More about Calkins
Two responses to Helen Lewis’s Atlantic article, “How Lucy Calkins Became the Face of America’s Reading Crisis.”
The (Lucy Calkins) empire strikes back
I see so much self-mystification and evasion of fact in Calkins’s response to her fall from favor.
Fourteen lines? tl;dr
“Daniel Shore, the chair of Georgetown’s English department, told me that his students have trouble staying focused on even a sonnet”: from an Atlantic article by Rose Horowitch, “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books.”
“Is Reading Over for Gen Z Students?”
Listening to podcasts and watching YouTube videos — two suggestions offered in this podcast — don’t replace the work (and joy) of reading. Podcasts and YouTube videos might, on occasion, supplement the work (and joy) of reading in worthwhile ways. But without the reading, what’s the point? If instructors are unwilling to assign “an entire novel,” exactly what are podcasts and YouTube videos supposed to be supplementing? And what happens when the work of listening and watching becomes odious?
Never underestimate
“So there I was, a forty-something high-school teacher, with little kids, zero political experience, and no money, running in a deep red district. But you know what? Never underestimate a public-school teacher. Never”: Tim Walz, just now.
Librarians and teachers (Project 2025)
Look out.
Generative AI, trust, and distrust
At Inside Higher Ed, Jacob Riyeff writes about generative AI and its effect on teacher-student relationships. What breaks his heart, he says, are the ways in which AI makes it difficult for him to trust his students.
“AI and the Death of Student Writing”
In The Chronicle of Higher Education, Lisa Lieberman, a community-college instructor, writes about “AI and the Death of Student Writing.”
Siebold
And then I saw that I had misspelled Sebald as Siebold.
Flooring
That institutional-looking floor tile in the Trump-trial courtroom — it’s the same non-descript stuff found in the building where I taught for thirty years.
Norman, knocking
I posted this story in April 2020 as a great moment in pedagogy. I remembered it this morning and am reposting it in memory of Norman Spencer:
“AWOL from Academics”
In Harvard Magazine, Aden Barton, a Harvard undergraduate, writes about what it’s like to be “AWOL from Academics.”
“Frost” and Frost
I was teaching a poetry class and getting ready for our first meeting after a break, when it’s always a challenge to get back to the realities of a semester. I realized that I had forgotten to bring the two poems we were going to talk about, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight” and Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” I printed out a copy of each poem in my office and went off to teach.
Struggling to read
Adam Kotsko writes about the decline in college students’ reading ability.
Evaluations
This is the twenty-seventh teaching dream I’ve had since retiring in 2015. In all but one, something has goes wrong.
Reporting the teacher
A South Carolina high-school English teacher was reprimanded after two of her AP students reported her to the school board for teaching about race.
Gothamist hears from Lucy Calkins
WNYC’s Gothamist reports on the dissolution of the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project. And Lucy Calkins responds — dishonestly and unconvincingly.
TCRWP LC? LLC!
Lucy Calkins doubles down.
TV in the classroom
“You know how in The Wire, Walter White shaves his head and wears a black hat and calls himself Heisenberg? Wait — was that The Wire, or Breaking Bad ?”
Spot the bot
The New York Times has a challenge: read ten short pieces of writing and figure out which ones were generated by a chatbot and which ones were written by children.
Teachers and chatbots
If I were still teaching, I’d adopt five strategies to counter the chatbots.
Lear, window treatments, pie
This is the twenty-fifth teaching-related dream I’ve had since retiring in 2015. In all but one, something has goes wrong.
To: Calkins, Fountas, and Pinnell
An e-mail to three prime movers behind the mistaken forms of reading instruction examined in the podcast Sold a Story.
Gender and evaluations
From Inside Higher Ed: “Two new studies show how bias against women in student ratings operates over time, worsening with critical feedback and instructor age.”
4:17?
“I am doing what is called lecturing,” I said, and I was doing quite well.
Teaching for free
Prompted by the now-infamous listing for an unpaid teaching position at UCLA, The New York Times looks at the realities of academic labor: “The unspoken secret had been fleetingly exposed: Free labor is a fact of academic life.”
Boxes
Clearing out my office, again.
Recently updated
The professor who called his students “vectors of disease” is threatening to sue his school.
Professor gone wild
Inside Higher Ed reports on a seventy-four-year-old history professor’s first-week video for his students. The performance/protest about teaching in a pandemic is at YouTube.
RTF$
“Tucked into the second page of the syllabus was information about a locker number and its combination. Inside was a $50 bill, which went unclaimed.”