Somewhere between the phone ban and the AI moratorium, a lot of us have started to suspect that “yes or no” is the wrong question. This week’s reading keeps circling the same one: what would it look like to teach kids to live with these tools, and to know when to put them down? A father waits in a car and counts the machines he’s talking to. A mother orders coffee without speaking to anyone and wonders where she ever learned to. A teacher gets called an “AI vegan” by his own juniors. Further down, there’s a note on what teachers do that can’t be automated, a short reminder that the library is open, and Margaret Atwood on book bans.
10 Things — October 23, 2026
Sitting in a car outside his daughter’s tennis clinic, one history teacher counts up how thoroughly AI has become ambient in a single Thursday evening, and concludes that bans and moratoriums are a poor stand-in for actually teaching kids when to use it and when to leave it alone.
Michelle Ament’s family ordered coffee entirely through an app, and it sent her wondering where she ever learned to talk to strangers, and what it means that schools are now being asked to teach on purpose what daily life used to require.
Think of a school device policy the way you’d think of a driver’s test: a district tech administrator argues that you can’t opt a kid out of the digital world, only decide whether an adult is in the passenger seat while they learn, and that goes for AI too.
A few of her juniors have started describing themselves as AI vegans, so this teacher keeps an AI assistant on hand in class but never requires it, hoping a real choice builds more agency than a rule would.
What if you taught the AI how you teach? Claudia Fisanotti argues that Skills in Gemini lets educators write down the invisible micro-decisions behind a good lesson once, rather than re-explaining them in every prompt.
John Spencer’s latest sets two kinds of professional development side by side, one built on shame and black-and-white thinking, the other on nuance and empowering the teachers in the room.
Quarterbacks don’t call the plays and actors don’t write the lines, and Seth Godin says the age of compliance is losing value now that the internet’s long tail and AI give so much leverage to anyone willing to take initiative.
Stephen Downes, reading Colin Beer’s worry that universities might think AI can replace teachers, pushes back: judgment, recognition, and support are likelier to fall within AI’s reach than Beer allows, and we may eventually skip the teaching step altogether.
In places where workspaces are scarce, libraries are letting cardholders in after the staff goes home.
Margaret Atwood’s advice on book bans, back in 2023: go ahead and ban it, since young people are hard to keep from anything they’ve been told is off-limits.
That’s it for this week, gang. Tune in next week for the Halloween Edition. I’ve been burning through creepy movies, and I have some recommendations for you!