Computers And Defective Children

Kristen DiCerbo is the "chief learning officer" at Khan Academy, the hot new ed tech firm that is using computer programs to replicate some of the oldest problematic behavior in the educational universe. 

"If bringing AI into the classroom is a marathon," asserts DiCerbo in a recent article, "we’re 250 yards into this." I would argue that's a generous assessment.

See, Khan is one of the outfits betting on AI tutoring. But we can already see the problems, all completely predictable, emerging. 

Transcripts of student chats reveal some terrific tutoring interactions. But there are also many cases where students give one- and two-word responses or just type “idk,” which is short for “I don’t know”. They are not interacting with the AI in a meaningful way yet. There are two potential explanations for this: 1.) students are not good at formulating questions or articulating what they don’t understand or 2.) students are taking the easy way out and need more motivation to engage.

Oh, there are more than two possible explanations. Like 3) students aren't interested in interacting with computer software. Or 4) AI is incapable of interacting with students in a meaningful, human way that helps them deal with the material with which they struggle. 

I'm not going to expand on that point, because Benajmin Riley got there while I was still mulling this piece, and he's written a beautiful piece about what the profoundly human act of connecting and teaching with a struggling young human being requires. You should read that.  

But I do want to focus on one other piece of this. Because it's the same old mistake, again, some more.

In talking to teachers about this, they suggest that both explanations are probably true. As a result, we launched a way of suggesting responses to students to model a good response. We find that some students love this and some do not. We need a more personal approach to support students in having better interactions, depending on their skills and motivation.

In other words, the students are doing it wrong and we need to train them so that the tech will work the way we imagined it would. 

It's actually two old mistakes. Mistake #1 is the more modern one, familiar to every teacher who has had hot new "game changing" ed tech thrown at them with some variation of That Pitch--the one that goes "This tech tool will have an awesome positive effect on your classroom just as long as you completely change the way you do the work." The unspoken part is "Because this was designed by folks who don't know much about your job, so it would help them if you'd just change to better resemble the teachers they imagined when they designed this product." Raise your hand, teachers, if you've ever heard some version of "This isn't working because of an implementation problem." (The unspoken part here is "Let me, a person who has never done your job, tell you how to do your job.")

Mistake #2 is the more pernicious one, committed by a broad range of people including actual classroom teachers. And we've been doing it forever (I just saw it happening 200 years ago in Adam Laats's book about Lancaster schools). It's the one where I say, "My program here is perfect. If a student isn't getting it, that must be because the student is defective." 

Nobody is ever going to know how many students have been incorrectly labeled "learning disabled" because they failed to fall in line with someone's perfect educational plan.

We also sought to find the right balance between asking students questions and giving them hints and support. Some students were frustrated that our AI tool kept asking questions they didn’t know. If AI is to meet the promise of personalization, the technology needs to be aware of what the student currently knows and what they are struggling with to adjust the amount and type of support it provides.

You just measure what is in the brain tank, and if the level is low, pour in more knowing stuff! If this is all AI thinks it needs for personalization, AI has a Dunning-Kruger problem. At a minimum, it seems to be stuck in the computational model, a model floating around since the 1940s that the brain is like a computer that just stores data, images coded as data, experiences reduced to data. If you buy the brain-is-computer model, then sure, everything teachers do is just about storage and retrieval of data.

The brain-is-computer model has created a kind of paradox-- the idea that AI can replicate human thought is only plausible because so many people have been thinking that the brain is also a computer. In other words, some folks shrank the distance between computers and human thought by first moving the model of human thought closer to computers. If both our brains and our manufactured computers are just computers, well, then, we just make bigger and better computers and eventually they'll be like human brains.

Problem is, human brains are not computers (go ahead--just google "your brain is not a computer"), and a teacher's job is not managing storage and retrieval of data from a meat-based computer. 

Which means that if your AI tutor is set up to facilitate input-output from a meat computer, it suffers from a fundamental misconception of the task. 

This lack of humanity is tragic and disqualifying. We are only just learning how much can go wrong with these electro-mimics. There's a gut-wrenching piece in today's New York Times about a young boy who fell in love with a chatbot and committed suicide; reading the last conversation and the chatbot's last words to the child is absolutely chilling. 

AI is not human, and so many of its marketeers don't seem to have thought particularly hard about what it means to be human. If this is a marathon, then we aren't 250 yards in or even 250 feet in, and some of us aren't even running in the right direction.

Redefining Discrimination

Lexi Lonas Cochran, education reporter at The Hill, took a look at the steady conservative push on education and the Supreme Court decisions that have fed it. She got lots of things right, but I have some quibbles. 

As many of us have noted, SCOTUS has been knocking holes in the wall between church and state where it passes through the school yard, and conservatives have been both pushing on it and walking through the holes as they appear.

It's a tricky thing to chart cause and effect here. People on the right did not suddenly decide to take some of these positions just because the heist of three court seats gave them Big Dreams. At the same time, the far-right court has signaled clearly to people who have been waiting for their moment that the time is now. 

It's hard to precisely identify the juncture of political agenda and favorable court atmosphere. Neil McCluskey offered:

The most clear-cut example of what I have in mind is the Oklahoma Catholic Charter School, where it’s not so much that they see a friendly court, it’s that the courts are more friendly to school choice and have developed precedent now to support that kind of move.

Wellll..... It's true that the Catholic diocese and the christianist nationalists in political power didn't suddenly decide they'd like to hand taxpayer dollars to the private church schools. They've wanted to do that for decades. But it's also true that the diocese, and the board overseeing charter approval kind of put their heads together with Oklahoma Previous Attorney General O'Connor for a legal opinion about whether now was the time or not. Nor is anybody the slightest bit surprised that Oklahoma has asked SCOTUS to hear this case (digest version of the story here). So no, the court didn't lead to them deciding to do it all, but it surely influenced them to do it now.

This part of the discussion is an exercise in hair-splitting, but within the comments from Rick Garnett, the lawyer who's "involved" in the Catholic charter case, is a really important and deliberate mis-statement:

And more recently, there’s been a run of cases in the last, let’s say, five, six, seven years where the Court has said governments are not allowed to discriminate against religious schools. 

Nope. Nope nope nopity nope nope nope. At no point has anyone argued that governments may discriminate against religious schools, and that's not the hammer that lawyers have been using against the wall. 

Instead, what the court has done (with plenty of prompting) is to change the definition of discrimination.

The new definition has two key features.

First, the right and the court have declared that it's discrimination against religious folks if they aren't allowed to act out their own biases and prejudices. If I can't tell people that I don't want to serve them because I disagree with some aspect of their life, then that's discrimination against me. I can only freely exercise my religion if I'm allowed to throw gay people out of my cake shop or my school. 

Second, it's discrimination against religious organizations if the religious organization is denied taxpayer funds. It's not sufficient to avoid troubling or picking on a religious organization; if you won't let them have taxpayer money, that's discrimination.

And that also includes giving them those taxpayer funds without any strings attached (see "first"). The government must give the religious school taxpayer money even as it is forbidden to enforce any of the anti-discrimination rules that apply to all other government-funded organizations.

If a taxpayer-funded religious school refuses to hire an LGBTQ person as a teacher, that's the free exercise of religion. If the LGBTQ person refuses to let the school have their tax dollars, that's discrimination. If a public school football coach holds open prayers on the 50 yard line while still on duty, thereby clearly signaling to his players that failure to properly worship might put them on the bench--well, that's just free exercise of religion. If the school district fires the coach, that's discrimination.

If your religion tells you that you can't freely exercise that religion without collecting taxpayer dollars and being able to treat some people poorly, on purpose, just because, then I suspect something is wrong with your religion.

But set aside the religious and moral objections to this new definition. The practical concerns are bad enough.

Because who decides that something is a True Religion that deserves all these freedoms. If I've decided that my own personal religion also needs some taxpayer funding to start a school, who decides whether or not I get that? If I declare that I have really religious reasons for wanting to set up a private school that rejects all non-aryan families, and I want government funding for it, who settles that? Will the Department of Deciding Which Religions Are Real be a state or federal department?

Again--this has never been about combatting discrimination against religions, but about redefining what discrimination against religion means. That's the success that has paved the way for various initiatives that have been cued up for years. 

Interview: A Teacher Surgeon Speaks Out and Fesses Up

Our crack investigative at the Curmudgucation Institute had a chance to sit down with Pat DeMasquool, a member of the teaching staff at Harry Gray Middle School about the actual work there.

CI: So to be clear, you are on staff as an English Language Arts teacher and also..um...

PD: Assistant Chief of Neurosurgery. Yes.

CI: This is not something we've really heard about American schools before. Why are you choosing to go public now?

PD: Well, I mean, Donald Trump called us out, didn't he. "Sex change operations are happening in public schools." The jig is up. We might as well fess up.

CI: So that really happens. Student comes in as a boy in the morning and leaves as a girl that afternoon? How does that even work.

PD: We have some extra time built into the lunch schedule for elective surgeries. It's generally better if they get the anesthesia on an empty stomach anyway. Occasionally the surgical team gets pulled from a study hall or even a class, if there's coverage. 

CI: I don't understand. I thought school nurses can't even hand out a Tylenol without parental permission. 

PD: Oh, they can't. Rules about that are very strict. Generally the students have to get home before they can get post-surgical pain relief. That's another reason we try to schedule the surgeries later in the day. 

CI: Donald Trump also referred to these secret surgeries as brutal. Any response?

PD: As I said, we've got to sneak these surgeries into a pretty short amount of time. But we're teachers--we can eat lunch in five minutes and take a pee break within forty-five seconds. We're good at speed, even if it is a little messy. 

CI: Also, I have to ask-- the school asks kids to send in boxes of kleenex every two weeks, and your textbooks are from the 20th century. How does the school district manage to afford all the equipment for these secret surgeries when you can't even afford simple basics.

PD: Different line item on the secret budget. Yeah, we have a whole secret source of financing to cover this stuff that we aren't allowed to spend on ordinary school supplies, but can support the surgeries.

CI: You keep saying "surgeries," like plural. Do you perform a lot of these?

PD: Well, the secret trans surgeries keep us busy some times of year. But we have plenty of other surgical specialties here, too. Mrs. Whippet in the Home Ec department does a pretty good secret knee replacement, and Mrs. Hergenschimer in the Social Studies department is on the brink of developing some cutting edge secret brain surgery techniques. Our lunch ladies are top-notch anesthetists. 

CI: This is going on all the time??

PD: Not all the time. Sometimes we get busy with classwork around the end of the grading period, and of course we're very busy in the spring testing season. And of course you've heard about the substitute shortages--that's one of the main reasons we need so much coverage. So sometimes the surgery has to wait. And of course we have limited space. We've only converted three classrooms into operating theaters. 

CI: I'm a little surprised to find a middle school English teacher with knowledge of advanced surgical techniques.

PD: We pick it up mostly in professional development sessions.

CI: Incredible. I'm surprised so many teacher surgeons stay here after getting that training. A neurosurgeon makes about a quarter million a year. How does that compare to the salary for a middle school English teacher? 

PD: Yeah, but where else could I get to spend my days trying to get kids interested in prepositions and Emily Dickenson? 

CI: Really, wouldn't it be simpler to sneak surgeons in here to perform the secret sex change operations? 

PD: Well, that would make it harder to keep secret, wouldn't it? Plus, what neurosurgeon would want to come work for my wages? No, the only way to keep it quiet is to do it in here with school where only the staff, the students, the lunch ladies, and the rest of the support staff know about it. That's why no word of it has ever leaked before.

CI: Don't parents notice? Why haven't we heard from any alarmed parents whose children went through transitional surgery in school? You'd think one or two would have said something.

PD: You would, wouldn't you. Only Trump was canny enough.

CI: It seems like an awful lot to manage.

PD: That's for sure. Four separate preps a day, papers to grade for 200 students, running student council, plus secret surgical work. And on top of that, we're also making sure to keep up with litter boxes for the furries as well as performing the regular Marxist indoctrination. Also, the homecoming dance is coming up. I can tell you one thing-- it leaves absolutely no time to make up senseless bullshit stories about other professions that we know nothing about. 

Care and Consequences

It may be the silliest false dichotomy in education. 

Do we bury toss aside the school disciplinary system for a truckload of warm, fuzzy sensitivity, or do we handle the misbehaving children with a traditional authoritarian round of showin' them who's boss?

I would love to say that both of these are gross overstatements, but, of course, they are not. Beyond the assorted hard-core authoritarian administrators out there, we've seen entire schools modeled on "no excuses," which at its most extreme means "I don't want to hear about your troubles, kid. Just knuckle under and do as you're told." And the anecdotal record of principals who send the offending student back to class with a lollipop, or won't take action until the teacher has forty-seven pieces of documentation and a certified "built a relationship with the student" story-- well, I'm pretty sure that every working teacher has stories.

Despite the advent of new languages for these extremes, they are not new at all. I've worked for both, and those days are at least 25 years in the rear view mirror.

The two poles are always discussed in the most extreme terms (much as I have so far), and I think that's because to people who disagree, the other side seems very extreme, and I think it seems very extreme because the correct answer in the real world is (once again) All Of The Above.

There is no question that when students act out, they are delivering a message and/or expressing a need. But that does not mean they should not experience consequences. For one thing, many times the message is that they would benefit from, even like to see, some structure and guardrails in the classroom. For another, the other students deserve a classroom in which they too are safe and able to learn. Consequences for the choices they make and the actions they take are a useful and necessary tool in the classroom.

At the same time, consequences that do not take into account whatever needs and pressures and traumas inform the child's behavior are blunt instruments that are destined to be less effective. As one of my principals frequently demonstrated, simply trying to hammer a child into submission creates far more problems than it solves. 

"Build a relationship" can mean an awful lot of things, but for teachers and students, mutual respect is the ideal. Respect includes a lot of features, but it doesn't include saying "I'm going to treat you like someone I can't expect to behave like a civilized person" and it doesn't include "I'm going to treat you like some kind of savage that must be broken and overpowered." 

Care and consequences are both a necessary piece of the disciplinary puzzle. Teachers and administrators absolutely can, and should, understand what message is contained in student behavior AND have the students face consequences for those actions. Teachers have to find their own way to balance. Teachers starting out are often reluctant to be "mean," but most figure out that it's not "mean" to create some order in the classroom (there is also an oft-noted phenomenon where a teacher tries to be too soft and eventually explodes all over the room). Teachers have to learn how their stern selves (which most 22-year-olds have little practice in performing) plays in the room. I found that what felt to me like a mild rebuke hit my students like a brutal beatdown. 

But I have never met anyone effective in a classroom who did not do both care and consequence. I have met zero effective teachers who were all one or the other. It would probably be useful have conversations that acknowledged what's needed is a proper balance rather than talking as if one or the other needs to be obliterated (or even successfully can be).But that is one of the scourges of education discussions--framed to often as either-or when they really should be about balancing both-and.

Investors Warned: Stride Is A Mess (Still)

A investment analyst website has declared that cyber-school giant Stride stock is about to drop, based on problems from hidden ESSER benefits to ghost students and other details hidden from investors.

Wait-- who are Stride again?

Stride used to be K-12, a for-profit company aimed at providing on-line and blended learning. It was founded in 2000 by Ron Packard, former banker and Mckinsey consultant, and quickly became the leading national company for cyber schooling.

One of its first big investors was Michal Milken. That investment came a decade after he pled guilty to six felonies in the “biggest fraud case in the securities industry” ending his reign as the “junk bond king.” Milken was sentenced to ten years, served two, and was barred from ever securities investment. In 1996, he had established Knowledge Universe, an organization he created with his brother Lowell and Larry Elison, who both kicked in money for K12.

K12 went through a long series of legal problems and operational screw-ups. I have talked before with a company insider who found herself in the midst of battling lawsuits (it was one of my rare imitations of real journalist), and that lawsuit revealed that Stride actually has ties to investment giant BlackRock, and to Milken as well. 

Stride has generated a ton of profit for folks, enough that they are a lobbying powerhouse (particularly here in PA where cybercharter reforms always seem to stall and the cybers remain big moneymakers).

Now what's a fuzzy panda?

Fuzzy Panda Research is a website that specializes in information about stocks prime for shorting, which, to skip the whole investment black hole, is basically a bet that a company's stocks are about to take a dive.

They have apparently took a close look at Stride, and they see trouble on the horizon:

We are short Stride Inc (fka K12 Inc.) (NYSE:LRN). We believe Stride, a K-12 online education company, is the last Covid over-earning stock yet to fall. The stock is near its highs (+60% YoY) but investors are clueless about the looming Covid funding cliff. Investors don’t know because Stride management has NOT told them. Instead, management has said over and over again that the company received little to no benefit from the $190 Billion of federal Covid funds (called Elementary & Secondary School Emergency Relief Funds, or “ESSER”). Former Stride executives told us that management misled investors.

Let's take the issues one at a time.

ESSER shenanigans

Stride told its investors that their exceptionally great profits over the past four years were the result of the Elementary & Secondary School Emergency Relief Funds, the covid relief funds aimed at schools. CEO Rhyu told investors over the years that the company wasn't really seeing many of those dollars and wouldn't have to adjust when they went away.

Since those funds came with few strings attached, Stride just sort of shuffled them into a closet, then opened the closet and said, "Look at all these profits we found! What a good job we're doing!" Some of the funds were used to cover operational losses, but Fuzzy Panda estimates that over 25% of the EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization) was simply those covid relief funds-- about 50-75% of them. 

In other words, taxpayer covid relief funds just went straight to the company's bottom line. Executives told them "it was a little bit of a shell game."

This does not matter to investors because of any outrage over misuse of government funds. But what it means to investors is that, since ESSER funds are now done, Stride is about to lose a major source of profit. 

But there are other issues.

Ghost students

Stride collected millions of dollars for students it was not actually educating. Fuzzy Pandas breaks this down into two groups.

Invisible ghosts are fake students who simply don't exist. FP estimates 5-10% of their total enrollment is these non-existent students.

Truant ghosts are the students that Stride pushes to show up on the days when the state counts the initial enrollment. Then they disappear. 

FP reports that Stride actually cut the staff responsible for tracking attendance and chasing down truant kids.

For investors, the big question is this-- Kamala Harris cracked down on Stride in 2016 over ghost students and forced them into a $168 million settlement. Would we see a repeat of that in a Harris administration? Sure would be expensive if, as they put it, "the ghostbuster returns."

Undisclosed loss of schools

Seven schools have left the Stride fold since 2021; investors don't know about this because it's kept hushed. FP predicts the "undisclosed churn" will continue because many Stride schools are unhappy, Management talks "about opportunity to add schools in 19 states – but Stride already has been kicked out of 9 of those states."

The lack of disclosure started when Rhyu stepped into the CEO spot.

Allegations of overbilling and fraud and poor performance

These have followed K12/Stride since forever. Overpriced hardware, class change charges, and a fake shell company that further allowed them to inflate enrollment. Also, FP figured out what many of us already know-- the ratings for Stride in particular and cyber-charters in general are low. Will these combine with post-pandemic scenery to bring drop in enrollment?

Finally, the CEO is...well...

In discussing James Rhyu's "colorful leadership style," FP says that "the phrase asshole came up frequently." Rhyu was promoted from the position of Chief Financial Officer. I've read hundreds of pages of his depositions, and as those he comes across as slippery, evasive, and weaselly. Here's an exchange that FD mined from a deposition:

Q: Mr. Rhyu, are you a man of your word?
Rhyu: I’m not sure I understand that question.
Q: Do you do what you say you are going to do, sir?
Rhyu: Under what circumstances?
Q: Do you do what you say you are going to do, Mr. Rhyu?
Rhyu: That’s such a broad question. It’s hard for me to answer.

Former execs also told FP about incidents of rage and bullying. "management by fear, bullying control freak."

Read the full report

Fuzzy Panda has a wealth of details and links and has brought all the receipts. They even offer twelve questions that investors should ask management of Stride. 

Investors appear to have already started to react to the news that despite not acknowledging it, Stride is about "to fall off a Covid cliff." We'll see what happens. This is all news for the investment world, the world that Stride is very interested in. For those of us in the education world, the news that Stride is shady, shifty, and operating unethically while pretending to be an education business--well, that's not news at all. But if the news could get out to other folks, that would be great. If you are in Pennsylvania, forward the Fuzzy Panda article to your legislator and ask them if they're ready for some cyber charter reform yet. 

ICYMI: I've Had Enough Edition (10/20)

If you don't live in a swing state, count your blessings. Pennsylvania is being overrun with political noise, all in service of a race in which to still be undecided you would have to be a very not-smart person who has been living under a rock. And we can't even put our heads down and power through, because either Beloved Leader will win and we will have to set our teeth for more years of struggle, or Beloved Leader will lose, which will trigger a long, ugly attempt to overturn the election. 

Well, some times don't ask much of us and some times ask a lot, and sometimes the only way out is through. Do what you can.

Meanwhile, there's still stuff about education to read. Her is some of it.

How a Struggling Boston School Found Success in the Roots of its Haitian American Community

Jeff Bryant at the Progressive with a story of a town that didn't lose its damned mind when Haitian immigrants came to live. And a school was at the heart of it.

Conservative megadonor Jeffrey Yass to fund South Carolina school choice voucher program

How rich is Jeff Yass? Rich enough to step in with funding for voucher students in South Carolina when the court takes the ax to the state's plan.

Oklahoma families, teachers and faith leaders file lawsuit to block Superintendent Ryan Walters’ Bible-education mandate

If you heard about edu-dudebro Ryan Walters mandating a Bible in every class and thought, "Well, that can't be legal," some parents and teachers and faith leaders and some powerful organizations agree with you, and they're taking Oklahoma to court in order to put the kibosh on it.

Oklahoma grand jury blames Ryan Walters, Gov. Stitt for COVID relief misspending

Also, Walters is still suffering consequences for the huge mismanagement he performed when he was just a baby grifter and not a state education tsar.

Far-Right Candidates Are Trying To Take Over Public Schools Across The Country

Before you spend all your worry on the marquee races, Nathalie Baptiste reminds us that there are critical local races on the ballot, too.

‘Money Matters. Now What?’: How Districts Get More Funding for Poor Students

Mark Lieberman at EdWeek says now that we've finally established that the reformster argument that money doesn't matter is, in fact, hooey, what can be a district's next steps?

California’s two biggest school districts botched AI deals. Here are lessons from their mistakes.

Boy, did they ever. Khari Johnson ay Cal Matters performs an autopsy on the cyber-messes at Los Angelos and San Diego. Maybe there are some lessons here (for humans, not AI).

Kentucky Board of Education approves resolution opposing Amendment 2

Kentucky's state board of education has come out publicly against the proposed constitutional amendment designed to open up funding for vouchers.

In Praise of Social Studies

Nancy Flanagan was a music teacher, but she calls social studies "the most critical field for K-12 students to explore."

Private school vouchers opposed by more than half of Pa. voters, poll shows

Hoping Governor Josh Shapiro gets the message. When you actually explain what vouchers do (send taxpayer dollars to private schools) they don't love them so much.

Florida: Defunding and closing Public schools while Encouraging The Building of More Private Options.

Sue Kingery Woltanski keeps an eye on Florida shenanigans, in this case surrounding school closures. "Recently, the narrative in Florida is that public schools are under-utilized because families are fleeing to other “school choice” options. I encourage you to be skeptical of that narrative."

Former Norman teacher Summer Boismier asks judge to reverse revocation of her license

Boismier is the teacher who was decertified by Ryan Walters because she dared to provide students with access to books. She's in New York now, following other professional paths, but she is not going to let Walters off the hook.

Parents stunned after Acero charter school network announces plans to close 7 schools

Acero is descended from failed charter chain UNO, and now they are leaving more families high and dry in Chicago.

Building the Bridge Between Old and New Math

Not that I spend a lot of time here working on Math Stuff, but as usual, Jose Luis Vilson is writing about more than just the math.

Techno-optimism as digital eugenics

Benjamin Riley takes a look at one tech CEO's vision for an AI future and finds it... not very serious.

It’s early days for AI. Here’s what we’ve learned

Here's a more serious look at AI developments.

To Parents of High School Seniors, What I See as a Teacher Every Year

From teacher Kara Lawler at Grown and Flown. It's nice.

Internet Personality? Thought Leader? Writer.

John Warner writes a lot of smart stuff about writing. This piece looks at the new problem--writing as a stepping stone to other sorts of roles in the world. What about those of us who just want to write?

Elsewhere this week-- At Forbes.com, I wrote about the three states where voters have a chance to squelch vouchers in their state. At Bucks County Beacon, a more in-depth look at the case of the Oklahoma Catholic charter, and what it could mean if the Supreme Court chooses to take it up. 

Also, given the latest update of terms in Musk-land, I've been reviving my participation at Bluesky. If you're over there, look me up at @palan57.bsky.social

As always, I invite you to subscribe on substack. It will always be free and it makes it easy to get all my stuff in your inbox.

John Green and Religion

You are probably aware with John and Hank Green's Crash Course videos; short, perky videos that provide a quick sharp look at a particular topic. They are what Khan Academy wishes it could be. Crash Course covers a broad assortment of topics in a chatty manner, but not dumbed down in any way. The brothers have expanded their crew as well (e.g. check out Crash Course Black History hosted by Clint Smith). 

Hank hosts the newest offering-- Crash Course Religions-- and if you live in a state where leaders are trying very hard to push a particular brand of a particular religion into schools, this is a series that will really help you put your finger on why it all seems like such an exercise in futility. I'd start with Episode #2, which is embedded below.

Take the issues being raised in Oklahoma and Florida. In Florida, the law to allow "volunteer chaplains" has raised the entirely predictable announcement by the Satanic Temple that they'd like a piece of that action. Ron DeSantis expressed not a hint of hesitation in declaring that "that is not a religion." Meanwhile, in Oklahoma, when the same issue was raised, education dudebro-in-chief Ryan Walters declared, "Satanists are not welcome in Oklahoma schools, but they are welcome to go to hell."

Americans in general and conservative christianists in particular have pretty clear ideas about what a Real Religion is, right down to folks who believe that not only their religion, but their own particular church, is the Only Real Religion.

In ten minutes, Green makes a couple of important points. The Big Five are "religions" because Europeans carried their definitions of religion out into the world, as well as thei assumption that religion was a necessary requirement for civilization. The Big Five are also not even the biggest five religions practiced in the world. And the whole category of "world religions" is a human construct, right to the idea that the definition of "religion" is based an awful lot on "how I do my worshipping." 

"The idea of religion as this special category, set apart from other stuff people think, believe, and do," says Green, "Well, that's only a few hundred years old." People have a lot of ways of making sense of their lives, and the notion that "religion" is clearly and distinctly different from other ways is kind of suspect. And there is vast diversity within traditions.

It's ten minutes packed with reminders that any time you try to legislate religion on the assumption that there's a clear, concrete understanding of what religion is, you are on wispy low-lying fog that would have to upgrade huge amounts to even dream of being shaky ground. It's not crystal clear, it's not obvious, and it's not simple, and anyone who tells you it is is just showing you how stunted their understanding of religion is.