congratulations you don’t have to take a college history course
congratulations you don’t have to take a college history course
reckless
🤔🤔
thanks so much!!
thanks!!
am looking for an accessible, lively essay to introduce high schoolers to transcendentalism and emerson—anyone have recos? nyer, tnr, etc?
happy back to school!
morrison has a perspective, whitman has a perspective, students have a range of perspectives—the work of the course is thinking about them
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
i wrote about teaching it for the awl (rip): www.theawl.com/2017/06/jem-...
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...
it’s not the CLT itself, it’s another thing, will be interesting to see how historians respond: firstthings.com/erasing-chri...
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...
would read a detailed history of that initiative’s origins
I really think it’s worth noting that Alpha/2HR rely on AP scores for legitimacy
“crushing academics”
was thinking about elementary school in particular, but it‘s all the way through
books
boutique writing instruction for all
calling for a moratorium on the word “scale”
what does this even mean
it's like an alternate universe
that's interesting, I guess we'll find out soon
thanks!
“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
people who talk about education in terms of "unfulfilled potential" and "opportunities to live dignified lives" are sometimes referring strictly to future employment and i think that's a mistake
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
different strokes
a female student who read Nature last year just wrote last week to say it “reminded me that I am a part of something much greater…I became aware of how much I don’t know, and the pull to learn it all left me with a restless excitement to read.”
(student work)
he's not my fave, not my hill
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).
am teaching an elective on matthiessen’s canon this term, v much looking forward to it
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/...
and so easy to co-opt
it’s real weird
sorry, didn’t mean to offend, opposite, really
would love it if more epistemologists were writing about what goes on in high school as a matter of policy
you’re right, of course—it’s not “no one,” there’s a lot of tossing around that phrase without intention though
grotesque
!!!
would read this piece
paper’s good sometimes
my dissertation, years ago, was about the 19C American construction of a mythic Anglo-Saxon past and antislavery writers who studied Old English and medieval history
dark ages
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
this is the thing
I think this every time I see it
no shade, she’s doing interesting things, there should just be room for lots of other stuff too, i think
but her school probably wouldn’t be right for my child either, and its mission diverges from what i have in mind— thelwschool.org
racism, bigotry aren’t always at the fore, even if they win out—it’s a shame to gloss over, for instance, anika prather’s work (redefiningclassics.org/2025/03/09/a...)
not that rigid scheme with predetermined outcomes, this other one
“workforce readiness”
www.aei.org/research-pro...
I see.
"Above all, and as distinct from standard public school models, classical schools are mission driven....These schools know what they are trying to do: form young people into wise, virtuous, and free adults...As Long...puts it, 'The mission keeps us from becoming another urban test-prep machine.'"
"Classical education demands an unusual synthesis: a teacher who is intellectually serious, well-versed in the great books, morally grounded, and pedagogically effective in techniques such as explicit instruction and Socratic seminars."
reading the aei report about building a classical teacher pipeline
seems like it really matters what we teach about culture in high school
hmm
was elated when mine ate a bowl of multigrain cheerios as part of a balanced dinner last night
necessarily big tent
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
Anika Prather’s doing interesting work in that vein and I’m very glad to know about it!
which major orgs, partnerships, initiatives are focusing on how and why to read books, APART FROM THE CLASSICAL MOVEMENT
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.
?! I missed it entirely
are they talking about it on twitter?!
has someone published on that?
oh wow
we'll see
have been thinking for a long time now that affirmative arguments about alternatives are overdue
there’s been a “recalibration” going on since 2019
they cut the multiple choice question choices from 5 to 4, for instance—that’s a possibility too
I don’t think that accounts for the Lang shift from last year (54% “pass rate”) to this one (74%)
it’s sad and weird to think of depriving students of the total pleasure of writing something and having someone else really consider it
omg
I've got an essay in there!
agree
classical stuff drives me up a wall, truly
it’s the cynicism above all else that gets me
