Close up of smartphone in hand flickr photo by Japanexperterna.se shared under
a Creative Commons (BY-SA) license

As October comes to a close, New England remains in the full fall bloom. The colors continue to be bright and the air is getting sharp. However, this week the rains are supposed to arrive and will likely knock most of the color to the ground just in time for November.

This week’s selections include a more common trio with an extra thrown in the mix. There are the typical couple of short reads and a long one. All are interesting and worth a look. One is more about challenges to teaching, the other about the realities of being a teacher, and the third about technology use in higher education.

This week’s “If you read only one article…” is the last one. It is the longest one but probably the most startling and informative one. I suspect that there are very few people knew that this kind of data tracking thing was going on. Like so many things, it has all the hallmarks of only exacerbating the gaps between haves and have-nots, particularly in an area where politicians continually claim as a solution to economic inequality.

Have a good week.

Here are three+ curated articles about education, technology, and evolutions in teaching.

How Not to Get a Standing Ovation at a Teachers’ Conference – Alfie Kohn’s blog – Alfie Kohn (5-minute read)

I hope I get the chance to hear Alfie Kohn speak at some point in future. I always say the longer I teach the more I find myself agreeing with him. Similarly here, he kind of nails both the paradigm and paradox of working with teachers. I think what I like most about what he has to say in this post is that just because edrefrom is pox, generally, that does not mean that there is not plenty of room for improvement. Many of the uncomfortable truths he shares here remain in fact true.

I especially like how he challenges teachers to consider students both as co-creators of curriculum but also in shaping the environment of the classroom. The sentence, “teachers need to decide whether they’re going to treat their students essentially the same way they’re being treated by politicians — as opposed to the way they wish they were being treated,” might be the most powerful one in the whole piece for me. It is a great reminder to us all.

It is so easy to default to I’m-the-adult-in-the-room kind of thinking without remaining completely conscious of it, especially when feeling the pressure to cover content. The more the demands of pre-packaged content reign, either purchased for teachers or developed by teachers, the more challenging it is to create rich learning environments that are high quality for all students. Also, while applause does not usually accompany a lesson, the spirit of this sentence, “Applause is a reasonable metric of whether a presentation was entertaining, not whether it did any good,” could also be applied to classroom teaching too.

Chicago teacher strike enters second week, with patience wearing thin – The Washington Post – Susan Berger (4-minute read)

This story from The Washington Post summarizes the Chicago Teachers Union strike, which at last check Sunday afternoon continues. What is interesting about this particular strike is that the media coverage has been decent. There is less of the typical teacher-blaming going on despite the school being halted.

What is getting more coverage is the effort by the teachers union to secure more personnel and services for their students. There is even a bit more positive news, as rapper Chance wore a CTU shirt in solidarity during his appearance on Saturday Night Live, as mentioned here in the local coverage. Also included in that piece is just how far apart the city and union remain.

What I find fascinating is that both articles reference the frustration about student athletics being interrupted. As sympathetic as that issue might be, it is not even relevant. It is precisely the kind of spin used to paint teachers in a bad light. As important as state playoffs might be for individual athletes and teams, reasons like that are not even the primary point of schooling. Interestingly, when Dedham teachers also decided to strike after two years of failed negotiations, despite the legal prohibition, administrators also invoked student athletics as a way to curry public sympathy.

Student tracking, secret scores: How college admissions offices rank prospects before they apply – The Washington Post – Douglas MacMillan (13-minute read)

This article is yet another harrowing tale of how user data is being collected and used in with increasingly questionable ethics. The internet has ushered in an if-it-can-be-tracked-it-will-be reality that raised all kinds of questions about privacy, profiling, and principles. The fact that some colleges and universities do not even disclose the tracking should cause even greater concern, especially as they attempt an end-run around the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA).

Aside from being extraordinarily shifty, this is the least of what can be expected without any real regulation. The whole predictive analysis is already running amock in other areas, so why not in higher education where big data has been racing in a digital land grab. As funding has fallen and tuition has soared, schools are now looking to leverage this kind of tracking to pursue out of state students, who pay more, as well as preemptively get a jump on whether or not students and their families can foot the bill.

All the claims that these tools simply provide ways for admissions offices to better help applicants or potential students. These are the same kind of claims companies say about helping customers, as they hoover up as much data as they can with next to no privacy restrictions. The idea that even more algorithms are potentially in play for students hoping to gain admissions to their desired school, based on their exploration of a school’s website, couldn’t possibly produce flawed conclusions either. It is not like that kind of thing happens anywhere or anything.

Close up of smartphone in hand flickr photo by Japanexperterna.se shared under
a Creative Commons (BY-SA) license

Despite the best intentions of getting this issue out earlier today, I could not help taking advantage of one of the most beautiful autumn days in New England yet. Today was absolutely gorgeous after a few days of cold and rainy weather. The sun came out with a crispness that warmed the day befitting the colors of the season. Needless to say, I spent the best parts of it outside with the family.

This week’s selections include three short reads that anyone can take in if Monday is a holiday or later throughout the week. They are all a bit different and there is no theme but they address a wide scope of issues related to education. While the first selection is heavy, the other two are a lot more upbeat and even fun.

This week’s “If you read only one article…” is the first one. It may be the most serious but is undoubtedly the most important. An old friend of mine once said, “Everything is political.” The older I get the more right he is proven. Teaching is an inherently political act as much as we might wish it were not. It is a helping profession and as such always manages to overlap on some level with the political. Addressing the ways the education system can amplify inequities is something long overdue. PL Thomas helps explain a way.

I hope you too were able to enjoy the day.

Here are three curated articles about education, technology, and evolutions in teaching.

Unsweet Tea: On Tokenism, Whiteness, and the Promise of Culturally Relevant Teaching – radical eyes for equity – PL Thomas (5-minute read)

For the second week in a row, I have selected an opener article from PL Thomas. This is a powerfully personal take on privilege, as well as being one of the best I have read. As usual, Thomas weaves in a number of great sources to strengthen his point. What’s more impressive is how he extends the idea into education, undermining claims that education serves as a reform to inequities.

What makes the post so powerful is how he uses sweet tea as a metaphor to hammer home his point. Sweet tea is something so common as to be the default in the South, where Thomas calls home. It is an unrecognized default beverage. If you order tea in the South, you will receive sweet tea. As he explains there really is no alternative. Sweet tea is the “right” tea in that context, just as whiteness has been the default culturally in the wider context.

As Thomas highlights, challenging the default whiteness can spark both white fragility and tokenism. Neither is particularly palatable and both require a confrontation to overcome. The time to recognize the inequities in our current systems has long past. What’s more, tearing down privilege need not always be a zero-sum game. Plus, tokenism is definitvely not an answer. As he explains, “centering [whiteness] one last time in order to recenter our society and schools in ways that are equitable” seems like one of the few viable ways to confront and conquer some of the systemic inequities that education tends to perpetuate.

How to reach people with poetry? ‘Fault in Our Stars’ author John Green, Chicago Poetry Foundation are trying YouTube – Chicago Tribune – Steve Johnson (6-minute read)

This was a fantastic find for me personally but seemed well worth sharing. This year in my freshman English classes, I have committed to reading a poem every day to start class. The first thing I do every day is read a poem – twice. I spend some time selecting the poems, always looking for relatively short ones. Sometimes they are just poems I have found or like and sometimes I select them with some connection to what we will be doing in class. Sometimes we might talk about the poem but never for very long.

To see that John Green has put his time and effort into a project around poetry makes my decision feel a bit more vindicated. The best-selling young adult author and co-producer of the hugely successful Crash Course YouTube channel have teamed up with the Poetry Foundation to do something super cool, make short videos about poems. The videos themselves are simple and beautiful.

I chose to read a poem a day to my classes for a number of reasons, some of which are mentioned in this short article about the new YouTube channel, Ours Poetica. I wanted to introduce students to poetry without a lot of baggage. Students often claim not to like poetry and are often intimidated by it, feel like they don’t get it, and are rarely exposed to it. Adding some of these videos to the mix might be a little something extra that might sweeten the effort.

Having A Best Friend In Your Teenage Years Could Benefit You For Life – MindShift – Angus Chen (5-minute read)

Just as I started with a PL Thomas for the second week in a row, I am also ending with a MindShift article as well. This one caught my eye for a couple of reasons. One of my favorite colleagues who also reads this newsletter wisely told me not that long ago, “All you need is a really good friend,” when I mentioned my oldest had begun middle school. It was the kind of comment where truth immediately rings in your ears upon hearing it.

Like the writer, I too have retained a friend from early childhood. My oldest friend and I met when we were seven-years-old but our friendship has now endured over 40 years. So reading about a new study that shows the importance of adolescent friendships is no surprise to me. Most of my closest friends are those that I maintained since I was a boy and those that I gained while I was in college. They have also had some of the greatest influences on my life.

None of the findings are particularly surprising to me but serve more as academic validation of phenomena that already seem only too real to me and I expect many who have maintained long friendships since childhood. The benefits of a study like this kind of pinpoints and labels a lot of things that may not be as easy to articulate from experience without the benefit of a long objective look. How exactly it all works might still be a bit hazy but I expect that doesn’t bother anyone who has experienced life-long close friendship.