Reading list
Shortform reading
This is an incomplete list of the shortform reading (and listening and watching) I’ve been doing lately.
Why "Book-Shaming" Won't Solve the Children's Literacy Crisis
Barnett’s concerns about literary merit and professional esteem may be timeless, but they are not terribly timely; they seem to float high above the current on-the-ground realities of what many educators and researchers agree to be a literacy crisis. In urging his audience to see children’s books as “real books,” Barnett skips over larger, more pressing questions about why so many children aren’t reading books at all, real or otherwise.
#books · #education · #reading
Replacing freshman comp with dozens of small groups run like graduate seminars is expensive and hard to imagine. But it would create a generation of students who wouldn't use an AI to write their essays any more than they'd ask an AI to eat a delicious pizza for them. We should aspire to assign the kinds of essays that change the lives of the students who write them, and to teach students to write that kind of essay.
Last month, I wrote an article about how schools were not prepared for ChatGPT and other generative AI tools, based on thousands of pages of public records I obtained from when ChatGPT was first released. As part of that article, I asked teachers to tell me how AI has changed how they teach.
The response from teachers and university professors was overwhelming. In my entire career, I’ve rarely gotten so many email responses to a single article, and I have never gotten so many thoughtful and comprehensive responses.
One thing is clear: teachers are not OK.
School district uses ChatGPT to help remove library books
Faced with new legislation, Iowa's Mason City Community School District asked ChatGPT if certain books 'contain a description or depiction of a sex act.'
Girls Who Code founder speaks out after school district bans her books
"This is an opportunity to realize how big this movement is against our kids and how much we need to fight," Reshma Saujani told Insider.
Two Marin schools forced to integrate after years of segregation and battles for funding
The authors underscore how racial segregation in schools is not a phenomenon of the past, giving the example of two schools in Marin, a county which, despite its reputation as a bastion of liberal politics, is the most segregated county in the Bay Area. Until being forced to integration, two schools in the same zip code were massively different in terms of the racial breakdown of their students, the funding allocated per student, and educational outcomes.Promote agricultural education
Onyejiaka advocates for including agricultural education in students' curriculums, both to teach students how to grow vegetables and other crops, but also to teach them about histories of inequality in access to food (particularly produce) by race and income.Politicizing Critical Race Theory Is Meant to Keep Public Education Oppressive, Biased and Basic
Peeples criticizes legislators and those lobbying for bills that would ban the teaching of critical race theory in public schools. She compares the "parent advocacy groups" (reported upon by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch) who allege that school districts are "pushing social justice and equity ideals that amount to a Marxist takeover of schools that paints white students as oppressors and Black students as victims" to the women in the KKK who harassed and threatened Black school administrators for diversifying curriculum and school leadership.How to be an Active Bystander for Academic Ableism
Discusses some examples of academic ableism, and describes what helpful actions bystanders can take to support the victim of such an event.