“Ultimately, teachers must accept that they no longer need to be a fountain of knowledge and that their energy is better spent as an architect of learning experiences, a coach providing real-time support and feedback, and an analyzer of data to shape individual learning paths.” (Catlin R. Tucker, Power Up Blended Learning)

Sometime near the end of one school year in the pre-pandemic “God, everything was so much easier” days of education, I gave my 7th-grade math classes a “real world” task to finish out the school year.

Let’s acknowledge the elephant in the room - once those end-of-year tests are live and after they’ve wrapped, there’s not a lot of actual learning that takes place, mostly because the kids believe they’re done and they just need to ride out the last few days. Yet, teachers (me included) want to save the real-world stuff for the end of the year so it doesn’t get in the way of the important learning: prepping for the tests. I’ll come back to this later.

I found a 7th-grade math lesson online that was fun, gave the kids some actual work to do, and had a heck of a hook. The task? They were going to “save” a failing diner by building a new menu for them, using recipes made from roadkill.

Mike, will you share the lesson with us?

*NO. Mostly because I don’t have it anymore, but it was also fairly terrible. Sorry. Work with Claude for a few minutes, and I’m sure you’ll have a better version.*

It’s as gross as you imagine. Also, there are several states that do allow you to collect roadkill for your own use. Log that tidbit back in the nooks and crannies of your mind for future reference, right behind the glass that says “Break in case of apocalypse”.

To be fair, the lesson did fit the requirement of being something positioned in the real world, albeit just barely and in the broadest terms. It wasn’t great, but we did have fun. I added a few requirements to flesh out the project; students had to build the budget in Google Sheets, they had some research requirements, they used Canva to design a new menu, etc. At the end of the day, it was really nothing more than a fancier tri-fold board presentation.

No one grabbed hold of the project and took it more seriously than the surface-level engagement; no one prepared a presentation for an actual business (we ended up not having time to present at all), and no one remembers it for anything more than what it was: a silly activity to wrap up the year.

Fast forward a few years. I’d moved out of the classroom and taken a position as the Digital Learning Coach for my district. That change happened right before the COVID-19 pandemic struck in March 2020 (I was actually at a training conference in Salt Lake City four weeks before we shut down public schools on March 13, 2020. Yikes.)

After surviving the pandemic years, I started a year-long teacher training cohort: the Future Shift Fellowship. This was my attempt to work with a small group of teachers to begin a shift to more authentic learning experiences.

We weren’t winging it, either. The whole year ran on something called the 4 Shifts Protocol, out of Scott McLeod and Julie Graber’s Harnessing Technology for Deeper Learning. It isn’t a program or a curriculum or a binder. It’s a set of questions you ask about a lesson you already teach. Hold onto that, because one of those questions turns out to be the entire point of this essay, and I didn’t understand it for a long time after I started using it.

Overall, it was a smashing success, but two experiences stand out for me, both from 3rd-grade teachers.

The first teacher took an existing reading/writing unit that had students writing about famous inventions. They could pick the invention, but the original task only had them write a couple of paragraphs. Remember: 3rd grade.

The teacher made a small change in the task. She gave students three options for the task (another student agency opportunity): Student groups could choose to write a newspaper article about the invention, create a website about the invention, or do a “breaking news” video.

Every. Single. Group. All of them chose the news video.

The teacher told me that, for the first time, students were asking if they could do some work on this assignment at home. They wrote more and planned more than anything they did the entire school year (Her words, not mine).

They had full control over the video and how they presented themselves, how they recorded the video, how they edited the video, everything. Most used Canva video templates - they have several newscast templates perfect for this task - and wrote their own scripts. Some students didn’t really dress up or have much scenery, but there was that one pair of young ladies...

These girls. They stole their setup from watching “Good Morning America” or the “Today Show” - they came in nice clothes, hair fixed, and, the pièce de résistance... they brought their own coffee cups to sit on the desk in front of them.

The videos were fantastic, the kids learned so much, and, maybe most importantly, the teacher said she’d do it again. As a matter of fact, her class started a podcast to chronicle their year together very soon after this.

The other 3rd-grade teacher took a different path. She had a unit on economics and decided to have students create a “market day” - they could work together to create a business. They had to market the business, come up with a name, graphics, products... starting from the ground up.

All this may sound pretty familiar and unoriginal, until you learn one more thing: the teacher brought in someone from the local city government to talk to the students about what it took to start a business and about business licensing.

As part of that talk, the students prepared their own applications for their business licenses. However unofficial these licenses were, they went through the same process any other business would. And, they received their license before the market day. During market day, while everyone was walking through the stands in the halls, hanging behind each one, stamped with an official stamp and everything, were their business licenses.

These aren’t perfect examples. We certainly didn’t talk about how to assess the work, nor did we do a deep dive into standards alignment. The whole point of this exercise was to make the learning more authentic - to get it outside the realm of the school walls.

Now, let’s say these teachers had their projects going on at the same time I had mine. You might think that mine, because it was with older students, using more tools, and perhaps providing more evidence for their work, would be the task seen as more authentic.

But... they had business licenses and coffee cups.

Here’s the part that took me years to work out, and I’d like to save you the years.

I wasn’t looking at the task; I was looking at the facade in front of the task.

My project looked like the real world. It had a business in it. It had a budget, and budgets are serious. It had research, a designed menu, and a hook you could tell at a dinner party. If you had walked past my classroom with a clipboard, you’d have written down “real-world application” and moved on down the hall feeling good about seventh grade.

But look at where all of it came from. I invented the diner. I invented the diner’s problem. I decided the diner was failing, I decided roadkill was the answer, and I was the only human being on this earth who ever laid eyes on what those kids came up with. The whole thing started in my head and ended in my gradebook. Nothing about it ever touched anything outside the walls of that building.

That’s a closed loop. And a closed loop can be as realistic as you like — that’s the trap. Realism is cheap. A school can manufacture a perfectly plausible scenario all day long without ever picking up the phone. My diner was more plausible than a bunch of eight-year-olds selling friendship bracelets in a hallway. My scenario would hold up better in a business class. The difference wasn’t plausibility.

The difference was that one of those hallways had city hall in it.

So here’s the ladder I wish somebody had drawn for me back then:

Does the work look like what real people do?
Does it use the tools real people use?
Does anybody outside the room ever see it?
And does it go anywhere?

Four rungs. I made it to about two and a half, put a bow on it, and called it authentic learning. Most of us do. I’ve seen a hundred projects since then that stop right where mine did, and they’re all built by people who care.

And now the part I’d rather not write.

Of those four shifts I was supposedly making — deeper thinking, authentic work, student agency, technology — the one I actually made was the technology one. Google Sheets. Canva. A research requirement. I moved that project further on the technology dimension than on the other three put together.

Which figures, doesn’t it. Technology is the only one of the four you can buy. It’s the only one with a vendor and an invoice and a rep who’ll bring donuts. It’s the only one that shows up in a photograph. You cannot take a picture of a kid exercising judgment, but you can absolutely take a picture of a kid with a Chromebook, and I promise you that picture is in somebody’s board presentation this month.

I actually wrote this down myself, three years ago, in the first newsletter I ever sent:

“The last question to ask when shifting to deeper learning is ‘what technology should we use?’ That’s the least important question.”

I meant it. I still mean it. I had also, a few years before writing it, built an entire unit where the technology was the only thing I upgraded.

There’s a story I used in that same newsletter, and it fits my diner a lot better than it fit the thing I originally aimed it at.

Malcom McLean owned a trucking company and had driven a truck himself, and he was sick to death of sitting in traffic on the coastal highways. So on the 26th of April, 1956, he sailed a converted tanker called the Ideal X out of Newark with fifty-eight boxes on it. That’s the whole idea. Put the freight in a box instead of hauling the entire truck. He wasn’t trying to reorder global trade or hand the next century to Asia’s ports. He just didn’t want to sit in traffic anymore.

Now here’s the part I keep coming back to. The professionals thought this was a dumb idea, and they had good reasons.

Experienced stevedores could pack a ship’s hold beautifully — every good in its own optimal packaging, every gap filled, nothing wasted. Why would you take that and swap in a bunch of identical rigid boxes that fit worse? Why fit square boxes into a round-bottomed hull? Half your customers don’t ship exactly one box worth of anything, so now you’ve got containers going out half empty, or packed with three customers’ orders that have to be untangled at every single port. And once the box goes off on a truck, somebody’s got to chase it down and bring it back. McLean himself lost hundreds of them.

He wasn’t the only one who tried it, either. Plenty of others put containers on ships around the same time and quit. Not because they were dinosaurs — but because they lost money on it.

Sönke Ahrens tells this story, and his read on why the others failed is the sentence that got me. They tried to fit the container into the way they already worked. They kept their infrastructure, kept their routines, and bolted the new thing onto the old system. They were standing on the dock looking at crates and asking why they should pack everything a second time.

What McLean understood was that the ship owner’s point of view isn’t the one that matters. What matters is the purpose of the whole trade — getting the goods from the person who made them to the place they’re actually going. And the box only paid off once every piece of the chain got rebuilt around that: the packing, the ships, the cranes, the harbors, all of it.

Well.

That was Google Sheets and me. I stood on my dock (The diner project) and asked how to fit the new tool into the unit I already had. I never once asked where the work was going, or who was on the other end of it, because as far as I was concerned there wasn’t another end. I was the destination.

So ends the story of the diner. New tools, unchanged confines.

Now let me go back to that protocol, because the answer was sitting in it the whole time and I walked past it for years.

The 4 Shifts Protocol has four sections, and the first thing worth noticing is that authentic work is one section, separated from student agency. McLeod and Graber didn’t fold those together, and I think most of us in this business do fold them together, constantly. We say “authentic” when we mean “the kids got to choose,” and we say “student-centered” when we mean “it looked like a job.”

Keep them apart for a second, and you can see all four corners of the room. A task can hand students every decision and never once leave the building. A task can make real contact with the world while the teacher decides absolutely everything. Neither one is the whole thing. My diner was low on both, dressed up as high on one.

Then there’s the section on authentic work, and this is where I got humbled by a piece of paper I’d been handing out.

The section opens with a question I would have passed: is student work authentic and reflective of that done by experts outside of school? Sure. Restaurants have menus and budgets. Check.

But further down, under a question about whether students are creating real products for real audiences, there’s a sub-question. It’s indented. It only exists if you answered yes to the one above it. Here it is:

“Does student work make a contribution to an audience beyond the classroom walls to the outside world?”

That’s the only question in the whole protocol you have to earn the right to ask. Every other item, you can just walk up and answer. That one is conditional. You don’t get to it unless the work already has a real audience — and if it doesn’t, the question isn’t even on the table for you.

I never earned the right to ask it. Not once in that unit. And I’d been carrying the protocol around in a folder.

The third-grade teacher earned it with a phone call. That’s the whole trick. She didn’t design a better simulation, she didn’t find a slicker template, she didn’t buy anything. She called somebody downtown and asked if they’d come talk to eight-year-olds about business licenses. That’s the difference between my project and hers, and it cost her one phone call and a little nerve.

The researchers back this up, though I want to be careful about how hard I lean.

Koh and colleagues lay out four principles for authentic assessment: the task represents complex work in the field, students can see the criteria, students judge and revise their own work, and students present and defend it to real audiences. Read that list twice and notice what I noticed — only the first one is about looking real. Three of the four are about what students get to do and who they answer to. (Fair warning on this one: it comes from instructors studying their own course, so treat it as a good lens rather than proof of anything.)

And Stenalt and Lassesen went looking for student agency across twenty-nine studies and kept finding something else wearing its clothes — students energetically committed to plans somebody else had already made. Institutions, it turns out, are very good at growing the exact kind of “agency” that serves the institution. Their work is mostly college students and mostly surveys, so salt to taste. But the warning travels just fine.

Willing compliance is still compliance. My kids were compliant and cheerful and busy. So was I.

Now, I can hear the front row of the virtual audience the following question:

So I should burn my rubrics, turn ‘em loose, and call the mayor?

No. Lord, no. And I want to be careful here, because the version of this argument that gets people hurt is the version where structure is the villain.

Structure was never the enemy. Deciding everything in advance is the enemy. Those are different things, and the difference is worth a paragraph.

There’s a classroom in the research I keep coming back to — Robertson and her colleagues wrote it up. The teacher picked the science content. She modeled the strategies. She held the line on what students were accountable for. And inside all that structure, the students chose which words in the text were worth their attention, and then had to defend the choice. Destination fixed. Path open. It’s one classroom and one vignette, so don’t build a district initiative on it — but it demonstrates the thing teachers doubt most, which is that clarity and agency can sit in the same room without one strangling the other.

The 4 Shifts protocol says the same thing about itself, and this is the part I skipped for two years because I was reading it as a checklist.

Right at the top, before any of the questions: pick only a few. Target them. Build on small wins. Their words, not mine — “The goal is NOT to hit every aspect of the protocol every time.” And then, a few lines later, a warning I wish every district would tattoo on something: it is not an evaluation tool, and it “should not be used as a ‘gotcha’ mechanism by administrators or peer reviewers.”

So nobody has to take a third-grade class to city hall next Tuesday. Nobody has to redesign a unit from scratch this weekend. One rung is a year’s work. The teacher who did market day changed one thing about a unit she already taught. She made a phone call.

That’s the whole ask. Pick one lesson you already have. Move it one rung.

There’s a mirror-image sin here, and I’ve committed that one too.

It’s the teacher — usually a good one, usually on a Monday — who stands up and says this quarter, y’all are going to take ownership of your learning, to a room where some kids showed up already owning things and some kids didn’t.

Brod has a list of what a student actually needs before open-ended work pays off: some belief that their own actions matter, enough knowledge to have something to think with, the thinking tools themselves, and the ability to notice when they’re lost. Hand the keys to a kid who has all four and watch him drive. Hand them to a kid who has two, and you haven’t given him freedom; you’ve given him a longer way to fail in front of his friends. (Brod is writing commentary rather than running a trial, so take the list as a good argument. Honestly, the evidence I trust most here is my own eyes and yours. You’ve watched this happen. You know exactly which kid I mean.)

So the question I ask now about any scaffold: does it transfer judgment, or does it just make dependence run smoother? Those look identical on a lesson plan. They are not remotely the same thing in June.

And while I’m poking at things, let me poke at the protocol, because I use it and I’d rather be honest about it than sell it.

One of the agency items asks whether students get to take initiative — whether they can be entrepreneurial, self-directed, go beyond the given parameters. Scored as a positive. And it is a positive.

But it never asks which students have historically been rewarded for going beyond the given parameters, and which ones got written up for it. Same behavior, same room, two different files in the office. If you’ve been in schools any length of time, you know that going off-script reads as leadership in some kids and defiance in others, and you know how that sorting tends to break. A good instrument still has blind spots. That’s one, and I’d rather name it than pretend the tool is finished.

One more question from that protocol, and this one you can run tomorrow, in a hallway, for free. It asks whether students can identify what they’re learning — not just what they’re doing.

Walk into my classroom in May of that year and ask a kid what he’s learning.

We’re making a menu.

Walk into that hallway on market day and ask.

How a business gets permission to exist.

Same question. Two different answers, and only one of them is going to be in that kid’s head in ten years.

Which brings me to feedback, and to the thing about my diner project that still bothers me most.

There’s a big meta-analysis on feedback — Wisniewski, Zierer, and Hattie, something like 435 studies — and the useful finding isn’t the headline number. It’s the split. Feedback that carries actual information does a great deal. Feedback that just renders a verdict does close to nothing. (The studies underneath it are old, median vintage somewhere in the mid-eighties, and the numbers wobble. Don’t quote me a decimal. The principle holds.)

Fine. Everybody says give better feedback. Here’s the part nobody told me.

Information has to have somewhere to go. Feedback informs a decision. If every decision in the task was already made — by me, in July, on a lesson plan I found on the internet — then the finest, most specific, most lovingly-crafted feedback in the world has no place to land. It can’t change anything. All it can do is tell the kid how well he obeyed.

And a closed loop makes it worse, because in a closed loop I’m the only judge there is. I invented the diner, so I’m the sole authority on whether the menu would have saved it. There’s no appeal. There’s no reality to check against. My opinion isn’t feedback at that point; it’s just an opinion.

Compare that to a hallway with actual customers in it.

Those kids got feedback all day long. Somebody walked past their stand and didn’t stop — that’s feedback. Somebody bought out their whole table in nine minutes — that’s feedback. Somebody asked a question they couldn’t answer — that’s the best feedback in the building, and it cost the school nothing, and no adult had to write a rubric to generate it.

That’s what contact buys you. Not just something for the kids to decide. Somebody besides me to answer to.

So let me put the pieces in order, because the order matters and it’s the only defense I’ve got.

Somewhere around 2017, I built a unit about roadkill and a failing diner, and I thought I was doing real-world learning, and I wasn’t. I was doing school with better graphics.

In January of 2023, I sat down and wrote — in public — that the last question you should ask about deeper learning is which technology to use, and that it’s the least important question there is. I meant every word. I had also personally proven it the hard way and hadn’t yet noticed.

And then I started a fellowship, and handed a group of teachers a protocol I only half understood, and got out of their way.

And a third-grade teacher made a phone call.

I want to be plain about this, because I think it’s the most useful thing in this whole piece: the correction worked better in her classroom than it ever worked in mine. She got to a rung I never reached, with eight-year-olds, with poster board, without a single spreadsheet. I brought the framework. She brought the nerve to use it on somebody outside the building.

That’s not a sad ending. That’s how this is supposed to go. You spend a career getting a little less wrong, and if you’re lucky some of it lands in a room you’re not standing in.

So here’s what I’ve got, and it’s two questions, not a rubric.

What are these kids learning here that works outside this building?

And who out there ever sees it?

If the honest answer to the second one is me, then it doesn’t matter how good the hook is, or how clean the slide deck is, or how many tools we bolted on.

You’ve built a diner.

In recent years, many school districts have developed Portraits of a Learner, Graduate Profiles, or similar frameworks intended to articulate what success should look like beyond test scores. Although these initiatives differ from place to place, they often emphasize many of the same human capacities: creativity, collaboration, communication, curiosity, adaptability, ethical judgment, and the ability to continue learning long after formal schooling ends.

The aspirations are worthwhile. They acknowledge something educators have always understood, even when our systems have not reflected it particularly well: the purpose of education cannot be reduced to the efficient transfer of academic content. Knowledge matters, but education is also concerned with the formation of people. We are not merely trying to produce students who can answer questions correctly. We are trying to help young people become the kinds of human beings who can make wise decisions, participate in communities, solve unfamiliar problems, create meaningful work, and contribute something of value to the world around them.

The difficulty is that our daily practices do not always match those ambitions.

Schools may celebrate creativity while rewarding compliance. We may speak enthusiastically about collaboration while asking students to complete most of their consequential work alone. We claim to value curiosity, but the questions that determine a course's direction are often selected before students enter the room. We tell young people that their ideas matter, then ask them to produce work that will be read by one person, assigned a number or letter, and quietly buried in a learning management system.

This is not an accusation against teachers. Most teachers are working within crowded curricula, rigid schedules, accountability pressures, inherited grading practices, and systems that were not designed with authentic contribution as their primary purpose. It is, however, a contradiction worth confronting. We say that we want students to become creators, collaborators, and problem-solvers, while much of school continues to position them as consumers of information and performers of predetermined tasks.

That contradiction was on my mind as I read Austin Kleon’s Don’t Call It Art.

At first glance, the book seems like an unlikely source of insight about education. Kleon writes about artists, writers, musicians, creative practice, and the ways people learn to make things together. He does not offer a school-improvement framework. He does not provide a list of instructional strategies or a rubric for evaluating student engagement. Yet as I read, I found myself filling the margins with references to John Dewey, Seymour Papert, Lawrence Lessig, Eric Raymond, Etienne Wenger, George Siemens, and Jal Mehta, as well as questions related to my own research on authentic, student-centered learning.

The more I read, the less I believed I was reading a book about art.

I was reading a book about how human beings learn.

We become through participation

One of the ideas running through Kleon’s work is that people discover who they are by doing the work. Creative identity is not something fully formed in advance, waiting to be expressed once the necessary confidence, expertise, or permission has been acquired. It develops through making, sharing, borrowing, revising, observing others, and participating in a community of practice.

That idea challenges one of the assumptions embedded in much of schooling: that students should first acquire sufficient knowledge and skills, and only then be invited to do something authentic with them.

The sequence usually looks something like this: explanation, practice, assessment, and perhaps, if time remains, application. Students learn the vocabulary before joining the conversation. They master the basics before engaging in deeper work. They demonstrate readiness before being trusted with meaningful responsibility.

There is certainly a place for direct instruction, guided practice, foundational knowledge, and carefully sequenced support. The problem arises when preparation becomes a permanent condition. Students can spend years preparing to write without publishing, preparing to conduct research without contributing to a real inquiry, preparing to participate in civic life without exercising meaningful civic agency, or preparing to create without ever producing work that matters beyond the grade attached to it.

Kleon’s perspective suggests a different possibility: perhaps participation is not merely the reward for learning. Perhaps participation is one of the primary ways learning occurs.

Every reader of fantasy understands this intuitively. Frodo does not develop courage by attending a seminar on resilience before leaving the Shire. Luke Skywalker does not become a Jedi by completing a packet on the Force. Miles Morales does not become Spider-Man by memorizing a list of heroic dispositions. Their identities emerge through action, apprenticeship, failure, responsibility, and participation in struggles larger than themselves.

The heroes of our stories rarely feel ready when the work begins. Readiness is produced by the work.

Schools cannot and should not manufacture perilous quests for students, but the underlying pattern matters. Human beings often become capable by being invited into meaningful activity before they possess complete mastery. The apprentice enters the workshop not because the apprenticeship is finished, but because that is where the apprenticeship happens.

This is close to what Seymour Papert argued through constructionism: people develop powerful knowledge when they are actively engaged in making things that are meaningful to them and visible to others. The public artifact matters because it gives thought a form that can be examined, questioned, improved, and shared. The learner is not merely receiving knowledge. The learner is participating in its construction.

Etienne Wenger’s work on communities of practice makes a related point. Learning is not simply the internal acquisition of information; it is also a process of becoming a participant in a community. A person learns what it means to be a historian, programmer, musician, scientist, teacher, or craftsperson by entering the practices, language, responsibilities, and relationships of that community.

Identity and competence develop together.

If our schools genuinely want students to become creative and capable contributors, then students need more than assignments designed to simulate contribution. They need opportunities to participate in the real intellectual and civic work of the world.

Knowledge has never grown in isolation

Kleon’s writing also resists the mythology of isolated genius. Creative work emerges from a network of influences, conversations, borrowings, adaptations, and responses. Artists learn from other artists. Writers answer other writers. Musicians inherit traditions, alter them, combine them, and return something new to the culture.

This makes some people uncomfortable because schools often teach a simplified version of what originality is. We warn students against copying, insist on individual production, and sometimes treat influence as contamination. Proper attribution is essential, of course, and students must learn to distinguish ethical borrowing from plagiarism. But originality has never meant creating in a vacuum.

Lawrence Lessig’s work on remix culture helps clarify the distinction. Culture grows because people inherit materials from the past and use them to make something new. Language itself is borrowed. Genres are borrowed. Methods are borrowed. The stories we tell are filled with ancient patterns wearing modern clothing. Shakespeare borrowed. Tolkien borrowed. Hip-hop samples. Scientists build on prior discoveries. Scholars place existing ideas into new relationships.

The ethical question is not whether we borrow. We cannot avoid borrowing. The better questions concern how we acknowledge our sources, what we transform, what value we add, and whether our use contributes to or merely exploits the commons from which it came.

This has obvious implications for education. Instead of asking students to perform originality by concealing influence, we could teach them to trace intellectual lineages, compare interpretations, remix responsibly, synthesize across disciplines, and explain what they changed and why. Those are more sophisticated intellectual practices than pretending every idea emerged fully formed from one mind.

Eric Raymond’s distinction between the cathedral and the bazaar offers another useful connection. In The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Raymond contrasts closed, centrally controlled software development with the visible, iterative, distributed work associated with open-source communities. In the bazaar model, many people inspect problems, propose changes, identify errors, and contribute improvements. The strength of the system comes not from the perfection of any individual contributor, but from the collective intelligence of the network.

Many classrooms still resemble cathedrals. Knowledge is designed elsewhere, delivered through approved channels, and protected by a hierarchy in which the teacher is expected to know what students do not. Student work is completed privately and inspected by the authority at the front of the room.

Authentic learning often resembles a bazaar. Ideas circulate. Drafts remain visible. Students learn from one another’s partial understandings. Problems become shared objects of inquiry. Expertise is distributed rather than monopolized. The teacher remains important, but the teacher is no longer the only person capable of making a meaningful contribution.

This does not mean abandoning expertise or replacing instruction with educational chaos. Open-source communities do not reject expertise. They depend upon it. They simply allow expertise to be exercised through participation, critique, documentation, mentorship, and contribution rather than guarded as a scarce possession.

The same could be true in schools.

The classroom as studio, workshop, and commons

One of the most productive metaphors for authentic learning is the studio.

A studio contains finished work, but it also contains sketches, false starts, scraps, revisions, experiments, tools, models, and evidence of thinking in motion. It is a place where people observe one another, borrow techniques, receive critique, and develop judgment through practice.

A studio does not treat mistakes as irrelevant, but neither does it pretend that every mistake is equally valuable. Errors become useful when examined. Revision is not punishment for getting something wrong; it is part of the work itself.

The same is true of workshops, laboratories, newsrooms, rehearsal spaces, kitchens, and software repositories. These environments are organized around the production of something meaningful. Knowledge is used in pursuit of a purpose. Feedback has consequences. Quality matters because the work is going somewhere.

Too much student work goes nowhere.

A student may spend hours writing an essay that will be seen only by the teacher and forgotten once the grade is entered. Another may create a presentation delivered to classmates who are simultaneously polishing their own presentations and waiting for their turn. A group may build an elaborate project that imitates professional practice but addresses no real audience, problem, or community need.

The work may be engaging. It may even demonstrate learning. But authenticity is not created by adding craft supplies, technology, or group roles to an otherwise closed assignment.

Authenticity begins when students participate in work that has meaning beyond its compliance function.

A history class might create a local archive that preserves oral histories from community members. Science students might collect environmental data that contributes to a public conversation. Mathematics students might analyze transportation, housing, or budget data and present recommendations to an authentic audience. English students might publish essays, produce documentaries, or develop resources that help others understand an issue. Computer science students might create tools that solve small but genuine problems inside the school.

None of these examples is automatically authentic. A public product can still be superficial, and a traditional assignment can involve profound thinking. The deeper question is whether students are being invited into the practices of a discipline and whether their work carries meaning for someone beyond the grading transaction.

The shift is not from worksheets to projects. It is from simulation to participation.

Technology should create room for more humanity

This question becomes more urgent as artificial intelligence changes the conditions under which students encounter information and produce work.

For generations, schools operated in a world where access to information was limited. Teachers, textbooks, libraries, and universities served as essential gateways. The ability to remember, retrieve, organize, and reproduce information carried tremendous value because information itself was difficult to obtain.

That scarcity has been eroding for decades. Search engines placed vast amounts of information within reach. Smartphones made access nearly constant. Generative AI now goes further by summarizing texts, explaining concepts, drafting prose, generating examples, translating languages, writing code, and producing competent responses to many of the tasks schools have traditionally assigned.

This does not make knowledge irrelevant. Students cannot exercise judgment about ideas they do not understand. They cannot recognize falsehood without sufficient background knowledge. They cannot ask sophisticated questions from a position of complete ignorance. Knowledge remains necessary.

But knowledge is no longer sufficient.

One of the reasons I have always loved Star Trek is that its technologies are usually not the point of the story. Warp drive, transporters, universal translators, and replicators remove barriers that once consumed enormous human effort. The result is not a universe in which human activity becomes meaningless. The technology creates room for more interesting human questions: How should people govern themselves? What does justice demand? How do communities respond to difference? What obligations accompany power? What does it mean to explore without becoming a conqueror?

The replicator provides an especially useful metaphor. It can produce food quickly and efficiently, making hunger and food scarcity largely irrelevant aboard a starship. Yet in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, Captain Christopher Pike still cooks for his officers.

From a narrow efficiency perspective, Pike’s choice makes little sense. The replicator is faster. It requires less labor. It can presumably produce almost anything his guests might request.

But Pike is not cooking because the crew needs calories.

He is practicing hospitality.

He is creating a space for conversation, trust, service, fellowship, and belonging. The value of the meal does not reside solely in the food. It resides in the relationships formed around the table.

The replicator can produce dinner. It cannot replace the human act of making dinner for someone.

Artificial intelligence may become the educational equivalent of the replicator. It can already produce summaries, examples, explanations, outlines, lesson plans, and first drafts. The immediate institutional response has often been defensive: protect the assignment, detect the machine, preserve the old labor.

That response is understandable, but it risks confusing the task with the purpose.

If a machine can perform an educational activity adequately, we should ask what human purpose that activity was supposed to serve. Was the purpose to produce five paragraphs, or to develop an argument? Was it to retrieve information, or to exercise judgment about evidence? Was it to generate a presentation, or to communicate something meaningful to an audience? Was it to complete the work independently, or to develop a voice capable of contributing to a conversation?

Technology does not necessarily reduce the importance of human beings. It reveals which parts of the work were never uniquely human in the first place.

The arrival of AI should not lead us to make education more mechanical in an attempt to defeat the machines. It should force us to make education more human.

That means giving students more opportunities to ask worthwhile questions, make judgments under conditions of uncertainty, collaborate across differences, create beauty, serve others, develop ethical commitments, and contribute to communities. It means recognizing that efficiency is not the highest good in education, any more than it is at Pike’s dinner table.

Some things matter precisely because a human being chose to do them for another human being.

What kinds of people are our classrooms helping students become?

This brings us back to the Portraits of a Learner and Graduate Profiles appearing in many school systems.

The competencies named in those frameworks are often treated as outcomes to be measured at the end of schooling. Creativity, communication, collaboration, citizenship, and agency become qualities graduates should possess when they cross the stage.

But people do not become contributors by learning about contribution. They become contributors by contributing.

They do not develop agency in environments where every meaningful decision is made for them. They do not become collaborators by dividing a teacher-created task into four isolated parts. They do not become ethical users of technology by being prevented from using it until graduation. They do not become creative thinkers by waiting until they have mastered everything adults believe they need to know.

The qualities we claim to value must become features of the learning environment itself.

Students should have genuine choices whose consequences they can examine. They should create work for audiences capable of responding. They should participate in communities where expertise is distributed and where helping another person learn is recognized as evidence of one’s own growth. They should encounter problems that cannot be solved by locating the correct answer in a textbook. They should revise their work because they want it to improve, not simply because the rubric requires another draft.

This is where instructional coaching and school leadership become crucial. Teachers cannot simply be told to make learning more authentic while the surrounding structures reward coverage, standardization, and compliance. If we want different classroom experiences, we need to examine pacing expectations, grading practices, schedules, professional learning, access to community partnerships, and the ways schools define evidence of success.

The shift toward authentic learning is not primarily about adopting a new instructional strategy. It is a change in the role students are permitted to play.

Are they recipients of a system adults have constructed for them, or are they participants in the intellectual and communal life of the school?

Are they completing tasks, or joining practices?

Are they being prepared to contribute someday, or are they contributing now?

Austin Kleon does not answer those questions for educators. That is not what his book sets out to do. What he offers is a vision of creative life rooted in participation, community, influence, experimentation, and contribution. When that vision enters into conversation with educational theory and classroom practice, it exposes the poverty of any model of schooling that treats learning as passive acquisition.

It also reminds us that creativity is not an ornamental addition to the serious work of education.

Creativity is part of how human beings become capable of doing serious work.

Education as human formation

The twenty-first century has not made the old purposes of education irrelevant. Young people still need knowledge. They still need intellectual discipline, historical understanding, mathematical reasoning, scientific literacy, careful reading, and the ability to express themselves clearly.

What has changed is the environment in which those capacities must be exercised.

Students are entering a world saturated with information, shaped by algorithms, and increasingly populated by machines capable of producing plausible answers. In that world, the ability to repeat information will matter less than the ability to interpret it. The ability to complete familiar tasks will matter less than the ability to recognize unfamiliar problems. The possession of a credential will matter less than the capacity to continue learning, adapting, creating, and contributing.

The goal of education, then, cannot be merely to make students more efficient at the work machines are learning to perform.

The goal must be the formation of human beings who can use powerful tools without surrendering judgment, who can participate in communities without losing individuality, who can inherit culture without becoming trapped by it, and who can create something new without pretending they created it alone.

That is an ambitious task, but education has always been ambitious when understood at its best.

It asks us to help young people discern truth, create beauty, build community, solve worthwhile problems, and recognize that their lives are connected to the lives of others. It asks us to preserve knowledge while also making room for transformation. It asks us to prepare students for a future we cannot predict without reducing them to future workers in an economy we do not control.

Most importantly, it asks us to treat students not as incomplete adults waiting for real life to begin, but as human beings already capable of meaningful participation.

Perhaps the central question for twenty-first-century education is not simply, “What should students know?”

Knowledge matters, and it always will. But knowledge has never been the final purpose of education.

A better question may be, “What kind of people are our classrooms helping students become?”

Are they becoming people who wait for permission, or people who recognize responsibility?

Are they becoming people who consume what others create, or people who add something of their own?

Are they becoming people who see learning as a requirement imposed upon them, or people who understand learning as one of the ways they participate fully in the world?

If we want graduates who are creative, collaborative, curious, ethical, and capable of contribution, those qualities cannot remain promises printed on posters or listed in strategic plans. They must be practiced in the ordinary life of school.

Students should not spend twelve years preparing to become writers, scientists, artists, historians, programmers, leaders, and citizens.

They should spend twelve years becoming them.

Education is not merely preparation for contribution.

At its best, education is contribution itself.

Continue the Conversation

This essay grew out of my reading of Austin Kleon’s Don’t Call It Art and the connections I found among his work, educational research, open-source culture, instructional coaching, and authentic learning.

I gathered those connections into Field Notes No. 001, a free companion created specifically for educators. It includes five ideas educators can take from the book, connections to thinkers such as Dewey, Papert, Lessig, Raymond, Wenger, and Mehta, questions for reflection, and a curated reading guide for continuing the conversation.

Download your free copy of Field Notes No. 001: Don’t Call It Art here

Read beyond education to improve education.

Greetings, Starfighters,

Friends, we’ve come to the very long ending of a not-quite-so-long school year. May is always a weird month, filled with required testing, silly funtivities, and the closing of one more school cycle as we prepare for the next. I get to be more slow-paced and reflective in May; being an instructional coach means that I’m often not involved in the year-end events, though planning for next year is always a major endeavor, and I’ve got several projects starting (or finishing, remember that whole dissertation thing?) next year.

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Amongst all the madness that is May, I’ve still managed to carve out some time and find 10 things worth your attention this week:

1. There are four perfect films made in the history of... films. They are, in no particular order, Galaxy Quest (also the greatest Star Trek movie ever made), 10 Things I Hate About You, The Princess Bride, and the film celebrating its 25th anniversary this week, A Knight’s Tale. No, it shouldn’t surprise you that Heath Ledger shows up twice in this list. No, I will not hear any discussion about your list of perfect films; this is my newsletter. Start your own. A Knight’s Tale is perfectly anachronistic (absurdly so), yet never gets old or boring. It’s a joy to watch every time.

2. “Benjamin Bloom published his original framework in 1956 — but it didn’t emerge from just him. It came out of a series of conferences held between 1948 and 1953, designed to find common vocabulary for curriculum design and educational examinations. The committee was chaired by Professor Bloom but included four collaborators: Max Englehart, Edward Furst, Walter Hill, and David Krathwohl. What they produced was a classification of educational objectives — not a pyramid, not a hierarchy with “Create” at the top. That version didn’t even include creation as a category.“ - Great read on how much of education jacked up the interpretation of Bloom’s Taxonomy (not that we do that in education... wait... graduate profiles, anyone? Authentic learning? Hmm...) and what we might use instead in this current age of AI.

3. My favorite music blogger/playlist creator, Matthew Perpetua, released another playlist that only serves to remind me of how old I am, and that time is running away from me faster than the fleetest hoof ever struck the pavement. Relive with me, if you will, the summer of 1995. Let’s get old together, shall we?

4. “I tell the rogues to read, read, read, read, read. Those who read own the world; those who immerse themselves in the internet or watch too much television lose it... Our civilization is suffering profound wounds because of the wholesale abandonment of reading by contemporary society.” - Werner Herzog on reading

5. Elizabeth Saloka paints rocks. But, probably not in the way you think. “From a couple of rock piles outside of her regular supermarket to crumbling curbs or demolished structures, she sifts through a variety of shapes and sizes to find rocks that may eventually transform into vibrant mimics of common household items...”

6. Cory Doctorow - may the Universal Architect preserve him - is launching his newest book with a Kickstarter. I love Cory’s mind and, even though I disagree with his takes every now and then, he makes me think. His latest is “The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI,” a book about our current AI bubble, but more broadly about the hyper-capitalist, high-tech world we’re being dragged into by hook or by crook. Yes, I backed the project. Cory launches these to circumvent the digital rights management (DRM) enforced by companies like Audible and their parent company, Amazon. When you buy these files, they’re yours. Do with them what you like. Shouldn’t it always be like that?

7. Speaking of Kickstarters, my good friend (and award-winning author/artist) just launched his latest book, *The Mysterious Adventures of Eula McDowell.* Think Supernatural meets HP Lovecraft meets Murder She Wrote (HA!), which should be enough to make you click through to purchase all on its own.

8. Some people tell me that I should spend more time on LinkedIn to make more professional connections. I ignore them for the most part, but perhaps if I start using this English-to-LinkedIn translator someone put together, I might be there more often. This reminds me an awful lot of the EduSpeak Generator.

9. Need some historic artwork for your students? Look no further than this Japanese Woodblock Print Search.

10. Vapes are everywhere in schools, to no one's surprise. I mean, it’s part of kid programming that they do things at school they’re not supposed to do. Right? Well, what if we could do something productive with those disposable vapes? Like, host a website or something?

That’s it, friends. Enjoy your weekend. Election day is coming up for the primaries in Kentucky, which means I’ll see far fewer ads for candidates who declare themselves the “Trump” choice, and we’ll have a little breathing room until November. Take care of yourselves, and each other.

Cyas.

Greetings Starfighters,

Welcome once again inside the mind of Mike Paul. I hope you don’t get lost, but I’m quite certain I did many, many years ago...

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These newsletters have been described by my friend Adam as “freewheelin’”, which is appropriate, I guess. However, please don’t expect the quality of the mighty works of “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan” - I’m 100% positive nothing I say or do will ever be ensconced in the Library of Congress as being culturally relevant - more like culturally ignorant and far too geeky.

Anyways, let’s continue the ramblin’ and freewheelin’ with a collection of ten things I thought were worth your attention this week. Enjoy!

What’s going on with the Chrysler Building?

Here’s a problem you might tackle with students: Why does nobody want the Chrysler Building in New York City? It’s iconic. In my mind, it’s one of the most beautiful buildings in any major city. But it’s for sale for the third time since 2019. And the price keeps dropping.

Speaking of buildings...

I gotta hand it to the Chinese people. When they build things, they go big. I mean... BIG. The new Chongqing East rail station covers approximately the same area as 170 football pitches (that’s soccer fields for all of us uncultured American swine), or roughly 2 Vatican Cities (an important fact to include since one of those uncultured American swines is now leading said Vatican City). This place is, in a word, huge. And impressive. Maybe this will inspire someone in the US to think seriously about high-speed public rail transport...

Birding is Coming...

Full disclosure: I was raised on PBS. Sesame Street, Reading Rainbow, 3-2-1 Contact, The Electric Company, This Old House, multiple cooking shows, travel shows, and so on. When I came across the lovely “Get Birding“ podcast on YouTube, I felt those same vibes from my childhood. Sean Bean - may the gods preserve him - has made a career out of being one tough guy after another, but also dying in pretty much everything. But here, as the host of Get Birding in the latest season, it’s such a joy and comfort to see him watching and talking about birds in his native Yorkshire accent. It’s just mesmerizing. And I can’t stand or make sense of bird watching. But this show... I dig it.

May the 4th...

This week included the annual celebration of all things Star Wars, May the 4th (be with you). Along with all the general silliness that takes place, like this video featuring former President Barack Obama and Mark Hamill, some genuinely cool stuff shows up, like this guy and his handmade Millennium Falcon model, allegedly accurate to the millimeter of the original model used during filming. The Falcon never looked better.

Pulitzers

The 2026 Pulitzer Prize winners were announced this week. I’ve got ‘Angel Down‘ on my Kindle as of last night, mostly because the premise of an entire book being one long sentence has me intrigued.

Elements of Deeper Learning

My friend, Scott McLeod, has some ideas about what we really mean when we talk about “deeper learning” - and it really does go beyond what some folks think.

I’m All in on ‘Tony’

To my great sadness, I didn’t really discover the magic and misery that is Anthony Bourdain until he left us far too soon. In the early COVID times, I devoured ‘Kitchen Confidential‘ and binged his ‘Parts Unknown’ and ‘No Reservations’ as quickly as I could. Now, thanks to my daughter, I learned there’s a Bourdain biopic coming later this year. I hope it’s great, but I don’t care. I’ll be there for all of the madness.

Creativity with Boundaries

We often think of creativity as requiring full freedom (which bothers so many teachers because there must be some guidelines somewhere), but that often leads us down a path of analysis paralysis with too many options. Operating within some bounds is freeing and can drive your creative engine harder. David Epstein talks about this, called the “Green Eggs and Ham” model of creativity, in this excerpt from his new book, ‘Inside the Box‘.

Artemis Photo Dump

So... as if the Artemis mobile wallpapers weren’t enough, NASA just dropped more than 12,000 photos from the Artemis II mission. You’re welcome.

The One Study to Rule Them All (And What It Actually Found)

The first in-depth study on school cellphone bans is now available as a working paper (not yet peer-reviewed) and shows some very interesting data. I’ve got a full write-up over on the blog that, I hope, breaks it down so anyone can understand what the study finds. Spoiler alert: whether you’re in favor of bans or not, you’ll find enough info to tick you off.

That’s it, friends. Another edition of freewheelin’ shenanigans delivered straight to your virtual desk. Stay frosty until next time, friends, and be safe.

Y’all. We finally made it to Spring Break. Some of you may have already arrived at this blessed time of the year, but much of Kentucky is just now getting there.

I made a few things for my staff that I thought I’d share with you. This is all just fun, no productivity, no expectations, take some time off to recharge before the run to the end of the school year goodies.

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Spring Break Vibes Playlist

Spring Break Escape Reads (Staff Edition)

Funny, Light, and Easy Wins

• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
  Absurd, fast, hilarious sci-fi. Zero effort, maximum payoff.

• Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers – Jesse Q. Sutanto
  Cozy mystery + chaotic grandma energy. Surprisingly wholesome.

• Guards! Guards! – Terry Pratchett
  Satirical fantasy that doesn’t take itself seriously (and you don’t have to either).

• Assistant to the Villain – Hannah Nicole Maehrer
  Workplace comedy… but your boss is an evil overlord.

Feel-Good Fiction

• Remarkably Bright Creatures – Shelby Van Pelt
  A grieving woman + a genius octopus. Sounds weird. Works perfectly.

• A Psalm for the Wild-Built – Becky Chambers
  Quiet, hopeful, philosophical without being heavy. Short and calming.

• The House in the Cerulean Sea – TJ Klune
  Pure comfort in book form. Like a warm blanket.

• The Flatshare – Beth O’Leary
  Clever, cozy rom-com without being cringeworthy.

Easy Page-Turners (Can’t Put Down)

• The Thursday Murder Club – Richard Osman
  Retirees solving murders. Surprisingly addictive.

• Dial A for Aunties
  Murder + wedding + family chaos = ridiculously fun.

• The Guest List – Lucy Foley
  Quick thriller, short chapters, very bingeable.

• Big Little Lies – Liane Moriarty
  Drama, secrets, and just enough mystery to keep you hooked.

Light Fantasy / Escapism

• Howl’s Moving Castle – Diana Wynne Jones
  Whimsical, magical, charming.

• The Lightning Thief – Rick Riordan
  Fast, funny, mythological adventure.

• Tress of the Emerald Sea – Brandon Sanderson
  Fairy-tale vibes, very readable even if you don’t “do fantasy.”

• Legends & Lattes – Travis Baldree
  An orc opens a coffee shop. That’s the plot. It works.

And, I can’t forget…

The Name of the Wind (You just knew this was gonna be on the list somewhere…)

Spring Break Binge: Hidden Gem TV Shows

“Why Have I Never Heard of This?” Tier

• Patriot
  Dark comedy + espionage + existential dread. Weird in the best way.

• Detectorists
  Two guys are metal detecting in the English countryside. That’s it—and it’s perfect.

• Mr Inbetween
  Half-hour episodes. Brutal, funny, insanely efficient storytelling.

• The Knick
  Early 1900s surgery + chaos + Clive Owen. Stylish and intense.

Smart but Still Addictive

• Severance
  Probably the smartest show that still feels bingeable. Creepy corporate sci-fi.

• Station Eleven
  Post-apocalyptic but… hopeful? Quietly brilliant.

• Devs
  Tech, determinism, and existential dread—but slow and hypnotic.

• Dark
  This one is complex—but once you’re in, you’re IN.

Easy, Funny, Comfort Binges

• Somebody Somewhere
  Low-key, heartfelt, very real. Sneaky good.

• Starstruck
  Messy dating + dry humor. Super bingeable.

• Taskmaster
  Absolute chaos. Perfect “brain off” TV.

• Better Off Ted
  Corporate satire that deserved way more love.

Fast, Addictive, “One More Episode” Shows

• Banshee
  Ridiculous premise, insanely watchable.

• The Lazarus Project
  Time-reset thriller that moves FAST.

• Evil
  X-Files vibes but modern—and actually creepy.

• Southland
  Gritty, realistic, overlooked for years despite strong reviews

Wildcards (But Trust Me)

• Legion
  Superhero show… if it were made by artists on another planet

• Made for Love
  Dark tech satire + relationship drama.

• Brand New Cherry Flavor
  Weird, gross, unforgettable.

• Years and Years
  Near-future dystopia that hits a little too close to home.

Spring Break Movie Escape List

Pure Fun (Easy, Entertaining, No Brain Drain)

• Game Night
  Way smarter than it has any right to be. Fast, funny, and chaotic.

• The Nice Guys
  Buddy comedy with sharp writing and ridiculous situations.

• Palm Springs
  Time-loop rom-com that never gets stale. Super bingeable.

• Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves
  Pure adventure fun—feels like a great hangout session.

“One More Movie…” Thrillers

• Searching
  Entire story told through screens—shockingly gripping.

• The Invisible Man
  Tense, modern, and way better than expected.

• Run
  Lean, mean, and it keeps you locked in the whole time.

• A Simple Favor
  Stylish mystery with just enough humor to keep it fun.

Feel-Good (Without Being Corny)

• Chef
  Food, road trip, second chances. Just a good time.

• The Way Way Back
  Quiet coming-of-age story that lands perfectly.

• Sing Street
  Music, teenage dreams, and pure joy.

• The Peanut Butter Falcon
  Heartwarming without being cheesy.

Light Escapism / Indie Vibes

• Midnight in Paris
  Nostalgic, whimsical, easy to fall into.

• Hunt for the Wilderpeople
  Quirky, funny, and surprisingly heartfelt.

• The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
  Visually beautiful, quietly inspiring.

• Safety Not Guaranteed
  Offbeat and charming with just enough weird.

OK, that’s it. Go home. Relax. Don’t move from the couch one day. You deserve it.

“Empathy, evidently, existed only within the human community.”
— Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

There’s a moment in Philip K. Dick’s novel when the line between human and machine doesn’t shatter—it thins. The androids aren’t clumsy metallic caricatures. They’re articulate. Quick. Convincing. They can simulate emotional response so well that distinguishing them from humans requires careful testing. The danger isn’t brute force. It’s indistinguishability. It’s the subtle shift where simulation becomes “good enough,” and we stop asking what’s been replaced.

That’s what this moment in education feels like to me.

Not collapse. Not revolution. Just a quiet thinning of the line.

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At Virginia Tech, a graduate course in Structural Equation Modeling nearly fell apart when the instructor unexpectedly dropped out. It was required. Students needed it to graduate. There wasn’t time to hire someone new. Instead of postponing the course, the department tried something that would have sounded like speculative fiction even five years ago. Half of the weekly learning objectives would be taught traditionally—through textbook and human instruction. The other half would be taught entirely through ChatGPT. Students received the same objectives either way. They completed the same assessments. And importantly, they submitted their AI chat logs along with their work so their reasoning could be examined. Every student passed.

You can read that as proof that AI can replace textbooks, maybe even instructors. Dr. Ivan Hernandez himself noted that AI can already function as a replacement for traditional textbooks and, to a certain extent, for instructors. That’s the easy interpretation, and it’s the one that will generate headlines.

But that’s not what interests me most.

What interests me is that Hernandez never surrendered the architecture.

He didn’t dissolve the classroom into a chatbot. He designed an experiment. He kept the objectives. He kept the assessments. He required documentation. He reviewed the logs. AI was allowed inside the system, but it did not define the system. The machine participated, but it did not govern.

That distinction feels subtle. It isn’t.

Because at the same time, another model of schooling is gaining attention. A 404 Media report on Alpha School states that students reportedly complete core academic work in roughly 2 hours per day. AI systems deliver most of the instruction. Adults function more as guides and coaches around the edges. The pitch is efficiency, personalization, and mastery at speed.

Now we’re standing inside the tension Dick was writing about decades ago.

If a system can simulate understanding, simulate responsiveness, and simulate personalized feedback, at what point do we stop asking whether it is human-centered?

When I talk about vibrant learning, I’m not talking about colorful classrooms or surface-level engagement. I’m talking about environments where students are actively constructing meaning, forming identity, navigating networks of knowledge, and experiencing the kind of belonging that makes intellectual risk possible. Vibrant learning is relational. It’s cognitively demanding. It depends on friction. It requires the presence of other minds.

And it is, almost by definition, inefficient.

The Science of Learning and Development has made something abundantly clear: learning isn’t merely cognitive processing. It is relational and contextual. Emotion and identity are braided into cognition. Belonging isn’t a nice add-on; it’s neurological infrastructure. When students feel safe enough to wrestle with ideas, they engage in deeper processing. When they feel unseen or disconnected, their cognitive system shifts toward protection rather than exploration.

Now imagine reorganizing schooling around algorithmic instruction as the primary academic engine.

Can AI explain structural equation modeling? Absolutely. The Virginia Tech experiment clearly demonstrates that. But explanation isn’t the same thing as formation. Learning is not just absorbing information; it’s situating yourself within a community of inquiry. It’s deciding what counts as credible. It’s learning how to disagree well. It’s building intellectual humility alongside intellectual confidence.

Connectivism adds another layer. Knowledge doesn’t reside in a single authority. It lives in networks—human, digital, and cultural. Learning is the ability to form and traverse those networks. AI belongs in that web. It can extend it. It can accelerate feedback loops. It can surface patterns that would take humans far longer to see.

But networks remain generative only when no single node dominates the topology.

When most academic interaction flows through a single algorithmic system, the structure centralizes. It becomes efficient. Predictable. Optimized. And optimization is not neutral. It always reflects a priority.

In Hernandez’s classroom, AI is one node among many. Students engage with it, but their interactions are documented and subject to human evaluation. The professor remains the architect. The AI is instrumentation. That’s augmentation.

In the Alpha-style model, as it’s been described, AI becomes the instructional spine. Humans support it. That’s substitution.

The difference between augmentation and substitution isn’t technological. It’s architectural.

And architecture shapes identity.

I understand why the efficiency model is appealing. Public education is strained. Teachers are exhausted. Districts are underfunded. Families are frustrated. If someone promises individualized instruction in two focused hours a day, it feels like relief. It feels like progress. It feels like the system is finally catching up to the technology that already saturates students’ lives.

But we have to ask what we’re optimizing for.

If the goal is procedural mastery at scale, AI-centered instruction makes sense. You can compress problem sets. You can adapt pacing. You can automate feedback. You can produce measurable gains efficiently.

But public education, at its best, was never solely about workforce preparation. It was about citizenry. It was about forming people who can navigate complexity, ambiguity, disagreement, and shared life. That kind of formation doesn’t thrive in compressed, frictionless environments. It depends on relational tension. It depends on encountering other minds. It depends on spaces where empathy is not simulated but practiced.

Dick’s line lingers because it names something we’re tempted to overlook: empathy exists within the human community. Machines can model tone. They can generate encouragement. They can approximate responsiveness. But vibrant learning depends on something more than approximation. It depends on shared vulnerability, on the subtle cues of presence, on the unpredictable back-and-forth that shapes identity as much as it shapes understanding.

The Virginia Tech experiment shows that AI can assist with cognition. It does not prove that AI can replace the relational architecture in which cognition becomes character.

That’s the line.

It’s thin. And it’s easy to cross without noticing.

If pedagogy remains accountable to human judgment, AI can deepen vibrant learning. It can expand networks, accelerate iteration, and free educators to focus on the uniquely human dimensions of teaching. It can serve as a co-teacher inside a human-designed ecosystem.

But if pedagogy becomes accountable to platform architecture—if efficiency and throughput quietly become the organizing principles—then vibrant learning will slowly give way to optimized progression. The system may still function. Students may still perform. But something harder to measure will thin.

An educated workforce can be trained through efficient systems.

An educated citizenry must be formed within human communities.

The question before us isn’t whether AI works. It clearly does.

The question is who remains responsible for the architecture.

If we keep that responsibility—if we treat AI as instrumentation rather than architecture—then this moment could expand what’s possible in ways that genuinely support vibrant learning. If we don’t, if we reorganize schooling around efficiency engines and call it innovation, we may find that we’ve streamlined education while quietly narrowing what it means to be educated.

The machine can assist.

But empathy, formation, and responsibility still belong within the human community.

And whether that remains true in our schools will depend on the choices we make now—quietly, structurally, and often in the name of progress.

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A recent investigation into Alpha School, a high-tuition “AI-powered” private school, revealed faulty AI-generated lessons, hallucinated questions, scraped curriculum materials, and heavy student surveillance. Former employees described students as “guinea pigs.”

That’s the headline.

But the real issue isn’t whether one school deployed AI sloppily.

The real issue is whether we are confusing technological acceleration with educational progress.

The Seduction of the Two-Hour School Day

Alpha’s pitch is simple and powerful: compress academic learning into two hyper-efficient hours using AI tutors, then free the rest of the day for creativity and passion projects.

If you believe traditional schooling wastes time, that promise is intoxicating.

But here’s the problem:

Efficiency is not the same thing as development.

From a Science of Learning and Development (SoLD) perspective, learning is not merely the transmission of content. It is a process that integrates cognition, emotion, identity, and social context. Durable learning requires safety, belonging, agency, and meaning-making.

You cannot compress belonging into a two-hour block.

You cannot automate identity formation.

And you cannot hallucinate your way to deep understanding.

Connectivism Is Not Automation

Some defenders of AI-heavy schooling argue that we are simply witnessing the next phase of networked learning. Knowledge is distributed. AI becomes a node in the network. Personalized pathways replace one-size-fits-all instruction.

That language sounds connectivist.

But Connectivism is not about replacing human nodes with machine ones.

It concerns the expansion of networks of meaning.

In a connectivist system:

• Learning happens across relationships.

• Knowledge flows through dynamic connections.

• Judgment matters more than memorization.

• Pattern recognition and critical filtering are essential skills.

AI can participate in that network.

But when AI becomes the primary instructional authority — generating content, generating assessments, evaluating its own outputs — the network collapses into a closed loop.

AI checking AI is not distributed intelligence.

It is recursive automation.

Connectivism requires diversity of nodes.

Not monoculture.

Surveillance Is Not Personalization

The investigation also described extensive monitoring: screen recording, webcam footage, mouse tracking, and behavioral nudges.

This is framed as personalization.

It is not.

It is optimization.

SoLD research clarifies that psychological safety and autonomy are foundational to learning. When students feel constantly watched, agency erodes. Compliance increases. Anxiety increases.

You can nudge behavior with surveillance.

You cannot cultivate intrinsic motivation that way.

If our model of learning begins to resemble corporate productivity software, we should pause.

Education is not a workflow dashboard.

The Hidden Variable: Selection Bias

To be fair, Alpha School reportedly produces strong test scores.

However, high-tuition schools serve families with financial, cultural, and educational capital. Research consistently shows that standardized test performance correlates strongly with income.

If affluent students succeed in an AI-heavy environment, that does not prove that the AI caused the success.

It may simply mean the students would succeed almost anywhere. I often say those students would succeed with a ham sandwich for a teacher.

The question is not whether AI can serve already advantaged learners.

The question is whether AI, deployed without deep pedagogical grounding, strengthens or weakens human development.

The Real Design Question

The danger is not AI itself.

The danger is designing educational systems around what AI does well.

AI does well at:

• Drafting content

• Generating practice questions

• Scaling feedback

• Recognizing surface patterns

AI does not do well at:

• Reading emotional context

• Building trust

• Modeling intellectual humility

• Navigating moral ambiguity

• Forming identity

SoLD reminds us that learning is relational and developmental.

Connectivism reminds us that learning is networked and distributed.

If we optimize for what AI does well and marginalize what humans do uniquely well, we create a system that is efficient — but thin.

Fast — but shallow.

Impressive — but fragile.

What This Means for Public Education

This story is not merely about a private school engaging in aggressive experimentation.

It is a preview.

Every district will face pressure to:

• Automate instruction

• Replace textbooks with AI tutors

• Compress seat time

• Increase data capture

The answer cannot be a blanket rejection.

Nor can it be an uncritical adoption.

The answer is design discipline.

We should use AI to:

• Reduce administrative drag

• Prototype lessons

• Support differentiated feedback

• Expand access to expertise

But we should anchor every AI decision in two non-negotiables:

1. Does this strengthen human relationships?

2. Does this expand student agency and meaning-making?

If the answer is no, we are not innovating.

We are optimizing the wrong variable.

The Choice in Front of Us

We stand at a fork.

We can design AI systems around human development.

Or we can redesign human development around AI systems.

One path amplifies Connectivism, relational trust, and whole-child growth.

The other path creates compliant, monitored, hyper-efficient learners who score well but lack deep agency.

Technology will not make that choice for us.

We will.

On The Late Show, Ian McKellen closes an interview with Stephen Colbert by performing a speech written over 400 years ago. The words come from Sir Thomas More, a play never staged in William Shakespeare’s lifetime but widely attributed—at least in part—to him.

McKellen doesn’t modernize the language.
He doesn’t explain it.
He just performs it.

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And suddenly, the room changes.

The speech is addressed to a mob angry at “strangers”—immigrants. Instead of scolding them, the speaker does something far more dangerous: he asks them to imagine. Imagine families forced to leave. Imagine being driven out. Imagine becoming the stranger yourself.

That move—imagine this is happening to you—lands just as hard now as it did in the early 1600s.

This is the moment worth showing students.

Not because it’s Shakespeare trivia.
Not because it’s historically interesting.
But it reveals what Shakespeare actually does when he’s at his best.

He doesn’t tell audiences what to think.
He doesn’t offer slogans or easy answers.
He uses language to stretch empathy, flip perspectives, and force the listener into moral discomfort.

When McKellen delivers the lines, you can feel it: this isn’t “old English.” This is a warning. A mirror. A test of imagination.

This is also why Shakespeare still belongs in classrooms.

Students don’t need Shakespeare because he’s canonical.
They need him because he trains a skill we desperately need more of: the ability to see ourselves in someone else’s place.

When we teach Shakespeare as a decoding exercise—translate the words, answer the questions, move on—we miss the point. Shakespeare was writing for performance, for crowds, for moments like this one, where language interrupts complacency.

If students can watch this clip and feel its weight, then the question isn’t “Why are we still teaching Shakespeare?”

The question is “What happens when we stop teaching students how to imagine?”

And Shakespeare, inconveniently, still has some of the best words for that job.

The Stranger’s Case

Grant them [the immigrants] removed.

And grant that this your noise hath chid down all the majesty of England. Imagine that you see the wretched strangers, their babies at their backs with their poor luggage, plodding to the ports and coasts for transportation; and that you sit as kings in your desires, authority quite silenced by your brawl, and you in ruff of your opinions clothed. What have you got?

I’ll tell you: you have taught how insolence and strong hand should prevail, how order should be quelled. And by this pattern not one of you should live an aged man; for other ruffians, as their fancies wrought, with self‑same hand, self reason and self‑right, would shark on you, and men like ravenous fishes feed on one another.

You’ll put down strangers, kill them, cut their throats, possess their houses. Oh, desperate as you are, wash your foul minds with tears; and those same hands that you, like rebels, lift against the peace, lift up for peace, and your unreverent knees, make them your feet to kneel, to be forgiven.

And say now the king, as he is clement if the offender mourn, should so much come too short of your great trespass as but to banish you. Whither would you go?

What country, by the nature of your error, should give you harbor? Go you to France or Flanders, to any German province, Spain or Portugal—anywhere that not adheres to England—why, you must needs be strangers.

Would you be pleased to find a nation of such barbarous temper, that, breaking out in hideous violence, would not afford you an abode on earth; set their detested knives against your throats, spurn you like dogs, and, like as if that God owned not nor made not you, nor that the elements were all appropriate to your comforts, but chartered unto them?

What would you think, to be thus used?

This is the stranger’s case; and this your mountainish inhumanity…

Friends, my life has certainly taken some unexpected turns. It wasn’t that long ago that I was working in a dead-end job with little to no hope for advancement or career longevity, mostly because I’ve never been a “yes man” and had, to my own detriment, too many times offered opinions and held beliefs that flew in the face of my taskmasters. When that end finally came, it had certainly been a long time coming.

Thankfully, I found something new, something quite unexpected. With all the things I’ve learned in the past 13 years since my life turned upside down, the truth of it is that I can’t even begin to tell you even a quarter of the things I’ve learned. Here’s what I can tell you: there’s always someone else who blazed the trail before you, even if you don’t know it.

For me, that someone is my friend, Adam Watson. Long before I ever had an idea in my head for creatively cool things to do in my math classroom or with the teachers and peers I serve now, this guy was rewriting Shakespeare and turning technology on its head. It would also be remiss of me to fail to mention his amazing hair from high school and what must be epic, face-melting guitar skills that I have yet to enjoy or, perhaps, endure.

Regardless, Adam has done more great stuff in the classroom than I’ll likely ever know about, forgotten more about being the cool tech guy than I could ever imagine, and absolutely slayed the game long before I ever stepped into a classroom to take attendance for the first time.

And now, to top it all off, he’s written a book. A whole book, mind you, not a chapter or small contribution, but an entire book! It’s alive! It’s a real thing with paper and words and a great cover! I haven’t read it yet, something about a major project I’m working on that is far less interesting and fulfilling than what Adam has to contribute, and alas, I likely won’t be able to for some time.

Side note: Adam mentions me in the book, though I’m absolutely certain I do not deserve such a position of honor.

But I don’t need to read it to tell you that you need to purchase a copy if you are a classroom teacher. Table top gaming, the subject of Adam’s work, can indeed inject needed agency, choice, and more fun than an 80s arcade game into your classroom, especially for kids like Adam and I who grew up being a little different than everyone else.

Dive in and explore something new, even if you’ve never played D&D or any other tabletop gaming title. The journey, as always, is far greater than the destination, and I can’t think of anyone more qualified than Adam Watson to take up the task of learning dungeon master on your way.

Oh, make sure you use the Bookshop.org link to purchase on Adam’s site, or head to your local independent bookstore and order it. Amazon is making enough money from all of us this season.

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Greetings Starfighters,

We’ve wrapped up the second week of school, and already I’ve seen some very cool things happening in classrooms—students solving puzzles, collaborating, moving beyond worksheets and into real, authentic learning. It’s a reminder of why we do this work: to keep the main thing the main thing. Don’t get distracted by shiny shortcuts or quick wins that don’t serve our students. As Steve Wozniak said, he “never sold out”—and neither should we.

With that, here are 10 things worth your time this week:

1. Disturbing Stories, Violence, and Professional Liars
How violence shapes our narratives—and how professional liars use those stories to bend reality. Read it here →

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2. Everyday Objects at Super-Macro Scale
Ordinary objects become unrecognizable when viewed up close. A reminder that perspective changes everything. See for yourself →

3. AI for People, Not as a Person
We keep trying to humanize AI, but maybe that’s the wrong direction. What if it just… helped us instead? Read more →

4. Replacing the Wrong People with AI
Maybe it’s not frontline workers who should worry about being replaced by AI—but the decision-makers at the top. Read more →

5. Rethinking Remote School
The narrative says remote learning was all bad. But for many Black, Latino, and low-income students, it actually felt better. Read more →

6. From Counting Blocks to Bias
The way we teach young kids math isn’t neutral—it shapes how they see the world. Read more →

7. Why Cell Phone Bans Fail
Schools keep banning phones, and teens keep finding workarounds. Maybe the problem isn’t the tech—it’s how we use it. Read more →

8. The DC Punk Archive Goes Online
Fugazi, GWAR, and a teenage cameraman—punk history is digitized and ready to explore. Check it out →

9. Generative Textbooks?
David Wiley imagines a future where AI and OER collide to create participatory, dynamic “generative textbooks.” Read more →

10. Beyond Policing AI in Assessment
Instead of using AI to catch cheaters, what if we reimagined assessment itself through authentic learning and connectivism? Read more →

That’s this week’s 10. As always, I’d love to hear what resonated, what you’re trying in your own classroom, and how we can keep making learning more authentic for students.

Cyas,

MP

The summer has been good to me. Not the “Instagram highlight reel” kind of good—no perfectly framed sunsets over Amalfi, no humblebrags about hiking the Inca Trail. My summer was good because it was quiet. I had fewer obligations. I gave myself permission to put the to-do list down and walk away. I traded the adrenaline rush of constant motion for the slow burn of intentional rest.

This wasn’t about laziness. It was about recovery. Teaching—and coaching teachers—is a profession of constant giving, of endlessly passing the controller to someone else so they can take the next turn. After a while, you forget what it’s like to have the game in your own hands. This summer, I took it back. I sat with books. I let mornings stretch long enough that the coffee got cold. And I remembered: rest is part of the work.

One of those books was Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow. It follows three friends—Sam, Sadie, and Marx—over decades of collaboration, conflict, and creativity as they build video games together. It’s not really “about” gaming in the way you might think; the games are just the canvas. At its core, it’s about the messiness of relationships, the risks and rewards of creative work, and the way we keep trying—again and again—to make something meaningful, even when life keeps breaking our hearts.

There’s a line in the book that’s been rattling around in my head since I read it:

“What is a game?” Marx said. “It’s tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. It’s the possibility of infinite rebirth, infinite redemption. The idea that if you keep playing, you could win. No loss is permanent, because nothing is permanent, ever.”

If that’s not the school year, I don’t know what is.

Infinite lives in finite time

Every August, the hallways smell faintly of waxed floors and new paper. The whiteboards are pristine. The login screens are empty. You could look at that and see futility—we reset every year, only to wear it all down again by May.

But Marx is right: each year is an infinite rebirth. Every school year is a fresh save file—same console, same mechanics, but a new set of choices ahead.

Jane McGonigal, in Reality is Broken, argues that one reason games are so satisfying is that they give us “the opportunity to start over as many times as it takes to get it right.” They offer a clear goal, immediate feedback, and the knowledge that failure isn’t final. You just respawn and try again.

That’s what school can be. Every failed quiz can be retaken. Every botched experiment can be rerun. Every strained relationship can be repaired. In the classroom, as in games, nothing is permanent—except the choice to keep playing.

The grind, the glitch, and the gallery wall

Zevin writes, “Art doesn’t typically get made by happy people.”

Teaching isn’t art in the gallery sense, but it shares the same blood type: creation, iteration, and an almost unreasonable devotion to something that doesn’t always love you back. You build lessons the way an artist builds canvases—layer by layer, making tiny adjustments no one else will notice. And sometimes, like an artist, you ruin the whole thing with one bad stroke.

That’s the grind. Sometimes it’s exhilarating. Sometimes it’s glitchy—when the tech won’t cooperate, the pacing’s off, or the class energy crashes into the floor.

McGonigal would call these moments “urgent optimism”—that mindset where even if the current challenge is maddening, you believe you can overcome it, and you’re willing to keep trying. Teachers know this better than anyone. The grind produces the work. The grind puts up the gallery wall of moments—students who suddenly get it, classes that click into perfect rhythm, projects that feel like magic.

Knowable. Fixable.

Sam’s grandfather believed two things:

“All things were knowable by anyone, and anything was fixable if you took the time to figure out what was broken.”

That belief feels radical in education. It’s easy to think that some problems are too big, some skills too elusive, some students “just not the type” for success. But if you start from the assumption that everything is knowable and fixable, your posture changes.

It means you approach a struggling student not as a puzzle missing pieces, but as a puzzle that just hasn’t been assembled yet. It means you treat a failed lesson not as proof of your limits, but as an opportunity to debug your own code.

Games give us the same lesson: if you can’t beat the boss, it’s not because you’re permanently incapable—it’s because you haven’t figured out the right strategy yet.

Macbeth and the meaning we choose

Shakespeare’s Macbeth gave us the line Zevin echoes—“Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow…”—but the original speech is bleak. Macbeth is mourning the death of his wife, facing the collapse of everything he’s built, and all he sees ahead is “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

But teaching lets us rewrite that fatalism. Yes, our days are often full of sound and fury—bells ringing, emails pinging, a chorus of “Do we need to write this down?” echoing from the back row. But it doesn’t signify nothing.

We get to choose the meaning. We decide whether this work is a meaningless loop or an infinite rebirth.

That’s the twist. Macbeth saw inevitability; we see possibility.

Playing the long game

There’s another Zevin line I love:

“To allow yourself to play with another person is no small risk… To play requires trust and love.”

This is what teaching is: an act of play in the most serious sense. You design the level. You set the boundaries. You hand the controller to your students and hope they don’t just run straight into the lava pit.

And sometimes, they do. They fail. They push boundaries. They surprise you in ways both delightful and infuriating. But the act of playing—of giving them that trust—is the work.

McGonigal points out that games connect us because they create “shared fiero”—the Italian word for pride after a hard-won victory. The joy is amplified because we went through the struggle together. In schools, that’s every group project, every shared aha moment, every day we make it through the final bell as a team.

The teacher’s respawn

If you’ve been teaching long enough, you’ve experienced the teacher’s version of a respawn: the moment you walk into a new year with the weight of last year’s mistakes still on your back, and realize you don’t have to carry them anymore.

That’s the beauty of “tomorrow.” The Earth continues to spin upon its axis. The sun rises. Joy cometh in the morning.

We get another chance.

This year, I hope you take that chance. I hope you build the levels you wish someone had built for you. I hope you play the long game. I hope you keep showing up to make the art, even on the days when you’d rather throw the whole project in the trash.

Because no loss is permanent. Nothing is permanent. And if we keep playing together, we can win.

Want more like this?

Starting this week, the newsletter is leveling up. You’ll still get my free weekly “10 Things” every Friday—quick hits of ideas, tools, and inspiration to take into your classroom. But on Tuesdays, I’ll be sending long-form pieces like the one you’ve just read: deeper dives into the intersections of teaching, creativity, and the messy, hopeful business of learning.

These Tuesday essays will be for paid subscribers, and because it’s the start of a new school year, I’m offering 20% off all new paid subscriptions through August.

If this piece lit a spark for you, or you want more stories, strategies, and reflections to keep you going all year long, I’d love for you to join me. Think of it as your weekly respawn point: a place to recharge, reframe, and head back into the game with fresh ideas.

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Greetings Starfighters,

So here’s the thing—I’ve always wanted to write short stories.

Not just stories, mind you, but the kind of short fiction that sat crammed in the middle of a worn-out paperback anthology you borrowed from the library when you were twelve. The kind that made you look up from the page and mutter, “Wait… WHAT?” to no one in particular. The kind written by the sci-fi greats like Bradbury and Ellison, who made magic with not many words and left your brain slightly singed.

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Well. Here’s me, swinging at that target with a slightly crooked bat.

This story, The Season of Scaleward, actually began as a humble little writing prompt from Reedsy a couple of years ago. “Write about a tradition gone awry,” they said. “Shouldn’t take long,” I said.

And then I set it down for two full years like it was a cursed object I wasn’t ready to touch.

Recently, something nudged me to dust it off; probably the ghost of Ray Bradbury whispering from an old YouTube video where he tells writers to “write one short story a week. It’s not possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row.”

Challenge accepted, Ray.

So here we go.

Let’s call it a first run. A sketch of a world I might return to. A story about fire, belief, betrayal, and a town that bakes scones like it’s a religious rite (because… it is). It’s a slow burn—pun very much intended—and I hope it leaves you with a little chill.

If you enjoy it, please let me know. And if you don’t, be gentle. I’m still sharpening the tools, one story at a time. Who knows, maybe one day there will be more from this world. Or another entirely.

Until then, enjoy Scaleward.

And maybe don’t trust anyone who tells you a tradition “just is.”

The Season of Scaleward

Dawn, the 19th of Macha, Fourth Cycle of Tellus

The dawnfrost glazed the cobbled streets of Snowmarble, catching the morning light like crushed emeralds. Ovens roared to life, warming kitchens with the scent of millberry and spiced mead. The day of Scaleward had arrived, and the entire village buzzed with the quiet, purposeful rhythm of tradition.

Lily Westhaven, age twelve and wide awake, took the stairs three at a time, her nightgown fluttering behind her like a festival banner. She landed with a skip, eyes bright, heart loud.

“Max! Max! Come quick! The scones are almost ready!”

Upstairs, a groan.

“Mama, make her stop,” Max moaned. “I’m trying to sleep in before the celebration.”

He appeared at the top of the stairs, hair a tangled mess, eyes half-closed. He brushed his bangs back with theatrical effort and trudged toward his room with the slouch of someone deeply aggrieved by being conscious. Down in the kitchen, Isa Westhaven was elbow-deep in dough. She slid a tray into the oven and glanced upward.

“Max, don’t be a spoil. It’s your sister’s first Scaleward. You were just as impossible when it was your year.”

She turned to Lily. “Come help me, love. We’ve got eleven more trays to finish before the gathering.”

“Yes, Mama!” Lily scrambled to the counter, nearly upsetting a bowl of sweet spice.

“Careful!” Isa caught it mid-air. “Break my bowls and we’ll be short for the council. And what would the gods say if I only brought eleven trays?”

Lily giggled. “I just don’t know why we have to wait so long. It’s just a fire. Singing, dancing, and... scones.”

“It's like you've never had a scone in your life,” Isa said with a smirk.

“Oh yes,” said a sleepy voice behind them. “Tragically scone-deprived. A tragic childhood.”

Max leaned in, stole a swipe of dough with his finger, and grinned at Lily’s look of horror.

“Maximillian Westhaven!” Isa snapped. “If you mess up my scones—”

“Just teasing. A young man’s got a right to annoy his little sister, especially once she hits the grand old Age of Warding.”

Lily slapped his arm. “Sometimes I hate you.”

“Better than being boring,” Max said, licking his finger. “Besides, we all know tonight’s just about overeating and pretending dragons care.”

Isa’s hands slowed in the dough. She wiped them clean, walked to the small shelf above the hearth, and pulled down the Book. It was thick, leather-bound, older than memory. The spine was cracked, the corners darkened by soot.

“Sit,” she spoke in an iron voice.

Max sighed dramatically but obeyed.

Isa opened the Book and read aloud, her voice steady, practiced:

“And so, each cycle, the People burned the scales of Dothus the White,
That the sky might remember what the mountains forgot.
Let the flames rise. Let the scales glow.
May the Fear of Dragons never fade.”

Max groaned. “Mama, come on. You've read that a thousand times.”

“But have you ever listened?” Isa asked, not looking up.

Max stood. “Dragons haven’t been seen in centuries. The scales don’t burn, they warm up. We light a fire, sing old songs, and call it sacred. That’s not belief. That’s habit.”

Isa shut the Book with care. “Your father believed. Until the very end.”

Max’s jaw clenched. “Don’t talk about him.”

Isa opened her mouth to say something more, but Max was already halfway up the stairs. Lily stood in the quiet that followed. She looked up at her mother.

“He doesn’t like Scaleward,” she said softly.

Isa nodded. “No. But he used to.”

Midday, 19th of Macha

Snowmarble wore celebration like a well-mended cloak—neatly, proudly, and a little too tightly. The streets bustled with preparation, though nothing was urgent. Pine wreaths were tied to doorposts with red thread, gar-fruit simmered in kettles, and voices murmured with the steady rhythm of tradition.

Lily wandered alone through the frost-bright village. She wasn’t sure if she was meant to help or stay visible. Everyone smiled at her the way adults do when you’re finally old enough for something, but they won’t tell you what.

Mrs. Crin from the bakery pressed a honeyed oatcake into her palm without saying a word. Lily murmured thanks and kept walking.

The Fire Circle lay at the center of town, bordered by old stones and soft earth. It looked more like a crater than a ceremonial ground—like the village had formed around an old wound.

The pyre was already built by the time Lily arrived: thick logs soaked in lamp oil, bound tightly and stacked with near-military precision. Five blackened scales crowned the top like iron feathers. They looked heavier than she remembered. Duller. Or maybe just older.

Councilor Tenreth, straight-backed and gray-bearded, moved through the workers like a conductor checking the tuning of his orchestra. He didn’t acknowledge Lily, only nodded once, which somehow felt weightier than a greeting.

She moved slowly along the edge of the circle, her hand brushing the trim of her ceremony cloak—dark green, newly hemmed. Max had sewn the lining himself. He hadn’t said much while he worked, but he’d made sure it fit perfectly.

She hadn’t seen him since breakfast.

Teenagers began to arrive in clusters, their sashes freshly tied, their expressions somewhere between awe and boredom. Parents followed with baskets of bread and warm jugs of cider. Children too young to understand were quietly ushered home. By twilight, only those twelve and older would remain.

Lily spotted Isa helping set lanterns along the path that circled the Fire. Her mother looked calm, as she always did. Maybe too calm.

The sun dipped behind the Skyshatter Mountains. A hush settled over the crowd—not silence, exactly, but a soft drawing-in of breath. The kind of quiet that always came before the fire.

Lily stood in the center now, torch in hand. The fire hadn’t been lit, but she could already feel the heat building, though she wasn’t sure if it came from the pyre or from somewhere inside her. Councilor Tenreth approached, placing a heavy hand on her shoulder. His voice was low, meant only for her.

“An honor, Lily Westhaven,” he said. “May your light guide us.”

Then he stepped back.

The crowd formed a wide ring around the Fire Circle. Their faces glowed in the lantern light. Some smiled. Some didn’t. None looked away.

Lily stepped forward.

She touched the torch to the kindling. The flame caught instantly, racing along the oil-soaked logs with a hunger that made her flinch. Heat poured off the pyre as the fire roared upward, taller than the town hall’s spire, crackling and spitting embers into the sky.

The scales atop the pyre began to glow; not orange or red, but a deep, metallic blue. Then white. So bright they almost looked like glass about to shatter.

From somewhere behind her, Rowan Lightfoot began to sing:

“Remember the dragons of old,
Scales of red and green and gold,
Their flame burned bright,
But now out of sight,
Gone, but never unseen.”

The melody was old and simple, and the villagers joined in as if pulled by a thread. Their voices rose in harmony—gentle, measured, unwavering.

Lily turned, searching for Max. He stood near the back, arms folded, lips pressed in a hard line. He wasn’t singing. She worked her way toward him.

“Max,” she whispered. “Why aren’t you singing?”

He shrugged. “You lit the fire. That’s the big moment.”

“But don’t you feel it?” she asked. “The heat, the way the scales glow—it’s real, isn’t it?”

Max’s gaze was far away. “It’s real, sure. Just not for the reasons they say.”

Then he turned away from the fire. And the wind shifted.

The change in the wind was sudden and sharp—an invisible line crossed, like stepping from sun into shadow. Lily’s breath caught. The fire flared. Sparks rose in a spinning column and didn’t fall back. The air felt charged, like it might break open if anyone spoke too loudly.

And then the sound came.

It wasn’t a roar, not at first. It was deeper—more like stone groaning, like mountains turning in their sleep—a vibration, more than a voice. The villagers fell silent.

No one moved.

Lily scanned the crowd, waiting for someone to laugh, to gasp, to do something. But their faces had shifted. They weren’t confused. They weren’t surprised.

They were waiting.

Above the fire, something vast passed between her and the stars. Wings. Enormous wings. Silent as snowfall. A shape descended in slow spirals, each beat of its wings stirring the flames higher. When it landed, the ground shuddered. The lanterns swung on their hooks. The fire hissed and bent in its direction.

The white drake towered above them all, its body long and lean, its scales glowing like winter ice catching firelight. Its eyes burned like smoldering coals buried beneath frost.

No one ran.

They bowed their heads.

Everyone but Lily.

And Max. He stood frozen beside her, his face slack with disbelief. The dragon tilted its head, the long arc of its neck swaying with the weight of centuries. Its voice, when it came, rolled through the square like thunder slowed to a crawl.

“Is he the one?”

Lily turned to Isa. Her mother had already stepped forward. Her voice was calm. Final.

“Yes, Lord Dothus. He is my son. And like his father before him... he does not believe.”

Max’s breath hitched. And then he ran.

Max bolted, elbows swinging, shoving past a merchant and a boy in ceremonial robes. He made it as far as the edge of the Fire Circle before the wall closed around him.

Not a literal wall, just neighbors. People he’d known his whole life. The woman who sold him pencils for school. The man who’d taught him how to sharpen a blade. They didn’t grab him, didn’t shout.

They stepped in front of him. And stopped.

He tried to push through, but more figures joined them. A soft tide of arms and shoulders and quiet strength. They turned him, moved him, like the current of a river changing direction.

“No!” Max shouted. “No, what are you doing?!”

He fought. He kicked. But the hands that held him were firm, steady, unyielding. They weren’t angry. They were resolved.

He locked eyes with Isa.

“You knew,” he gasped.

She didn’t deny it.

“You’re my mother!”

“That’s why I’m here,” she said softly.

The dragon lowered its massive head, steam curling from its nostrils.

Max screamed. It wasn’t theatrical. It wasn’t brave. It was the sound of a boy who had spent four years mocking something he didn’t understand and had just realized the cost.

Lily fell to her knees.

“Mama?” she whispered.

Isa came to her, crouching low, wrapping her arms around her daughter like she had a hundred times before.

“It’s alright,” she said. “It has to be.”

“What’s happening? What is this?”

Isa held her tighter. “Every five cycles, the dragons return. The old council made a pact. To stay here, to live safely in this place, we offer a sacrifice. Always a male. Always one who has… lost his faith.”

“But why him? Why Papa?”

“Because they stopped believing.”

Lily stared up at her, the firelight painting tears she didn’t feel yet. Behind them, Max screamed again as the dragon’s claw closed around him. The drake unfurled its wings. The flames bowed. The villagers knelt.

And it rose. Max’s cries trailed into the sky until there was only silence.

The night settled like snow.

The fire still burned, but no one tended it. The villagers stood quietly as the wind calmed and the heat from the pyre ebbed into the frostbitten air. Then, as if responding to an unspoken cue, they began to move.

Someone started to hum the final verse of the song. Others joined, voices soft and sure, like they were tucking something back into place. Like nothing had happened.

Lily stood in the center of it all, unmoving.

The firelight danced in her eyes, but she felt no warmth.

She turned slowly, searching for something—someone—who might still be pretending this was normal.

Isa stood just behind her, arms folded, face unreadable.

“You knew,” Lily said.

Isa nodded once. “We all do. After our twelfth cycle, we all learn the truth.”

“You chose him.”

Isa didn’t flinch. “He chose himself.”

Lily’s voice cracked. “You let me believe Papa died on the road to Dosteim.”

Isa sighed. “That’s what the younger ones must believe until they’re old enough to understand. Until they see the fire for themselves.”

Lily stepped back.

“And now I understand?”

Isa looked at her. “You’re still here.”

That wasn’t an answer.

The villagers began to drift away, murmuring to one another, some carrying baskets of food, others humming still. A few glanced Lily’s way—expressions unreadable, somewhere between pity and pride.

Rowan Lightfoot passed by and nodded at her. “You were brave,” he said. “The first time is always the hardest.”

Lily didn’t answer.

She turned her gaze skyward, to the place where the stars had returned.

And something inside her shifted.

Not loudly. Not violently.

But permanently.

That night, Lily did not sleep.

She lay in her bed, staring at the ceiling, the firelight still flickering in her mind. She saw Max’s face. The dragon’s eyes. The hands that had turned him back toward the center.

She saw Isa, calm and sorrowful.

“We all do,” she’d said.

But Lily didn’t want to be part of “we.”

Not anymore.

She rose before dawn and climbed to the loft above the kitchen, where her father’s old tools were still kept. A carving knife. A mallet. A box of wood shavings that smelled like cedar and soot.

He had built tables and chairs. Hope chests and doorframes.

She would build something else.

A truth.

A reckoning.

Snowmarble had followed the same path for too long. And the dragons were not the only ones who remembered.

See you next week, gang. Stay frosty,

MP

"If summer had one defining scent, it'd definitely be the smell of barbecue." –Katie Lee

Greetings Starfighters,

As May transitions into June this weekend, spring's final traces yield to the swelter and humidity of a Kentucky summer. We'll escape to the mountains for a few days to savor quiet evenings by the fire, lazy mornings with coffee on the porch, and maybe a round or two of Hillbilly Golf.

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For the first time in ages, I'm free of summer classes—leaving time for house projects, spinning vinyl, and catching up on non-dissertation reading.

And yes, there'll be movies and TV shows too. My wife and daughter are heading to a Heart concert, and I'm hoping to persuade my kid to join me for the Dave Matthews Band in the Queen City.

Though summer isn't my favorite season, it offers a chance to recharge. As the school year winds down, we find ourselves ready for a break—while we'll miss our students and the work, we need this time to explore our corners of the world and replenish our spirits. I hope you can find the time you need this summer and do whatever it is that fills your soul.

And yes, sitting on the couch doing nothing is perfectly acceptable behavior.

Here are 10 things I thought were worth sharing with you this week…

1. “At the end of every school year, when I say goodbye, once again, I sit in my empty classroom and wonder if I could have done more. I reflect and question the thousands of interactions I had with them, wondering if I did right by my students.” - Adrian Neibauer’s thoughts on ending a school year.

2. Summer reading is, quite possibly, the best kind of reading. My list of summer reads includes this year’s Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction, Ray Bradbury’s Stories, LeGuin’s The Language of the Night, the third book in Andy Peloquin’s Darkblade series, Lonesome Dove, and many more. Here are some ideas for your summer reads from Literary Hub, the New York Times, Publishers Weekly, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker.

3. If you’re spinning vinyl this summer—or just streaming— Mt. Joy and Budos Band just dropped new albums today. Also coming or already out for the summer are new drops from Caamp, Stereolab, Brian Eno, King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, and more.

4. Tubi is quickly becoming my go-to choice for streaming movies and TV shows, mainly because they have a decent library of sci-fi, fantasy, and horror titles. I’m four episodes into Hammer’s House of Horror anthology series from 1980 (gloriously ridiculous) and watched 80s cult classic Krull a week or so ago. Please, please, please don’t be afraid to binge your favorite movies/shows this summer. You create content every day in your classroom, take a break.

5. On the topic of reading, when we show our kids and students that we enjoy reading, they read more. Funny how that works. Maybe we should do more to combat the collapse of reading.

6. I don’t always agree with Audrey Watters, but I read her work to keep me honest about all things educational technology. However, I agree with her that to keep “the AI” from overtaking all of education, we must invest in humans who understand how to use tools to help us flourish and not succumb to the demands and desires of the technocratic elite.

7. Some slightly rude notes on writing (damn that Wadsworth Constant thing…)

8. Harvard, the current leader in the battle to maintain educational freedom, has 130+ courses you can take for free.

9. Change can be very uncomfortable, but for some, it’s downright deadly…

   

10. When you’re feeling down, watch old episodes of The Great Space Coaster and enjoy the updates from Gary Gnu’s Gnews.

That’s it, gang. See you next week.

Stay frosty,

MP

To be a creator, one must possess the capacity to rebel. - Erik Ritenberry, Poetic Outlaws

Devil inside, the devil inside
Every single one of us, the devil inside
Devil inside, devil inside
Every single one of us, the devil inside

-INXS

Yes, every one of us has a bit of a devil inside, pushing against all the things ‘they’ say we should do, say, and be. Who, exactly, do ‘they’ think they are? And why do they think they get to tell any of us what to do?

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Seems a very Republican mentality to me…

Most of the first half of my life was spent trying to please others and making wild attempts to do whatever it was that someone else with some sort of assumed authority and influence over my life thought that I should be doing. Little thought—nay, no thought—was given to what I wanted to do, what excited me, what interested me, what made we want to get up early in the morning.

No, friends, my days were spent doing what I was told. No independence, no self-regulation, no self-determinance. I went from one activity to the next, forever in search of the approval of those “in charge” of my life.

My, how the days would have been different if I’d stood up for myself sooner…

I digress. Without those lessons, I wouldn’t be the person, the dad, the husband, the educator I am today. I wouldn’t have the passion for ensuring that no child has to experience what I did in school and come out on the other side of that institution with nary a clue about what to do with their lives. Even if that means they have to be a bit of a rebel to get shit done.

Rebels make change, they destroy the status quo, they make things interesting, and they abide no BS, a recurring theme in today’s newsletter.

I encourage you, look for opportunities to rebel a little bit this week. Piss a few people off (they’ll get glad in the same spot they got mad in), wander off the prescribed path, and most of all, ask the one question that is more important than any other in times of frustration, angst, and general discontent…

Why are we doing this? The answer is often not what we expected or wanted.

Anyway, here are ten things worth sharing with you this week:

1. Meritocracy is BS: “The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.” - JK Galbraith.

   In a world where billionaires are worshipped as visionaries and markets are treated like oracles, a darker truth pulses just beneath the surface: the myth of meritocracy is mutating into something far more sinister. Cory Doctorow argues that what begins as an economic fairy tale—that the “best” rise through grit and talent—inevitably curdles into a justification for inherited power, and then into a polite, data-washed revival of eugenics. Because if the rich deserve their place, then their children must be genetically fit to rule—and the rest of us, by contrast, deserve to be ruled. This isn’t just capitalism. It’s caste, coded in spreadsheets and cloaked in the language of efficiency.

2. A nice cuppa: In my ever-present pursuit of becoming a Brit—yes, it’s a thing-I’m trying to make a good cup of tea. I swear I like my tea much, MUCH stronger than others. However, if you’re trying to do the same, here’s some advice from George Orwell, Christopher Hitchens, and Douglas Adams.

3. Transactional schooling is BS: If you want to understand why students are using AI to ghostwrite their way through school, don’t blame the robot—blame the system that taught them their thoughts don’t matter. In his sharp rebuke of the moral panic around student AI use, John Warner argues that our obsession with grades, rubrics, and future-proofing has hollowed out the very purpose of education. What’s the point of writing if all it earns you is a box checked and a promise of some deferred reward? This isn’t a crisis of cheating—it’s a crisis of meaning, born of a transactional model of schooling that’s trained students to perform, not to think.

4. Brian Eno, world-renowned creator and hero of this writer, took a stand this week, asking Microsoft to seriously reevaluate its relationship with the Israeli government. He’s also taking the fee from his original Windows 95 startup chime and sending it to relief organizations. Side note: Microsoft is apparently blocking emails with content related to Gaza and Palestine.

5. The authors are real, but the books are BS: From the Department of Really Stupid Ways to Use AI comes news that the Chicago Sun-Times published a list of summer reading titles (from a third-party service) filled with real authors but totally AI-generated book titles and summaries. Way to model responsible usage, adults. We can’t get mad at the kids for using AI to do their work if we don’t hold ourselves accountable, too.

6. In a world obsessed with speed, shortcuts, and surface-level success, John Spencer makes a powerful case for slowing down. In his latest post, he spotlights a quiet revolution happening in classrooms—not powered by apps or algorithms, but by teachers who choose depth over dopamine. This isn’t about a flashy new program or a viral strategy. It’s about reclaiming learning as a process of curiosity, resilience, and meaning. In a culture that rewards quick answers, Spencer reminds us: depth is the most radical thing we can offer our students.

7. Prompt writing isn’t BS: In an age when students can type a few words and let AI do the rest, it’s tempting to dismiss prompt writing as a shallow shortcut. But David Wiley flips that narrative: writing prompts for AI isn't the end of thinking—it’s thinking in action. In the paradox of large language models, the clarity, depth, and specificity of your prompts determine the quality of the output. That makes writing not just relevant, but essential. As Wiley argues, prompt writing isn’t a gimmick. It’s a new literacy—and maybe the most economically valuable one students can learn today.

8. Roger Ebert once described film noir as the “most American film style,” and I agree. OpenCulture has a list of 60 noir films you can watch for free and could likely put to good use in your classroom next year.

9. Picasso’s process isn’t BS: With just a few bold strokes, Picasso could summon a face, a bull, or a chicken-turned-demon—alive on glass, vanishing just as quickly as they appeared. In Le Mystère Picasso, the legendary painter and the cinematic eye of Henri-Georges Clouzot joined forces not to explain Picasso’s genius, but to witness it in motion. Decades before digital art and speedpainting, Picasso turned the act of creation into performance, capturing the fleeting magic of transformation—where a line becomes a soul, and a chicken becomes something far more unsettling.

10. RIP George Wendt, who played the iconic Norm Peterson. Norm is a cultural icon, even inspiring a Star Trek character. Here’s a super-cut of every time Norm enters the Cheers bar. RIP Normie, I hope your stool was waiting for you.

That’s it for this week, Starfighters. Get into some good trouble this week.

Stay frosty,

MP

Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes—including you. - Anne Lamott

Greetings Starfighters,

Here I sit in the aftermath of year-end testing. It’s my least favorite part of the year, but it’s an unavoidable part of the year. Any forward motion ceases in schools, even though the company line for what should happen when students aren’t testing is “regular instruction,” we all know that is not the reality.

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Sure, let’s see you try to do anything productive after sitting in the same place for several hours, completing tasks that no one should ever be asked to complete, remaining totally quiet, and having a teacher walk around the room watching everyone and everything that happens, ensuring that no testing allegations occur.

Testing fatigue is real and could be avoided, but we’re sick little puppies in the education world and we just want to prove our worth to the powers that be so they keep funding us, even if that funding isn’t nearly enough to do the job (no, I’m not talking about giving teachers a raise, although that would be nice) of educating kids.

Day after day of standardized testing is just the perfect way to end the school year. Right?

Anyways, we’re almost done with the madness. With its passing comes months of hand-wringing over the outcomes, waiting to see if we all meet some arbitrary minimum requirement of success. Meanwhile, in dark corners and shadows, some of us continue the work to reimagine our schools into places kids and adults race to join every day.

We’re a long way from that goal, but we press on toward that high calling.

It’s now time for me to remind you that, as summer approacheth, take time for yourself. Lazing around on your couch for a day or two is perfectly acceptable behavior. Reading a book on the back deck is also a recommended summer activity. Whatever restores your soul, take time in the coming months to embrace it.

Unplug. Detach. Avoid deadlines and headlines. Never mind the hustle, it will be waiting when you return from your sanctum sanctorum.

And now, a few things worth sharing with you this week…

1. What I’ve been reading lately… Joan Didion’s writing continues to haunt and inspire. I’m halfway through The Year of Magical Thinking after reading Slouching Towards Bethlehem late last year. Heidegger has me questioning some of my fundamental beliefs about technology (which is a good thing). I’m making my way back through the lessons of past masters with Robert Greene and doing my best to steal some ideas for next school year. Oh, and of course, Harlan.

2. Speaking of Harlan, my kiddo is working on a narrative piece in class that began as a single sentence suggestion from another student. My brain immediately went to this clip from the early 80s of Harlan Ellison writing “The Night of Black Glass” in the front window of B. Dalton booksellers. I love this clip because, as Harlan notes, it takes away the mystery of writing. As with any endeavor, nothing gets done until something gets done. It is this first step that stalls so many students and teachers when doing anything. Take the first step. Be prepared to fail and learn from it. Produce something.

3. People ask me why I don’t recommend more “education” books. It’s not because I don’t read them (I do) or like them (a few), it’s because they’re mostly all the same. If you’ve read one book on instructional coaching, you’ve read them all. Same for student engagement, assessment, lesson design, on and on ad infinitum. Also, most of them tend to reinforce existing ideas about our schools that I personally want to smash. Wanna read something different? Try Street Data. Remember your Zappa: “Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible.” But that’s just my two cents.

4. Speaking of the opinions of professionals (you know, like the MDs, PhDs, and other subject matter experts whose opinions any number of “do your own research” mongrels want to ignore), here’s this advice from Steven Pressfield. Use it as often as needed as a vaccine against those who have no informed opinion:

   

5. Stealing from another favorite, Ted Gioia published a list of 30 books to create an “anti-tech” canon. I’m certainly not anti-tech, but I insist on keeping a fair amount of skepticism about everything (always ask ‘why’ first when anything new shows up). Never blindly accept anything, especially when someone says, “This will revolutionize _____,” because they’re usually just trying to sell you something. I’d add Ursula Franklin’s Massey lectures to this list.

6. ICYMI, Kentucky’s Student Voice team is suing the state as they believe the state has failed its constitutional obligation to provide an “adequate and equitable” education. In my exploration of virtual schools in Kentucky (and other places), I’ve talked with several folks about what in the world a “common school” actually is (it’s certainly not defined well in the state Constitution), and I tend to agree with the Student Voice team on this one. However, this Tuesday, a small hearing primarily addressed the Kentucky attorney general’s request to throw out the suit as the state argues the students don’t have the right to bring the suit. Here’s my question: if the students don’t sue, who will?

7. Since I used articles from our local public media above, here’s your reminder that public media has been an integral part of our country for decades, has always been ‘woke,’ and has always been designed to educate at every level. Take a minute out of your day and support public media.

8. My 2025 archival playlist is now the longest I’ve put together yet. I’ve done more exploring this year and I think this eclectic mix shows that pretty well.

9. I’m a slacker, I know, but I finally read ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’ last year. Loved it. Every page. I watched the movie this week, and it’s just as trippy as the book. I can’t recommend it more highly.

   

10. Finally, in a bit of a ‘what the…” moment, a copy of the Magna Carta owned by Harvard Law School turns out to be an original from the 1300s. Harvard bought it for less than $30, but it’s likely worth tens of millions. How’s that for an Antiques Roadshow moment?

That’s it for this week, true believers. Stay frosty.

Greetings Starfighters,

It’s been a couple of weeks since last we spoke, mostly because life has been more than crazy for me and my little family. My wife and daughter have been ill, the Ohio Valley suffered a historic flood (again), and I’ve been wrapping up this little work known as my qualifying exams (essentially, chapters 1 and 2 of my dissertation).

When one of my doctoral buddies asked me how I felt after hitting send on that particular email, the best response I could manage was to call up memories of Cool Runnings and the following GIF…

Now that I’ve bored you with my whining and tales of not-so daring-do, let’s get on with this week’s newsletter with 10 things I feel are worth your time exploring…

1. A few weeks ago, Zane Lowe from Apple Music got the chance to enter creative genius Brian Eno’s studio. Eno talks about his creative process, including the custom software he runs to piece together different pieces of his compositions constantly. They share some tea and look at the lights Eno works on when he’s not writing music, which are just as creative as his music. Looking into the future of education, as we ask students to solve real problems and not just take tests, they’ll need exposure to creative folks to fill their minds with inspiration. Oh, and teachers could use a bit of this inspiration, too.

2. John Lithgow gives voice to Timothy Snyder’s “20 Lessons on Tyranny,” ideas we need right now, especially here in the US.

3. “The rapid rise of generative artificial intelligence is exposing a glaring disconnect in teacher preparation. While forward-thinking superintendents are rolling up their sleeves to build AI literacy among teachers, college programs tasked with preparing the next generation of educators are largely absent from the conversation. This isn’t just a missed opportunity; it is an existential crisis for teacher prep programs.”

   That’s the lead for an article on how teacher prep programs are failing to bring AI into conversations with budding teachers. Ignore it or embrace it, we can’t avoid the subject, lest we repeat the ignorance and apathy of the past two decades as many teacher prep programs avoided talking about any technology advances, save for PowerPoint.

4. ““Disengaged,” “unmotivated,” “fragile,” “behind.” These are just a few of the negative labels applied to young people today. We read stories about how they’re suffering from pandemic learning loss and an adolescent mental health crisis. “Kids are addicted to their phones” is a common complaint. It all adds up to an even less helpful label: “the anxious generation.””

   How about we try something different in education? Maybe we should try focusing on what students do really well, leaning into their passions and skills, rather than constantly label them by their faults or simply throwing up our hands and blaming the phones for our struggles? (Don’t get me started on the fear-mongering luddite that is Jonathan Haidt…)

5. “Even suggesting civil discourse today can feel naïve. Some have written it off entirely. And yet, I remain desperate to find examples of thoughtful, intelligent people engaging across ideological divides—people who wrestle with difficult issues, challenge each other’s thinking, and explore the real-world consequences of policy decisions. If such models exist, they are marginalized, unsupported, or invisible in today’s media landscape.” - this article on the loss of civil discourse.

6. Back to thinking about creativity, can we agree that one of the prime culprits in deadening the spark of creative genius in our students is the “five-paragraph essay?” Let’s provide space for students to give themselves permission to be creative, whether writing or any other creative act.

7. NewsHour asks Alton Brown for his advice for home cooks wanting to improve their cooking, and Brown responds with "read the recipe," which is optimal advice for anyone wanting to learn something; start by reading about it before you do anything else.

8. Wanna combat misinformation? Start with great history instruction:

Since context is key to critical thinking, learning to analyze information about current events likely requires knowledge about politics and history, as well as practice at scrutinizing sources. Fortunately, that is what social studies classes are for. Social studies researchers often describe this kind of critical thinking as “historical thinking”: a way to evaluate evidence about the past and assess its reliability. My own research has shown that high school students can make relatively quick progress on some of the surface features of historical thinking, such as learning to check a text’s date and author. But the deep questioning involved in true historical thinking is much harder to learn.

9. Somehow, childhood media influences came up in conversation with a colleague. I mentioned how influential the Muppets were in my early years (they’re the gateway to good comedy) and then we went down the bunny trail that is public television. You may never have heard of it, but a series called “Tomes and Talismans” is a core memory for me. Here’s the first episode (the entire series on available through Mississippi Public Broadcasting):

10. Finally, in what might be one of the finest examples of project-based learning, Ewan McGregor and his buddy Charley Boorman reunite once again for another epic motorcycle journey. Their first trip, Long Way Round, took them from London to New York, heading east for around 19,000 miles. Further adventures took them from the top of Scotland to Cape Town, South Africa, and from Cape Horn to Los Angeles. The kicker on each of these trips is that, for long stretches, it’s just the boys and their bikes, wheeling their way through some of the worst road conditions known to man. Oftentimes, there are no roads. Creativity happens on the fly.

    This time, the boys travel around Europe, doing their best to survive and thrive on classic motorcycles that don’t always cooperate. The show premiers on AppleTV+ in May, with all previous series available to watch there now.

That’s it, starfighters. See ya next week!

MP

Greetings Starfighters,

Today is the last day of school before Spring Break for me and my crew. While I’m not traveling anywhere, my thoughts are on places and spaces many will enjoy over the next few days before diving into the final part of what has been an interesting, significantly disrupted school year.

For me, Chapter 2 of my dissertation awaits with all its quantitative and qualitative morass, setting up the beginning portion of research this fall. Also, I’ll be navigating the ins and outs of the IRB process, ensuring all the ethical considerations are addressed—trust me, this part is the most frightening.

If you haven’t played with the recently updated image creation/editing features in ChatGPT 4o, you really should, especially if you’re an animation fan. My doctoral ride-or-die buddy Mike did a little work on a pic we took last summer that might be the most adorable/hilarious thing ever:

I played around with some family pics and came away with this great interpretation from our trip to South Dakota a few years ago:

Fun stuff, to be sure, if you’re playing around. However, here’s my shout-out to all independent artists and creatives who do far more interesting and personal work, whether for their projects or commissioned work. Support these folks, regardless of the platform they use or the art they create. Find someone you like and buy their stuff.

Shameless side note: My friend Brian Rodman is releasing his magnum opus, Memoirs of an Angel, very soon. This project has been part of his life for about two decades. You can and should pre-order it right now.

Anyhow, here are 10 Things I think are worth your time…

10 Things Worth Sharing

1. Dietrich Bonhoeffer did not hold back when a certain Austrian came to power in Germany in the early 1930s.

Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice… One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity we are defenseless.

He goes further…

In essence not an intellectual defect but a human one… under certain circumstances, people are made stupid or that they allow this to happen to them… Every strong upsurge of power in the public sphere, be it of a political or of a religious nature, infects a large part of humankind with stupidity.

These thoughts, of course, echo the sentiment at the core of Wizard’s First Rule, but also this final thought from Bonhoeffer that haunts me amidst the ongoing displays of ineptitude from the current US administration and the misguided acceptance and defense of their actions by supporters:

The power of the one needs the stupidity of the other.

2. As we navigate the rapidly evolving landscape of generative AI, it's tempting to focus solely on the speed and efficiency these tools offer—instant answers, rapid feedback, and streamlined content creation. I've witnessed students utilizing AI to enhance audio quality, automate video edits, and generate ideas at an unprecedented pace. However, speed doesn't necessarily equate to depth. Without intentionality, we risk succumbing to cognitive atrophy, where the learning process becomes superficial, and critical thinking diminishes.

   John Spencer, an early leader in integrating AI into educational practices, addresses this concern in his insightful article, "Ten Ways to Use AI for Deeper Learning and Mastery." He presents practical strategies that position AI not as a mere shortcut but as a collaborative partner in the educational journey. From engaging in prompt engineering and concept mapping to leveraging AI for simulations and Socratic dialogues, Spencer emphasizes approaches that encourage students to slow down and engage in thoughtful reflection, fostering deeper understanding.

   In addition to Spencer's contributions, my colleagues Adam Watson and Dr. John Nash have been instrumental in exploring the intersection of AI and education. Adam Watson has focused on the strategic implementation of digital tools in educational settings, emphasizing the importance of aligning technology with pedagogical goals. Dr. John Nash's work delves into the ethical considerations and human-centered design principles necessary for integrating AI into learning environments effectively.

   While vigilance and critical evaluation are essential as we integrate AI into our classrooms, we cannot afford to overlook the potential these tools have to enhance the learning experience. By thoughtfully incorporating AI, we can empower our students to engage more deeply with content, develop critical thinking skills, and prepare for a future where AI is an integral part of their personal and professional lives.

3. Embracing the practice of working in the open has influenced my journey as an educator and creator. This approach involves sharing our creative processes, ideas, and works-in-progress with the public. By doing so, we not only invite collaboration and feedback but also expand the potential for innovation and growth—thoughts that echo back to the founding ideas of the open source movement.

   Austin Kleon, in his book Show Your Work!, emphasizes the value of this openness:

   "Share what you love, and the people who love the same things will find you."

   This sentiment underscores the importance of transparency in our creative endeavors. We naturally attract like-minded individuals by openly sharing our passions and processes, fostering a community of mutual learning and support.

   Cory Doctorow advocates maintaining a public "memex," a digital repository where ideas and knowledge are openly documented and interconnected. He describes his blogging practice as an "annotated web history," serving as a personal archive and a resource for others.

   Integrating this philosophy into educational settings can be transformative. Encouraging students to document and share their learning journeys—including challenges, insights, and evolving understandings—can demystify the often nonlinear nature of education. This practice normalizes the "messy middle" of learning and cultivates resilience, adaptability, and a growth mindset.

   I've explored creating a digital space to collect and connect ideas, quotes, and reflections in my work. This method has enhanced my personal growth and is a model for students to develop digital repositories. By curating and sharing their learning processes, students can engage in meaningful reflection, receive constructive feedback, and contribute to a broader community of learners.

   When we embrace openness and sharing, we enrich our own learning experiences and inspire and empower others to embark on their own creative journeys.

4. I’ve been reflecting on a powerful conversation from the Brain Inspired podcast featuring neuroscientist Gabriele Scheler, who challenges many of our assumptions about intelligence, both human and artificial.

   Scheler explores language's role as the backbone of thought. She describes inner speech—not just external conversation—as a kind of cognitive architecture that shapes how we organize memory, process information, and construct symbolic understanding. In other words, we don’t just speak to communicate—we speak to think.

   She also sharply critiques current AI systems, especially large language models, which she argues mimic the surface-level structure of human language but miss the deeper symbolic and conceptual underpinnings of thought. Her vision for AI isn’t just faster computation—it’s a more biologically grounded intelligence built from reimagined neuron models that reflect real neuroscience.

   This hit home for me. It reminded me of the ideas I wrote about in my Crafting a Digital Commonplace Book post. Like Scheler’s argument, that post was all about helping students engage in authentic cognitive work—capturing, remixing, and reflecting on their thinking as it develops.

   As we continue exploring the role of AI in education, I think we need to stay grounded in what makes human learning truly meaningful: language, self-reflection, and the messy, iterative process of making sense of the world. That’s where the magic lives—not in polished outputs, but in the thinking itself.

5. Some news from our correspondents in the “OMG It’s about time Department:” Princess Mononoke, one of the great fantasy tales of all time, is getting an IMAX 4K restoration and release. It’s out right now. I’m getting tickets to reward myself after finishing chapter 2 of the ol’ dissertation.

6. Will Richardson sits down with students and educators from Sparkling Mindz, a Reggio-inspired school in Bangalore, India, and the conversation will stay with you.

   These students live in a city confronting climate collapse daily—floods, droughts, pollution, inequity. But instead of being shielded from the world’s problems, they’re invited into them, with the time, space, and structure to take ownership of real challenges. Whether designing birthday policies to eliminate plastic waste, mapping flooding cycles through interviews with hydrologists, or creating public poetry and theater performances at metro stations, their work is as raw as it is relevant.

   Founder Sreeja Iyer describes their approach as turning “problems to projects to possibilities to purpose.” And that’s exactly what these students are doing—grounded in empathy, fueled by design thinking, and supported by facilitators (not teachers) who create safe spaces for voice and vulnerability. One student said it best: “I used to be disillusioned. Now I want to roll up my sleeves.”

   Will makes a simple but urgent point: “It’s not a question of ‘How can we?’ It’s a question of ‘How can we not?’”

   This episode is a blueprint for what regenerative, student-led, purpose-driven education can and should be. It’s also a call to all of us working in education to create learning spaces where students don’t just pass tests; they transform communities.

7. Jillian Hess’s latest post in Noted dives into The Beatles’ notebooks—and uncovers creative gold. From Lennon scribbling lyrics on scraps of paper to George Harrison free-associating “attracts me like a cauliflower,” it’s a brilliant reminder that creative work is rarely neat, linear, or solitary.

   

   It’s collaborative. It’s playful. It’s messy. And it’s exactly the kind of learning environment we should cultivate for students and teachers.

   Paul and John leaned on each other when the writing got hard. George asked for help and got it. And the band often pulled inspiration from the world around them—cutting up news stories, riffing off headlines, letting chance and improvisation shape meaning. It’s what Seymour Papert might have called “hard fun.”

   These insights echo what we’ve seen in places like Sparkling Mindz in Bangalore: when young people are given space to co-create, remix, and play with ideas in community, authentic learning thrives.

   🎸 Whether you’re planning a lesson, designing a unit, or co-writing with colleagues:

   • Let the ideas simmer.

   • Use scraps, journals, whatever’s handy.

   • Invite others in before it’s “done.”

   • And most of all: don’t work—play.

8. We often act like information overload is a modern problem. TikTok, Twitter, email, AI tools, a million browser tabs… it feels uniquely overwhelming. But as Jared Henderson reminds us, we’ve been here before—ask Francis Bacon.

   “Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.”

   Early modern scholars like Bacon, Samuel Johnson, and those studied by historian Ann Blair didn’t just drown in the deluge of texts—they created new strategies for surviving and thriving in the flood. They triaged reading, invented better note-taking systems, and protected attention like a precious commodity.

   In an age when attention is currency, we need to bring this wisdom back into our classrooms and our lives. Blair’s work shows that we can’t just surrender to distraction. We must actively adapt—and teach students to do the same.

   This pairs beautifully with the ideas we’ve been discussing lately:

   • Like Austin Kleon’s notebook practice, it’s about intentional capture.

   • Like Cory Doctorow’s digital gardens, it’s about curation over consumption.

   • Like student-led projects, it empowers learners to sift, sort, and synthesize what matters.

   Maybe it’s time to revisit Bacon’s bookshelf wisdom with a modern twist.

9. Oh, Jacob Collier. What can I say? This young man brings me such joy and inspiration. Following in Ben Folds' tradition, Jacob works with the National Symphony Orchestra to create an entirely new musical experience and engage the audience as well.

   When he stepped onto the stage with the National Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy Center, he didn't bring a pre-written score. He brought trust—in the musicians, the audience, and the creative process.

   An entirely improvised composition emerged in the moment, with the orchestra and audience responding to each other in real time—no safety net. Just listening, risk-taking, and collective genius.

   “Improvisation,” Collier says, “is the purest form of composition.”

   Watching it unfold, you witness something rare: a master of his craft giving up control to create something that couldn’t exist in any other way, with any other group, at any other time. This is not chaos—it’s radical, structured openness. It’s what happens when people who have honed their skills deeply enough to trust them… let go.

   This is what we want for students and teachers, too.

   This is what happens when we shift from "covering the curriculum" to creating meaning together.

10. Finally, I’m remembering the great Jim Harrison.

    “The simple act of opening a bottle of wine has brought more happiness to the human race than all the collective governments in the history of earth.”

    Jim Harrison died on this day in 2016, slumped over his desk in Patagonia, Arizona, a pen still in his hand. His final, unfinished poem trailed off into scribbles—his strength fading mid-line, but his devotion to the craft never wavering.

    It was, as friend Philip Caputo put it, “a poet’s death.” And yet, it was also the end of a life fully lived. Harrison chased the wild edge of experience—food, wine, grief, love, nature, solitude—and wrote with the kind of raw honesty and philosophical clarity that only comes from knowing yourself deeply and paying attention fiercely.

    This week’s newsletter has explored that theme over and over:

    • 🎸 The Beatles show us how deep creative work is often messy, collaborative, and born from fragments and chance.

    • 📚 Early modern scholars invented systems to guard their minds against the flood of information.

    • 🎶 Jacob Collier, in full improvisation with a symphony, reminding us that risk is the partner of mastery.

    • 🧠 Sparkling Mindz students designing their way out of problems not by waiting—but by engaging, by choosing to act.

    Harrison would’ve understood all of that. He lived that tension between solitude and collaboration, effort and surrender, discipline and improvisation. He once wrote:

    “It was already apparent that you had to utterly give your life over to language with minimal chance of success though that was far from a deterrent at the time.”

    To live and learn like that—in full tilt, surrounded by scraps of beauty and scribbles of meaning—that is the work we’re called to do. Whether we’re teaching students, building something new, or simply trying to stay sane in a distracted world.

    It’s not always clean. It’s rarely easy.

    But it’s real. And it’s worth it.

That’s it, gang. I’ll be back next week with a Spring Break edition.

Cyas,

MP

Greetings Starfighters,

Things are hitting a little different in the education world today. Yesterday, the sitting President of the United States issued an executive order to dismantle the federal Department of Education. With much pomp and circumstance, including several students sitting at ancient school desks signing what seemed to be their copies of the order, Trump highlighted his campaign promise to “send education back to the states.”

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The problem is that states and local school boards already control public schools. State legislatures and local school boards set the learning standards and curricula, and 86% of public school funding comes from state or local dollars.

Here’s the other issue with that executive order (and so many other executive orders): it doesn’t do very much. Regardless of the bluster and harrumphing by Trump and his band of merry sycophants, there’s a line at the end of the executive order they hope you don’t read or understand (wait… you mean they don’t want you to be able to read or understand something? Seems suspicious when trying to eliminate a department of education…):

“This order is not intended to, and does not, create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity by any party against the United States, its departments, agencies, or entities, its officers, employees, or agents, or any other person.”

I’m not an attorney, nor do I play one on television. So, I asked ChatGPT to explain this to me (remembering that the interpretation and my understanding of it don’t mean much of anything, but here goes…).

I asked ChatGPT (using the 4o model), “Does this executive order do anything to close the Department of Education?”

The response:

Great question — and the short answer is:

Not really. Not on its own.

A disclaimer at the end of an executive order signals that the order is more of a policy direction or intention, not an immediately enforceable action. So, while a president can order executive agencies to begin steps toward dismantling the Department of Education, they can't unilaterally eliminate it through an executive order alone.

Here's why:

1. Congress created the Department of Education.

• It was established in 1979 through the Department of Education Organization Act, a federal law.

• Only Congress can repeal that law and officially eliminate the department.

2. An executive order can't override legislation.

• A president can’t use executive orders to eliminate a statute-created department.

• They can only direct agencies to plan, restructure, or stop enforcing certain policies, but the department can’t be legally dissolved without congressional action.

3. That final disclaimer reinforces the point:

• It says, “This order doesn’t create any enforceable rights,” which is a legal way of saying, “Don’t expect this order to result in immediate, binding change.”

• It protects the administration from lawsuits and signals that the actual dismantling would require further action — likely legislation, budget cuts, and congressional approval.

TL;DR:

✅ The executive order can signal the president’s intent to close the Department of Education.

❌ But it does not dismantle it — that would take congressional action, budget decisions, and likely years of transition planning.

Again, take that interpretation with a grain of salt. All funding programs handled by the Department of Education (Title I, IDEA, etc.) are supposed to continue as part of different agencies. So, yeah. This executive order doesn’t do much other than confirm our current executive branch's priorities on public education.

But it does put the current President firmly in the “shut it down” category for the Department of Ed. More than ever, it’s time for you and I to pick sides.

And now, on to much lighter fare, this week’s 10 things worth your attention…

10 Things Worth Sharing

1. Speaking of the current Executive Branch of the US Government, do you remember that pesky little thing called Project 2025? You know, that document that the current President claimed he didn’t know about, have anything to do with, and wouldn’t ever be used?

I’ll leave this here so you can see how much of the Project 2025 policy recommendations are moving into place: project2025.observer

2. Somehow, we’ve found another 128 moons around Saturn, bringing its total moon ownership to 274. Meanwhile, I’m still ticked about hearing what happened to Pluto…

3. One of my favorite places to find new music, Western AF, released a documentary on singer/songwriter Luke Bell, who passed away in 2022.

Bell—originally from Lexington, KY—hit the scene in the last decade and made a lasting impression during his short time with us. I’ve only recently discovered his music, but I’m already a fan.

4. Speaking of new music, Louisville, KY natives My Morning Jacket released a new album today, and, as usual, it’s pretty amazing. My current favorite track, Time Waited, is in regular morning rotations and is on my 2025 playlist.

Here’s Time Waited:

5. And the aforementioned, ever-growing 2025 playlist (my 6th yearly collection):

6. Derek Bruff has a nice, reflective write-up of John Warner’s new book, More Than Words. I haven’t read it yet, but after reading Bruff’s thoughts, I will very soon. Warner makes excellent points about what we should avoid when bringing generative AI into the classroom and what we can embrace.

For me, anything we can do to grease the proverbial wheels for teachers to free up their time to work with students is something we should leverage. Using AI as a student thinking partner with specific prompts (as Bruff notes) is a step in the right direction. However, many tasks we ask students to complete, even if we’re using AI as an aid, don’t allow for individual expression and follow a scripted result (I’m looking at you, five-paragraph essay).

7. Homes, businesses, and schools are still recovering from the January Palisades Wildfires. Here’s a look at what one elementary school principal is doing to keep her school together.

I remember thinking on that night, ‘I don’t know how to be the principal of a school that’s burned down,’ because that’s not actually in the principal playbook anywhere. They don’t teach you that in principal preparation school.

8. I Was Diagnosed With Autism at 53. I Know Why Rates Are Rising. The editor-in-chief of Science has some thoughts about the rising cases of autism, and, no, it has nothing to do with vaccines…

As a scientist with autism, I believe the rise in diagnoses is the result of greater awareness, better identification (especially among women and girls) and a broader definition that now includes a range of neurodevelopmental conditions under the umbrella of autism spectrum disorder.

9. I know I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know when I say that I love comic books. My local shop, Clobberin’ Comics, is pretty great. I regularly visit to see what’s new or if I can plug a few more holes in my original Marvel GI Joe run of issues 1-155. Shopping for Superman is an upcoming documentary about local comic shops, their rise, and what may be their future.

10. Finally, what’s the opposite of fascism?

That’s a wrap, gang. Cyas next week, right before I retreat into my dissertation writing cave for Spring Break…

Stay frosty.

Greetings Starfighters,

Another week has come and gone; this one included the annual ACT test-taking festivities for all our high school juniors (insert fake enthusiasm here) and a presentation at the annual Kentucky edtech conference. I presented some chunks of my research on virtual schools and how Universal Design for Learning (UDL) might help us solve some of the most pressing issues. Those session resources are available here if you want to check them out.

Here now, for your consideration, are this week’s “10 Things”…

10 Things Worth Sharing

1. Millions of students nationwide could lose access to free school meals under Republican budget proposals that slash food assistance in the name of cost-cutting. These changes would force schools to reinstate burdensome paperwork, increase food insecurity, and deepen inequality—despite research showing that universal meal programs boost attendance, academic performance, and student well-being. With 12 million children at risk, the question isn’t just about budgets—it’s about priorities.

2. A slew of people who never listened to Radiohead decided to listen to Creep. The results are as amazing as you think they should be.

Sidebar: The band acknowledges Creep for the anthem it is, but they don’t really like it much, saying that it limited their creativity. The iconic guitar ‘crunch’ leading into the chorus was guitarist Johnny Greenwood’s attempt to sabotage the song…

3. I finally got around to watching season 2 of Silo on Apple TV+. As with any book property converted to television or film, there are deviations from the book. But they don’t matter much, because the story and the acting are so good. It’s a show that I wish I could watch again for the first time. Spring Break time is here or very near; you’ve got time to slouch on the couch and devour this epic sci-fi show.

4. Speaking of taking time to do some things, while we are in the midst of a possible collapse of democracy in America (no, I’m not joking), you might wanna take some time and think about getting more political and causing a ruckus. Mariame Kaba has a zine on starting an activism or organizing plan you can print out to help you get started.

5. The release of ChatGPT in 2022 sparked a media frenzy predicting the demise of writing as we know it—high school English, the college essay, even human authorship itself. But after three years of working closely with English teachers navigating the AI wave, this PhD researcher sees a different story. Through conversations, collaboration, and critical reflection, educators have resisted tech-driven panic, shaping AI’s role in the classroom rather than being shaped by it. Writing isn’t dead—it’s evolving, and teachers are leading the way.

6. The Trump administration's draconian cuts to federal research funding are eviscerating America's scientific future. UMass Chan Medical School's unprecedented move to rescind all biomedical PhD admissions for 2025–26 is just the tip of the iceberg. Institutions like Duke and Vanderbilt are slashing admissions and freezing hires, while Columbia University reels from a $250 million funding termination. These reckless policies not only dismantle diversity initiatives but also cripple innovation, ceding global leadership in science to nations like China. The administration's assault on knowledge and progress threatens to set back medical advancements by decades, jeopardizing public health and economic stability.

7. In an era of political polarization and self-censorship on campus, two philosophers at Carnegie Mellon have created Sway—an AI-driven chat platform designed to help students engage in meaningful, constructive disagreement. Instead of avoiding contentious topics like abortion, gun control, or the Israel-Palestine conflict, Sway pairs students with opposing viewpoints and guides them through respectful, critical discussions. With built-in AI support that encourages clarity, intellectual humility, and fact-based reasoning, Sway proves that civil discourse isn’t dead—it just needs better scaffolding.

8. I love Ted Gioia’s work (I found a ton of great new musicians from this recent post), and apparently, he’s tamed the YouTube algorithm and found some gems. Here’s one very interesting one on a 70s genre’s influence on modern music:

9. As AI reshapes education, faculty seek ways to integrate it thoughtfully into their teaching. The University of Virginia’s new collection, Integrating AI into Assignments to Support Student Learning, offers real examples from educators experimenting with AI across disciplines. From AI-assisted critique to creative co-creation, these assignments move beyond hype and fear, demonstrating how AI can enhance—rather than replace—critical thinking and learning. Whether giving students free rein, guiding them through structured use, or encouraging them to challenge AI’s outputs, these assignments provide a roadmap for meaningful, ethical AI integration in the classroom.

10. Finally, science thrives on inquiry, but under authoritarian assault, its future is at risk. Government efforts to defund research, censor academic discourse, and intimidate universities threaten individual fields and the foundation of knowledge and progress. Like Tolkien’s Ents, academia has long been slow to act—but the destruction is now too vast to ignore. If scholars and institutions remain silent, critical research on climate change, inequality, public health, and more will be choked off by political and corporate interests. The time for passive observation is over. It’s time for the March of the Ents.

That’s it, gang. As always, thanks for reading and for keeping up the good fight when it seems like the world is crashing down around us.

Cyas,

MP

Greetings Starfighters,

Kentucky’s weather has lost its mind. One minute, it’s springtime bliss, the next, you’re dodging high winds while scraping ice off your windshield. If you don’t like the weather, just wait five minutes, right?

But amidst the meteorological chaos, I’ve had some of the best conversations with teachers this week. And let me tell you—when teachers start talking about real, meaningful learning experiences, the magic happens. Forget worksheets and test prep drills—these were conversations about authentic, hands-on, brains-on learning—the kind that sticks and gets kids thinking, creating, and doing.

And speaking of thinking… ever had one of those moments where a quote hits at the perfect time? During a PD session this week, a William Gibson line appeared like a neon sign in a cyberpunk novel:

Bam. That one stopped the room cold. Because isn’t that the truth? We’re shaping that future in our classrooms, in how we design learning, in the opportunities we create for students. The question is—are we making sure it reaches everyone?

While you’re stewing and chewing on that question, here are 10 things I found worth sharing this week:

1. Heather Cox Richardson’s latest piece dives into how Trump’s recent actions—like shutting off intelligence sharing with Ukraine and ambushing Zelensky in the Oval Office—are shaking up U.S. alliances. It’s a complete shift away from long-standing commitments, leaving European leaders scrambling to determine what comes next. If the goal is to hand Putin precisely what he wants, mission accomplished.

2. If you’re a teacher trying to figure out how AI can help—not replace—you in the classroom, this conversation between Tyler Cowen and David Perell is worth your time. Instead of debating the ethics of AI, they dive into practical ways to use it for research and expanding how we think. Cowen shares how he uses AI to prepare for interviews, uncover new ideas, and sift through complex information—skills that translate directly to teaching. They also discuss strategies for better AI prompts, the evolving role of writing, and to stay ahead in an AI-driven world.

3. If you’re older than dirt (like me) and remember wasting countless hours on the original Digg, brace yourself—it's back. Alexis Ohanian and Kevin Rose are resurrecting the once-legendary news aggregator, aiming to recapture the magic of the internet before social media took over everything. If you were around for the wild west days of Web 2.0, this feels like an old friend returning from the digital graveyard.

https://x.com/alexisohanian/status/1897326680316002560

4. The people who teach America’s kids daily have spoken and don’t support the education agenda coming out of Washington. In a new survey, teachers overwhelmingly back programs like Title I funding and IDEA, which are the exact initiatives Trump’s administration seems eager to gut. Evan Stone breaks down how the new education secretary, Linda McMahon, is pushing policies teachers don’t want and didn’t ask for, all while claiming to “invest in teachers.” The reality? Cuts, chaos, and a radical shift from decades of bipartisan education policy.

5. Stephen King might write horror, but sometimes real life is scarier than fiction. In The Dead Zone (1979), he created Greg Stillson—a loud, unpredictable, populist politician who laughs his way into the White House and, well… let’s say things don’t end well. Sound familiar? King himself has admitted that by 2016, he saw the writing on the wall: voters weren’t just looking for change; they wanted to burn it all down. Whether King is just eerily good at reading people or has a touch of Johnny Smith’s clairvoyance, his take on Trump as a symptom—not the cause—of something deeper is worth considering.

6. Steven Pressfield comes through with some thoughts on The Unlived Life…

7. TechDirt isn’t just a tech blog anymore—it’s a democracy blog, because the fight over technology is the fight over democracy. Their latest piece lays it out: the exact tactics we’ve seen in Silicon Valley—power grabs wrapped in the language of “innovation,” dismantling systems under the guise of “efficiency”—are now playing out nationally. And as institutions crumble, it’s not just about politics; it’s about whether the foundation of innovation, free speech, and open inquiry will survive. I’m taking the same stance with my work—if we don’t connect these dots, we’re sleepwalking into disaster.

8. I’m still reeling from Gene Hackman's death, and I loved this write-up on some of his best roles (including some of my favorites from The Quick and the Dead and Heist).

9. Cory Doctorow’s latest piece, There Were Always Enshittifiers, traces the battle over personal computing from its earliest days to today’s locked-down, monopolized tech landscape. He shows how the tactics behind today’s digital lock-ins—app store fees, DRM, and subscription-only features—were already alive in the 1980s, when companies built hardware that deliberately broke compatibility to squeeze more money out of customers. The fight over technology was never just about innovation—it’s always been about control. And now, with power more concentrated than ever, that fight has never been more urgent.

10. Finally, Larry Cuban gathered insights from teachers using AI in their classrooms, and the takeaway is clear: AI isn’t replacing teachers—it’s helping them teach smarter. From automating feedback to adapting materials for different reading levels, educators use AI to enhance learning, not take shortcuts. Some have students critique AI-generated essays, while others use it to streamline communication with parents and administrators.

Another week, another whirlwind of ideas—AI, innovation, and the ever-evolving tech and education landscape. Thanks for reading, thinking, and pushing boundaries with me.

Cyas,

MP