Here's the reading list for the week. Remember to share the things that speak to you. In this age, everyone can be an amplifier.
I have some quibbles with this post from The Rea; Classroom (I'd absolutely add "know what the hell you're talking about" to list, which absolutely has to do with what you teach) but she still has some good points to make in this list.
In home state, Moms for Liberty shows lackluster influence in school board races
Trinity Webster Ross reports for the Florida Trib on the waning influence of everyone's favorite culture panickers.
Men Yell At Me is usually more political and cranky, but this post about parenting teens is beautiful and on point.
Thomas Ultican unpacks some of the problems still plaguing gifted and talented education.
Retired music teacher Nancy Flanagan is right on the mark here.
Looks like the AI teacherbot might not be coming to Salamanca after all. From New York Times (if I did this right, a gift link, maybe?)
Anthropic is making its bid for a slice of the education pie, and Ben Riley correctly questions why this is even a thing.
Audrey Watters is likewise skeptical about this newest iteration of edutech and puts it in the context of other bad edutech ideas as only she can.
Yeah, Anthropic has stirred up an ocean of skepticism. John Robinson reminds us that there is nothing free-- just the hope that you'll be so hooked that you'll be willing to pay later.
Devin Pavlou at San rounds out the mini-list of Claude-doubting. Come for this quote from Martina Meijer:
“We’re training their models for free, and they’re telling us it’s a gift,” Meijer said. “No, no, no — our labor, our experience, our intellectual work — that is a gift. And I don’t give that gift to corporations. I give that gift to children.”By One Dishonest Measure
Gary Rubinstein puts his number crunching skills to work dismantling claims about how many students are "trapped in failing schools."
Why we can't have nice things
Larry Cuban shares the tale of a reform attempt from the 1930s, a study that was swallowed by the war, but deserves just a little bit of attention.
Jan Resseger suspects that the Ohio legislature doesn't actually care about public education.
Ted Dintersmith is an interesting animal, a rich guy who has dabbled in education but seems to have done so with actual interest in learning stuff rather than imposing his own genius ideas. Here he draws some conclusions about the Big Standardized Test as a central feature of education.
I love a story that wears its attitude on its sleeve. Amanda Siberling at TechCrunch looks at Zuckerberg's latest boneheaded idea:
The good news about StoryKit is that it could be a lot worse. Meta regularly ships boneheaded ideas like Instagram deepfake generators and “pervert glasses.” Comparatively, is it so bad to doom children to soulless bedtime stories? Should we have expected anything better from the company that promised us a utopian world of virtual reality work meetings?
Short, worthwhile read.
Your Cookware Got Worse On PurposeI discovered a new-to-me newsletter this week (thanks, Joanna) called "Worse on Purpose" and this post is a fine introduction.
When a brand changes hands this many times, the name becomes the product and the pan becomes a cost to be managed beneath it: thinner steel here, an offshored handle there, a warranty rewritten by lawyers instead of engineers, and so on…
Yes, this website is about markets and products and consumers and enshittifcation, which are not obviously education issues, except that in a country where people are trying so hard to turn education into a market commodity, we really need to pay attention to how the marketplace actually works these days.
At Forbes.com this week, I look at the latest chapter in the Maine lawsuit-fest that is still trying to establish a religious school's right to discriminate as it wishes while demanding taxpayer dollars to fund its discrimination. Also, maybe states considering federal vouchers should also consider some regulatory guardrails to go with them.
The band has a theme song; here we are playing it at the beginning of our 150th anniversary concert (for which we invited back former players). Not exactly perfect video quality from our local cable access station, but you get the idea.Subscribe and get all the stuff, for free.
I think Jennifer's The Real Classroom is totally on point.
ReplyDeleteAs far as gifted and talented...I've never seen these students as something we should worry about. It's probably blasphemy and heresy, but I've always felt that kids who are gifted or talented will get along fine without any intervention, because they are gifted and talented. They can learn on their own, especially now with so many online resources. Also, I'm not sure that the whole program wasn't invented to create an "elite" status hierarchy. The ones we need to worry about are anyone who has trouble learning something. I've never had anyone who was gifted or talented cause trouble or feel unsatisfied because they were bored and lessons were too easy for them; if they got done with their work faster, they did other homework or read or drew or wrote a poem. We would do a lot of practice on the same skills, but I would vary the format so that it didn't seem the same, and so I was hitting different learning modes, like visual, audial, kinetic, which all reinforced the skills and made learning more complete. And I would introduce some things in more depth in class, but not test anyone on it, and suggest ways to practice it, so if they wanted to, they could go further. If they didn't want to at that moment in their lives, well, they'd always have the capability to later. I would also arrange seating so that the ones who learned easier could help their peers who didn't if I thought they had the personality to want to do that. And we would always have "Quest" programs in the school, where kids who wanted to advance more than what was offered in a subject they liked and excelled at could get credit for studying it on their on with minimal supervision from a teacher.
Rebecca deCoca
AI in education is a funny thing. But have you heard about AI grading standardized tests? Cambrium’s AS Engine has been used in Florida and Ohio for the past couple of years. Utah has also started using it.
ReplyDeleteThe writing tests have been, ahem, interesting.
The psychometric folks keep doing their tweaking behind the scenes to clean up the messes, bless their hearts. But AI still misses copied text along with missing students’ usage of AI! This has led to shorter projects and fewer readers, although one wonders where the money is now being spent?