. What's going well in their writing? How're they achieving? Etc. Or maybe it's just a "What-How?" And the "So" is the actual revision...

Prescribed reading lists, but make it narrower. ibpublishing.ibo.org/prl/?lang=en

Current IB trainings have mostly seemed like an uncritical embrace of LLMs (the word "enhance" gets thrown around a lot, as does "career readiness"). All of these programs seem ripe for corporate capture.

Bitter, bitter Teach for America, Class of 2009 graduate, here. Nice to see Wendy Kopp is still out here making things worse in education after all these years. She's serving a different Kool-aid now, though, I see. These people do not care about teachers (or students).

A friend of mine is at the game tonight, and he said he realized Ramaswamy was there when a guy near him was loudly booing someone sitting courtside with Cleveland Cliffs people. It was Vivek and a gaggle of bodyguards.

One for the ages, for sure.

Read Mark Carney's full speech on middle powers navigating a rapidly changing world | CBC News Read the full text of Prime Minister Mark Carney's speech about a shakeup of the global order and role of middle powers at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

You likely already saw this today, but it fits the brief! I'm going to use it later this semester, I think.

One of my favorite things is when students turn a work of literature into a communal experience. While teaching Much Ado last year, one of the sweetest groups of freshmen I've ever taught basically created their own private language out of lines and in-jokes from the play. It was magical.

My mishearing of his intro to "Say My Name" by Destiny's Child as a kid (I was 12 when the song came out) is so ingrained in me that to this day when feeding my dog, I will say out loud "Dog chow, now now" instead of "Darkchild '99." My dog knows exactly what is about to happen when he hears it.

A student emailed me today to tell me I should listen to OK Computer by Radiohead because it reminded him of our class discussions about Fahrenheit 451. He said it felt like the album was made to be listened to after reading the book, and when I will say I will ride this high for a year, I mean it.

It would be nice, too, if such a thing existed outside of the "marketplace." I'm all for teachers making money off their work (à la TPT and the like), but that feels a bit like NIL, but for teachers: a small win for the individual that ignores a larger exploitation.

I'm teaching F451 right now to high school sophomores, and it's landing really, really weirdly. We talked about the AI bubble and speculative narratives on Friday. One kid said, "Okay, miss, I'm going to read this now, I promise. It's getting good."

Reminds me of that Haraway quote, "It matters what matters we use to think other matters with... It matters what knots knot knots."

Atomized learning for all the good little slop-fed children.

It's all built in to their freshmen orientation course. They also said many of their profs have banned using GenAI for any of the work in their class. One is spiraling about whether to stay in STEM because the institutional messaging she's receiving devalues the field (sounds familiar...).

My co-worker, a computer science teacher (I'm a high school English teacher in Ohio), has kept in regular contact with two of our recent grads, both wonderful, bright students in STEM programs at OSU. So far, they've reported that the "AI" instruction has felt compulsory and half-baked...

"If we can give children the knowledge they need to use these AI tools, that's going to be a huge thing. It's helping people understand that AI doesn't just mean cheating; it means growing capabilities."

Why will that be a huge thing? And what capabilities will they grow? And for whom?

What's so interesting about admitting to offloading some cognitive work to GenAI? What's so interesting about openly and shamelessly using a technology with so many environmental and ethical issues attached to it? I just can't get past the open disdain for human labor. I like people and thinking!

I also had Molly! 🙃

This is a really good question. I do think there are still a lot of students who confer a great deal of cultural capital to having read "the classics." And I think the aestheticizing of bookishness is nothing so new. Rory Gilmore informed more of my tastes in the early aughts than I care to admit.

Absolutely!

I think there are a lot of high school English teachers out there who share my (your) sentiments. We are sick of it. Our students deserve better (humanity deserves better). I wish I could light the beacons of Gondor or something to get them to mobilize.

This is the energy I'm taking into the classroom this fall.

I'm a nobody high school English teacher from Cleveland, and I've basically wanted to burn GenAI to the ground for the past two years or so. You've perfectly articulated the reasons why here. I'll co-sign this manifesto. Thank you for writing it.

This is why the AFT's new "A.I." training hub feels so misguided. There is no ethical use for a technology predicated on the kind of treatment of humans (and our world) that LLMs require. It's impossible to hand-wave this in the name of giving our students some nebulous competitive edge.