There’s a moment in Jacob Collier’s TED talk, The Wiggly Wonder of Music, where he takes something we usually explain to death- melody, rhythm, harmony- and insists instead that music was never meant to run in straight lines. He calls it “the wiggle,” and what struck me isn’t the theory; it’s what he does with it: he hands that curviness to a room full of strangers who’ve never studied a chord in their lives, and they find their way into it together, by ear, by trust, by play. The parts of music that resist easy understanding are exactly what pull people into the same note at the same time.

I’ve been sitting with that alongside a much darker story about the same instinct gone the other way. Harlan Ellison’s “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” (which just got a new paperback release that includes several commentaries from Harlan himself!) is about a machine humans built past the point of understanding and, rather than follow Ted Lasso’s advice to be curious and not judgemental, embraced dominion and fear, ending up with something that has vast capacity and no way left to connect, only punish.

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And then there’s what actually happened to a teacher named Kathryn Merrick, who was pushed out of her job for daring to put that story in front of her students, then spent six years rebuilding a career because a community met something hard to fully grasp with suppression instead of conversation. Same fork in the road, playing out for real. We are extraordinary at making things that outrun our first understanding of them. What we do with that gap, whether we lean toward it or slam the door on it, is most of the story. This week’s ten things are, in one way or another, about people who leaned in.

10 Things — September 24, 2026

1. Ethan Mollick argues most of the anxiety about AI right now is about future models, even though today’s models are already wildly underused. He had one build a full 3D adaptation of a 1977 text-adventure game and reconstruct Umberto Eco’s entire personal library from YouTube walkthroughs. The real opportunity, he says in his latest, is closing the gap between what AI can already do and what most of us actually ask it for, using four distinctly human advantages: deep knowledge, wide knowledge, taste, and agency.

2. Michael Horn and the Clayton Christensen Institute are six papers deep into a state policy playbook on why K–12, higher ed, and workforce systems keep grinding against each other instead of meshing — using Christensen’s business-model theory and Chesterton’s Fence to explain why well-meaning reforms keep failing, and what states can actually do differently.

3. Trevor Aleo goes after both the “kids don’t read anymore” panic and its nostalgic opposite in a new essay, arguing that basic literacy, print culture, and literary tradition are three different things we keep collapsing into one crisis narrative. First in a planned series on what literacy actually looks like now.

4. MIT’s new report on AI in higher ed got Christine Nowik thinking about grades themselves — specifically, how they work like a detached “academic currency” that AI-assisted cheating is just the latest way to spend. She writes about what happened to her strongest writers once that currency stopped being the point.

5. Angela Stockman lost a coaching partner to cancer, and it’s part of what’s behind the six postures she now names for herself mid-conversation as an instructional coach — diagnostic, teaching, pacing, framing, connecting, mirroring — built around what the person in front of her actually needs in the moment, not a fixed developmental ladder.

6. Molly Beasley on the year a divorce had her sleeping on her mom’s living room floor, and what taught her that heart — showing up for kids even while your own life is falling apart — is the actual job, whatever the standards say.

7. The new PISA reading scores have everyone theorizing, but Kip Glazer thinks the real story isn’t the decline itself — it’s the widening gap between the highest- and lowest-achieving students, and the fixes (less crammed content, more community, more relationship-building) are cheaper and simpler than anyone wants to admit.

8. We assume creativity needs freedom; John Spencer makes the opposite case in a short piece and podcast — that limits are often what push people past their most obvious first idea.

9. A short cross-posted statement, written with colleagues at her Peer & AI Review + Reflection project, explaining why a platform built around human peer review still leans on AI — Anna Mills lays out the reasoning in just a few lines.

10. Not an education piece, but a genuinely moving one: Stephen Wolfram writes at length about his wife, a mathematician, and their 36 years together in a remembrance worth reading slowly, with coffee.

That’s all, folks. Keep making cool stuff; if you get discouraged, just remember that even the best of us need to remember how awesome we are sometimes.

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Walk into any district office, and you’ll find a wall of initiatives: a new attendance campaign, a behavior matrix, a technology rollout, an engagement task force. Each one has a coordinator, a budget line, and a PD day. Each one is treating a real problem. And most of them are aimed at the exhaust, not the engine.

Here’s the uncomfortable question nobody wants to ask in the initiative-planning meeting: what if disengagement, behavior referrals, chronic absenteeism, and flat technology adoption aren’t four separate problems? What if they’re the same problem, showing up in four different places — and that problem is what’s actually happening in the classroom every single day?

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That’s Tier 1. Not intervention. Not the extra layer we add when something goes wrong. The core instruction every student gets, all day, every day.

Think about it from the student’s seat. If the daily instructional experience is passive, low-choice, and disconnected from anything that feels real, disengagement isn’t a mystery — it’s the rational response. And disengagement doesn’t stay quiet. Sometimes it looks like a referral, because escaping a task you can’t access or don’t care about is easier than sitting in it. Sometimes it looks like an absence, because why show up for a place that reliably makes you feel incapable or invisible? And sometimes it looks like a shiny new app nobody actually uses the way it was designed, because we handed teachers a tool without ever fixing the pedagogy underneath it — you can’t digitize your way out of a worksheet.

None of this means Tier 1 is the only cause. Poverty, trauma, staffing shortages, systemic inequities — all of that is real, and none of it fits neatly into a blog post. But Tier 1 is the cause we can actually do something about tomorrow morning, and it’s the one we consistently overlook, because it’s less visible than a new initiative and slower to show results than a new program.

And that’s the real trap: when we keep stacking initiatives without asking how each one strengthens Tier 1, we don’t just fail to fix the root problem — we make it worse. Every new program pulls something from the instructional core to attend a meeting, complete a checklist, or sit through training. We end up with less bandwidth for the one lever that actually moves all four problems at once, in the name of fixing all four problems separately.

So before the next initiative gets adopted, it’s worth asking one question: does this make Tier 1 instruction stronger, or does it just add another layer on top of a core we never fixed?

Meanwhile, some time later that very self-same second…

Besides the usual “10 Things,” I’m throwing in some bonus shares each week. Just for funsies. Like this:

A Musical Interlude: Vasily Kalinnikov’s Symphony No. 1 in G minor (I played the finale in high school band, so there’s a special place in my heart for this one.)

And now… you’re regularly scheduled 10 Things…

10 Things — September 17, 2026

1. It’s the screens, stupid!

   Alexander Thompson takes apart James Marriott’s The New Dark Ages, a bleak new book arguing that screens are pushing us into a “post-literate” society. Thompson agrees with some of it but pulls apart the PISA-and-IQ-decline evidence piece by piece, landing on a more honest “it’s complicated” than the book allows.

2. Why Are Our Kids Not Reading?

   Reacting to this year’s PISA reading drop, Kip Glazer resists the doom narrative and points instead to the widening gap between the highest- and lowest-achieving students — arguing that relationships with teachers and family, not screen time alone, are what actually move the needle.

   Ready to Lead with AI

   Why Are Our Kids Not Reading?

   Last week, the new PISA results showed that American 15-year-olds dropped 14 points in reading since 2022. Obviously, this is concerning, but what is most concerning is that the gap between our highest- and lowest-achieving students was the greatest in the US…

   Read more

   14 days ago · 1 like · Kip Glazer

3. #882: Why Kids Can Learn 10x Faster Than We Think

   Tim Ferriss hosts a live, unscripted coaching session with Niels Hoven, founder of Mentava, a startup built to serve fast learners underserved by a system paced for the average student. Worth the listen if you’re thinking about differentiation and acceleration.

4. Evaluation or AI-valuation

   Heléna Stakounis lays out the real bind AI creates for assessment: detectors don’t work, oral exams don’t scale, and reverting to timed, invigilated exams undoes decades of progress on teaching students to draft, revise, and think on paper. No tidy answer — just an honest look at the tradeoffs.

5. AI has made the practice of homework obsolete

   Clark Aldrich’s provocation: schools can’t realistically keep AI out of students’ hands for long, so the critical-thinking skills schools actually care about have to get built during the school day itself, not assigned as take-home work.

   Experiential Learning – Feed the Heroes or Lose the Heroes.

   AI has made the practice of homework obsolete.

   We have all been hand-wringing about AI. We know it is addictive, we know it is expensive. (The cost is highly subsidized today.) It is one of the most successful technologies ever, and it is still only in beta…

   Read more

   17 days ago · 11 likes · 2 comments · Clark Aldrich

6. The Importance of Reading (and Teaching) Cyberpunk in the Age of AI

   Joanna Nelius-Free, a former tech journalist turned high school teacher, uses cyberpunk fiction — including E.M. Forster’s 1909 story “The Machine Stops” — to help students name what unsettles them about living inside AI-mediated systems. A warm, personal essay about teaching literature that talks back to the present.

7. AI Framework for Educator Preparation

   A tight, 7-page framework for preparing teachers to work with AI, built around four pillars: ethical (including the right to refuse), practice, cognitive, and expertise. One of the better summaries of where the field’s thinking has landed this year.

8. OPINION: We’ve been treating college as a career plan, but it’s failing too many students

   Pat O’Donnell on the wave of kids — even from wealthy families — opting for trade certifications over four-year degrees, and why treating college as a guaranteed career plan set up a whole generation for disappointment.

9. Libraries Are Not the Problem

   Ron Charles on the awkward same-morning collision of a PEN America report on libraries under siege and a publishing-industry study blaming ebook lending for hurting book sales. A clear-eyed, slightly wry look at who’s actually squeezing whom.

   Ron Charles

   Libraries Are Not the Problem

   Read the Room…

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   a month ago · 426 likes · 121 comments · Ron Charles

10. Am I well-read if I haven’t read the right books?

    Lou Blaser’s honest, funny essay about feeling insecure over reading thrillers and police procedurals instead of “serious” literary fiction — and pushing back on the idea that some reading is a guilty-pleasure “off-season.” Sometimes, you just need permission to enjoy a book for nothing more than enjoyment’s sake.

    Shaping Life

    Am I well-read if I haven’t read the right books?

    I read a lot…

    Read more

    24 days ago · 29 likes · 22 comments · Lou Blaser

    That’s a wrap, gang. Have fun out there.

    Thanks for reading The Eclectic Educator! This post is public, so feel free to share it.

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I’ve started writing this bit of the newsletter three times now, and three times I’ve had to start over. This being the fourth incarnation of a brief introduction to this week’s things I thought you might like, I’m sitting at my desk in this comfy big-butt chair, mulling over the already inordinate amount of AI tool usage to make the stupid, mundane, completely unnecessary tasks we are obliged to do every day in whatever industry we work in easier to accomplish without ever asking the question, “why are we doing this anyway?”

I have no qualms about using AI tools. If they’re the right tool for the job, use them. But always question what the job is, why you’re doing it, and whether you should keep doing it.

Just because you can do something because it’s easier to do with AI help doesn’t mean it was ever worth doing in the first place.

Anyways, on with this week’s 10 things…

10 Things - 11 September 2026

1. We Can Limit AI Without Leaving Kids Unprepared

   New York just drew a hard line on student-facing AI through eighth grade, and Andrew Marcinek’s follow-up asks the question the moratorium leaves open: what should kids learn about AI while it’s off limits, and how should that change once it’s allowed? He pulls apart a PNAS math study where unguided chatbot use left students worse off later, against a Harvard physics trial where a carefully designed AI tutor outperformed in-person teaching — and lands on a line worth sitting with: when the assignment’s done and the tool’s closed, the student still has to be able to think.

2. No More Muddling Through

   Mark Humphries thinks the quiet truce between students and professors over AI is about to break. This fall’s incoming class used AI throughout all four years of high school, and the models themselves can now replicate a full research process end to end — which means the avoidance strategy so many instructors have relied on stops working right about now.

3. Whose Literacies Are Shaping Your Portrait of a Graduate?

   Angela Stockman’s working with a New York district on Portrait of a Graduate design, and she’s noticed something most of these processes skip: nobody stops to ask what “literacy” even means before building the whole plan around it. Her protocol for surfacing what a community doesn’t yet know it values is worth stealing for any vision-setting work.

4. Five Great Questions For “Evidence-Based” Programs

   Buried at the bottom of an EdWeek guest post on the “science of math,” Rene Grimes drops five questions that Peter Greene thinks should be taped above every curriculum adoption meeting: what did the original research actually investigate, which students and settings were studied, does the evidence support the recommendation or just an interpretation of it, what limitations should shape its use, and what would tell us it’s actually working here. Greene’s breakdown is a good gut check for the next AI tool pitch, too.

5. Get Curious Before You Get Busy

   A semester coaching first-gen business students taught Brian LeDuc something worth remembering at the start of any school year: the sharpest insight into what people actually need rarely comes from the questions leadership already has. His reflection is a short case for listening before you plan.

6. They Invited Educators to See the Future of Work. It Was a Surveillance State.

   A construction company invited teachers to preview its latest tech — AR headsets, exoskeletons, wearables that flag “extended periods of inactivity” — meant to excite them about trades careers. Instead, the piece argues the demo revealed a path toward deskilling the very workers it claims to train, concentrating judgment at the top and leaving less room for anyone to learn their way up. Worth reading before the next vendor demo of AI classroom tools.

7. Five Questions to Ask AI to Minimize Sycophancy

   Jason Neiffer’s follow-up to his piece on AI’s flattery problem hands you five prompts built to push back against a model that just wants to agree with you — genuinely useful if you’re using AI for planning, feedback, or coaching prep and want something other than validation.

8. The Rise of AI Companions

   A new Digital Future Center survey gets past the percentages and into what it actually feels like for people who’ve formed something like a relationship with an AI companion — trust, emotional connection, being understood, sometimes more than by the people around them. Some people are getting something real out of this, whatever we think about it personally.

9. The Power of Routine Creativity

   John Spencer’s argument here is a useful correction for anyone chasing the big showcase project: the most powerful creative thinking in a classroom usually isn’t an event at all; it’s a habit built into ordinary, everyday work.

10. Economic Scenarios for Transformative AI

    Tyler Cowen flags a new paper — with an Anthropic-heavy author list — that lays out sober, structured economic scenarios for AI’s impact between 2026 and 2030. If the daily AI-in-schools news cycle has you missing the forest for the trees, this is the forest.

That’s all, folks. Also, don’t forget what happened 25 years ago and how much worse the world has gotten since then.

I’d be lying if I told you that this week has been a rough one, for multiple reasons. The sinus agony of growing ragweed numbers has done a number on everyone in my household, including the dog, and the heat hasn’t broken here just yet, even as we hit the first days of September.

Then, early Thursday morning, I got word that my high school band director, who taught me more about being a great educator than almost anyone else, had passed. He’d been in poor health since a debilitating stroke in 2021, but knowing that this day was coming didn’t make it any easier.

I’ve drawn comfort from the many memories and lessons I learned from him, and from seeing numerous others share their memories and lessons across social media. Chuck Smith was a great band director but an even greater person. His legacy ripples through time and space and will impact generations to come.

And yes, he really did tell us all the time that making a mistake was ok; just make it big enough (commit!) so we can see it and fix it. That’s true for just about every area of life, not just marching band.

Anyways, on with this week’s 10 things…

10 Things — September 3, 2026

1. TX: Alpha School and Voucher Grift — It’s Synergy! A Texas Tribune/ProPublica investigation gets the deep dive treatment: Alpha School couldn’t get charter approval in Texas, so it’s using the state’s much laxer voucher-vendor rules instead — no proof of educational outcomes required. The piece traces the tangled web of companies (2 Hour Learning, Trilogy, Crossover) that all funnel money back to founders MacKenzie and Andrew Price, and notes that Alpha’s leadership declined interview requests. Via Peter Greene’s Curmudgucation newsletter:

Curmudgucation

TX: Alpha School and Voucher Grift-- It's Synergy!

At last we are seeing some of the press that Alpha School actually deserves. Lexi Churchill, in a joint Texas Tribune and ProPublica piece, shines a spotlight on the Texas emperor’s wardrobe. You should absolutely read the article, but I want to underline and expand on a couple of points…

Read more

a month ago · 10 likes · 1 comment · Peter Greene

2. The Same Page, In Practice - A follow-up to Andrew Marcinek’s home-school screens/edtech framework, this one gets concrete — walking through each of five “touch points” with classroom examples (third grade and seventh grade), common failure modes, and the research behind each move, plus two fillable toolkits for staff and families. Practical, coach-usable material. Via Andrew Marcinek’s Think Forward newsletter:

Think Forward

The Same Page, In Practice

Yesterday I published The Same Page, a home–school framework for screens and edtech in elementary and middle school. The free post made the argument. This one makes it usable…

Read more

a month ago · 1 like · Andrew Marcinek

3. 10 Instructional Illusions - Peter Greene digs into Kirschner, Hendrick, and Heal’s book on the gap between what teachers believe helps learning and what actually does — starting with the “Engagement Illusion” (a room of nodding, smiling students doesn’t mean anyone’s learning) and the “Expertise Illusion” (too little expertise breeds overconfidence, too much makes you forget what novices need). Directly useful for coaching conversations. Via Curmudgucation:

Curmudgucation

10 Instructional Illusions

In their book Instructional Illusions, Paul Kirschner, Carl Hendrick and Jim Heal argue that one defining characteristic of human learning is that “what we think works or is good for learning and what actually works or is good for learning are often some distance apart.” They set out to describe “illusions, not myths” and are clear up front that they do…

Read more

a month ago · 7 likes · 1 comment · Peter Greene

4. Performing Poorly: Tennessee Students Receiving Vouchers 20+ Points Behind Public School Peers - Hard numbers on Tennessee’s voucher program: 17% of voucher students hit proficiency in math versus 43% of public school students; 24% versus 40% in English. The legislature responded by expanding the program to $300 million and dropping the standardized-testing requirement entirely. Via The Education Report:

The Education Report

Performing Poorly: Tennessee Students Receiving Vouchers 20+ Points Behind Public School Peers

The promise of Tennessee’s private school discount scheme (school vouchers, ESAs, freedom scholarships) was that students would be able to use public funds to enjoy better opportunities at private schools. The goal: Improving overall education outcomes…

Read more

a month ago · 10 likes · 2 comments · Andy Spears

5. Back to Colonialism - The eighth lecture in Timothy Snyder’s “Hitler and Stalin Today” series, tracing how the language and structure of empire shifted after each World War — and how the Cold War let the U.S. be read, reasonably, as a racial frontier empire by African-American thinkers and others who saw echoes of practices Hannah Arendt also wrote about. Dense but rewarding if you want the historical throughline. Via Timothy Snyder’s newsletter:

Thinking about...

Back to Colonialism

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a month ago · 604 likes · 31 comments · Timothy Snyder

6. Why the Conversation About Reading Matters: A 59-minute podcast conversation with literacy consultant Jeffrey Austin, unpacking the current “reading wars” moment in education and referencing pieces like The Atlantic’s “The End of Reading Is Here.” Worth a listen if you’re thinking about how the reading conversation is landing in classrooms. Via The Broken Copier podcast:

The Broken Copier

Why the conversation about reading matters

There is a conversation about reading happening in our country right now, especially in the world of education—a conversation that is undeniably shifting what is happening in schools for teachers and students alike…

Listen now

a month ago · 5 likes · 1 comment · Marcus Luther and The Broken Copier

7. Pluralistic: Preparing for a Post-Trump Internet - Cory Doctorow on what a healthier, less enshittified internet could look like once current political conditions shift — part warning, part practical roadmap. Via Cory Doctorow’s Pluralistic: https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/03/broken-arrows/

8. AI and Education (MIT Report) - A research-backed look at how AI is actually landing in classrooms and higher ed, cutting through some of the hype on both the booster and doomer sides. Relevant background reading for anyone fielding AI questions from teachers. Flagged via Stephen Downes’ OLDaily: http://www.downes.ca/post/79714/rd

9. OPINION: Knowing How to Use AI Tools Is Not the Same as Knowing How to Apply Them Responsibly - Ngoc Cindy Pham argues that AI literacy training in schools too often stops at “how to use the tool” without building the judgment needed to use it well — a distinction worth raising with staff. Via The Hechinger Report: https://hechingerreport.org/opinion-knowing-how-to-use-ai-tools-is-not-the-same-as-knowing-how-to-apply-them-responsibly-colleges-must-do-more/

10. The Creative Power of Uncertainty: Szymborska’s Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech - Maria Popova revisits Wisława Szymborska’s 1996 Nobel lecture on “I don’t know” as the engine of poetry and creative thought — a lovely, short reflection to close the week on. Via Maria Popova’s The Marginalian: https://www.themarginalian.org/2026/09/03/wislawa-szymborska-nobel-speech/

That’s it for this week, gang. Keep the ones you love close and tell them often you love them. I’ll be here doing my best to be a living legacy of the leader of the band.

It’s almost September and, if school hasn’t started back where you live by the time you read this, it will soon. Or, maybe you just missed it from the comfort of your daydreams and horrorscapes. Regardless, welcome back to a new school year.

I’ve been back at work for a little over six weeks, building systems and doing my level best to slog through a number of new district initiatives while supporting the largest group of brand-new baby teachers at any of our schools. Shenanigans have ensued, tears have fallen, and smiles have sprung. I hope, true believers, that your year is off without a hitch.

Here, in no particular order, are this week’s Ten Things:

1. Homework Helper or AI Tutor? The Difference Determines What Students Learn. A deep dive into why “AI tutoring” isn’t one thing — it’s a spectrum from human-led instruction to AI-only chat — and why the research still shows real tutoring gains come mostly from relational intensity, not chatbot polish. Worth the full read if you’re weighing any AI tutoring tool this year. Via Edtech Insiders.

2. I launched the school year with my own slides even though Claude Design’s would’ve looked better. A teacher’s honest case for keeping his “handmade,” slightly plain Day One slides instead of letting AI design them — arguing that as AI-generated visuals become ubiquitous, the handmade look now signals that a real person designed this classroom experience. Via AI Waypoints.

3. Our Duty of Care in the Age of AI. Marc Watkins argues we should stop asking how to catch students cheating with AI (we should!) and start asking what educators owe students right now — with concrete examples of teaching “with,” “without,” and “about” machines depending on the course. Via Rhetorica.

4. Cheating Is Not the Problem—It’s a Solution (in a Zero-Sum Educational System). Borrowing from a TED Talk about corruption in poor countries, Michael Horn makes the case that cheating isn’t the disease in schools — it’s what students do when the system is built to sort rather than develop them. Via The Future of Education.

5. Suing To Eliminate All Public Schools. A dark-money legal group has filed suit arguing Nebraska’s public education system violates parents’ free speech — the latest and most direct legal attempt yet to declare public schooling itself unconstitutional. Via Curmudgucation.

6. McMahon Doesn’t Understand Education. A pointed recap of Education Secretary McMahon’s CNN interview — on school costs, AI in classrooms, and the Alpha School model — that catches several claims that don’t hold up under scrutiny. Via Curmudgucation.

7. Do we really need grades? A podcast conversation with anthropologist Susan Blum (author of Schoolishness) on the current wave of grading reform, from Harvard capping A’s to Michigan going pass/fail for freshmen, and what a better path might look like. Via The Broken Copier.

8. The Free Year: Five Pieces of Advice Now That ChatGPT and Claude Are Free for Teachers. Practical, skeptical advice on the free teacher tiers from OpenAI and Anthropic — sign up for both, but keep your district’s approved tool primary, never put student PII in, and treat the tools as a thinking partner rather than a shortcut machine. Via Frontier Learning Lab.

9. Who gets held back? Black boys, by a 3-1 ratio compared to white boys. More than a decade of national data shows boys are held back more than girls, and Black boys nearly three times as often as white boys — a stark look at grade retention patterns across U.S. schools. Via The Hechinger Report.

10. How Florida quietly removed climate change content from textbooks. An investigation into how Florida’s textbook review process stripped or softened climate science before it reached students — including a specific example of what was cut and what replaced it. Via The Hechinger Report.

What I’ve Been Reading

Over the summer, my family and I (yes, even my teenage daughter. Sometimes our parenting is questionable) have been plowing through Dungeon Crawler Carl. I’m about halfway through book five; it’s been a helluva ride so far - get the audiobooks. Seriously.

However, I’m pausing during September and October with our staff reading challenge. I threw down the gauntlet and plan to read around 60 hours between September 1 and October 31.

My plan is to (finally) read the four published volumes of Robert Caro’s Years of Lyndon Johnson. According to HowLongToRead.com, that’s about 61 hours of reading, all told. Those books have been sitting on my shelf for a few years now; it's time to brush them off and read them. Expect thoughts on each as I progress.

Along the way, I started re-reading The Gunslinger and finished up a few more essays from Montaigne (which is a great way to read his work, just one at a time).

A couple of upcoming book releases are on my radar. The first book born of the brilliant horror podcast The Magnus Archives, From the Library of Jurgen Leitner, releases just in time for Halloween. And Robert Greene returns to publishing new work with The Law of the Sublime, releasing in November.

That’s it for now, gang. I have longer, more detailed thoughts coming on how instructional coaching is really about systems brokering and why the “hero” teacher is a myth because the collective builds what the individual cannot.

Stay cozy, friends…

MP

“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.