What I Told My Kids

A story of malaise, blah, a whole lot of of worry, and a canary.

Short version: I have not yet learned to write shorter entries. There is no short version. This is long and self-indulgent. If you want more bite-sized (and high quality) snark, head over to Peter Greene at Curmudgucation.

Oh, I’ve missed this.

So we started the year in mid-August. As a result, we’re now hip-deep into our second quarter.

And I’m not feeling it.

Six-time Teacher of the Year loser, that’s me.

More and more, Stacks, posts, and Reels from my teacher pals read like dispatches from alternate realities—not tech-bro AI-evangelical alternate realities, but alternate realities all the same. Engaged students, amazing lessons, authentic connections, deeper learning, and wonderful interactions with and uses of technology. And I’m all like…

This is a total, IYKYK. Otherwise, go here.

We’re not in gaslighting land anymore, Toto. This is way worse.

Maybe it’s the upcoming election. While Mark Robinson’s campaign for governor of N.C. is ready to have a fork stuck in it (whew), our Superintendent for State Schools race is between a former Superintendent of Guilford County Schools and a homeschool parent, MAGA cultist, election denier (and probably denies a raft of the science stuff too) who would have fit right in with a Robinson (or any dictatorial, really) administration/regime? That one is close.

And then there’s the presidential one, which fills me with anxiety because it’s so (reportedly) goddamn close. Close, seriously? How?

Maybe it’s because phones, after a milquetoast policy that got a tremendous attaboy mileage and self-congratulations, are starting to creep back in. Teachers are tired, admins have all but forgotten the promises they made in August, and the kids have never stopped pushing. Spring (at the latest) will see exhausted teachers looking the other way (if they’re not already) and our schools being fully not phone-free. ¹

Maybe it's the unrelentingly cheery emails from admin about “having a great weekend!” when the stack of work to grade over said weekend is approaching a foot in height.

Maybe it’s watching other districts and states embrace and fold AI into curriculum and lessons while we’re waiting (two years post-Chat GPT unveiling) to unlock it on the school networks. There are occasional workshops for teachers about how AI helps you save time by writing those pesky lesson plans and letters to parents, so you never have to learn how to do it.² And then we’re supposed to get all upset when our kids use it exclusively as a time-saver and never learn how to do things? (shout out to Dan Meyer for his rundown of how “classroom-ready” AI-generated resources are.)

Yeah, a cohesive rollout of AI in the district is “in the works.” Related news: we’re also about 10-20 years away from fusion energy.³

Maybe it's the season of instructional time being the most crucial thing in the universe while regularly being sacrificed to standardized tests (Pre-ACT, Pre-SAT), search and seizure days⁴ that push the start of the first period back, and other near-constant nibbles out of days and weeks.

I can nibble at a chocolate cake in the fridge for a couple of days, and there’s no useful amount of chocolate cake left at the end. Now replace “chocolate cake” with “instructional time.”

For my baby teacher readers, do not even ask about the loss of instructional time to anyone outside of the classroom. Just don’t. By asking why the system is the way it is, you’re attacking those who are wholly invested in the system, who the system has made comfortable for decades, and who have made the system part of their identity. Asking about it is the same as insulting them. Just don’t.

We’ve been in the shit for a while now. Since the last week of September, our district has had two full five-day weeks without an interruption from a test, hurricane, or other thing (and that’s not counting said nibbles at instructional time here and there).

Coming up, this week for the district is functionally four days (thanks Pre-ACT and ASVAB - same day!), next week is four days (at best - we have Election Day off, but with this election, who can say?), the following week is four days (Veterans Day), that third week is five days. The following week is two days because we’re at Thanksgiving Break.

That’s the end of November.

You cannot build consistency with students when they (in their blissful ignorance of “how was I supposed to know?”) aren’t sure from week to week if they have a whole week or a short week, let alone where they’re supposed to go for the Pre-ASATCTSVAB test that will lock them away all morning.

Oh, and we’re told to prepare online material and regular classes while expecting students to perform after sitting all morning for food-processing factory-style testing?

This is the most frequently used gif in the history of Teacher, Teacher because it is every teacher’s response to anyone outside the classroom when they talk about how we should do our jobs or how our jobs are done.

Maybe it’s being told how wonderful we are doing as a district when the results show…well, not that. But cherry-picking is a career choice, I guess.

Anyway—the kids are…

I dunno.

For the first time in 16 years, I feel like I can’t reach them. I’m teaching an AP class this quarter, so I’ve familiarized myself with the mercenary class of students, with the manic drive and in it for the GPA, the AP credit, and then…? Well, they haven’t quite figured that out yet, but by God, they have to take every single goddamn AP class they can; hair loss, nervous tics, and anxiety disorders be damned.⁵

The non-mercenary class of students?

Maybe the kids aren’t alright.

You think I’ve got the ennui?

Can I Get a Hallelujah, Brothers and Sisters?

I’m the teacher who, now and then, gives a short “sermon” to my kids. I know I’ll never be asked to give a commencement address, so I take ‘em when I can. Sometimes, they’re spontaneous; sometimes, I have a couple of notes, and sometimes, I have a whole script. Student reaction varies. Sometimes it clearly bores several. Sometimes, I get tears, sometimes anger. Sometimes, I curse, and they respond to that, which is awesome. At least I got something out of them.

I think I started this when my first IB physics class was graduating, but there’ve been more. Like about ways to pull ourselves back together after a school shooting (Uvalde), which our school leadership was oddly silent on. Like how we reach down and motivate for the next quarter. Like how we move ahead when the world seems to shift under us badly. That one was back in November of 2016, and I set up and played this clip at the end (and I still have it handy because I am one of the indoctrinators, an academic Rick in my own little Casablanca classroom):

They always come from a place of love and, usually, frustration.

This was a long enough intro. This (lightly edited, enhanced, and annotated) is what I said to my kids at the end of our first quarter.

The Thing I Said to My Kids

Usually, I talk to my students at the end of the first quarter about things like giving themselves a break and taking the win. Look back to where you were when you started this class and where you are now. It’s a feel-good way to end the quarter and get us a little revved up for what’s to come. And you can think about that stuff if you want. 

But I’m not doing that this time. I’m not feeling it. 

I’m deeply worried about y’all. For the first time, I don’t feel like I can reach you. To be fair and transparent, I don’t think I’ve been 100% every day, and some of that is due to my frustration with this problem I can’t solve. I’m going to go stream of consciousness here. 

I want to preface this by saying that 1) I’ve got stuff that affects me here, even though I try not to let it, and I’m working on that. I hate that you need me at my best, and I’m not always there, but that’s a me thing, not a you thing. You help me. You don’t realize it, but you do. This is what I do, and this is who I am. This is what I live for. 

But there is the world - stuff in this place that gets to me, stuff outside, family stuff, just like y’all. All of it. Most of the time, the classroom is where I can come to and get away from that and be “Mr. Brady.” Sometimes I can’t. I’m working on it. 

Me (and I’d bet most teachers) on any given day.

The second thing I want to preface everything with is this - I reject the bell curve regarding grades. I hope you do, too. Why should the average be what it is, with two tails? I hate that. Why can’t there be one hump in the 90s? Who says we have to be the other way? I know. I’ve read the research but don’t have to accept it. Why can’t we have a test where the average is in the 90s? 

Why do we have to accept this as reality in education, and if the mean shifts, everyone gets suspicious?

I thought of that the other day, and now I’m obsessed. Obsessed. How can I change that?

Part of it goes back to my worry earlier - it’s me-based. I’m worried I can’t reach you, which is an entirely new feeling, and I hate it. 

Some of it, surprise, surprise, I’m going to suggest humbly, is you-based. 

In all of this, I’m not coming for you; nothing is meant to insult or upset you. I love you guys. But…

I’m astounded by the lack of caring and the lack of trying. The acceptance of lousy grades as “just the way things are.” It feels like an acceptance of people saying or thinking, “I can’t do better, so why try?” 

I want to tackle the phenomenon of learned helplessness head-on. That’s the idea that you learn to be helpless - in your case; someone will always come around and get you out of the fix you’re in, whether picking you up because you missed your bus or solving a problem in chemistry for you. 

It’s the idea that kids can get that an adult will be around and solve any problem, so they have learned to be helpless. Learned helplessness results in you…well, learning to be helpless and not learning much of anything else. It results in not trying, not caring, and in an intellectual retreat or a lack of intellectual development altogether. 

After all, someone or something will be there with the answer. Why do I need to know about it or how to do it? 

So here’s my thing on that - starting with the second quarter, I absolutely will not answer a question for you when you’re working on something unless you can demonstrate to me that you have exhausted all of your resources: 

• You’ve checked your notebook and notes. (I know I joke about it, but honestly, me showing you the answer to your question in your handwriting in your notes? That should be low-key embarrassing.) Honestly, I get offended when you treat me like your notebook. 

• It also means that you’ve talked to people around you. (Protip: Always look for the students teaching others because they know the subject. Also, always try to be a student who can teach others. There’s no better way to learn something than to be able to teach it to others. Trust me.) 

• You’ve maybe watched a video on it. 

• You’ve re-read (or just read) the instructions (you know what else should be low-key embarrassing? Losing points because you didn’t read the instructions). 

• It also means you’ve tried doing it, for god’s sake. You should have tried it, failed, tried it again, and failed (but failed better than the first time). 

You may be thinking that this is all me complaining about nothing, but think, maybe, about the questions you’ve asked me or seen others ask me, and I come off as being exasperated or a bit dickish, because you had the answer all along. 

When you grow up and become a high school science teacher, trust me on this — one of the most frustrating things to hear from a student: “I don’t understand this.” 

“Okay, what don’t you understand?”

”All of it.” 

Do you realize what you’re saying when you say that? You’re saying, 

“I wasn’t listening.” 

“I wasn’t trying to understand.” 

“I didn’t care enough to pay attention the first time.” 

“I’m helpless.”

Yeah - that phrase is no longer acceptable language in this classroom. 

We are learners and problem solvers. 

I mean, if learned helplessness locks in for you to the point that you can’t find it in you to solve your problems, where does that end? Does Mom come in to help you at work? Does Dad call the professor of that tough class in which you have four late assignments? And if those things don't happen, do you just quit when things get difficult? Drop the class, quit the job, skip out on all the opportunities that could have come your way because things were just...too hard for you? 

Where does it end? 

Or a real example? You can’t budget your money, so your parents give you the cash you need or are otherwise hovering just over the horizon, ready to come in and fix things for you or even lend their adult-ness to taking out obstacles for you. What have you learned if that’s the case? 

Or - do you just cheat on an assignment? After all, the answer’s right there, one prompt box away. How are you supposed to know how to do the work? 

The outgrowth of learned helplessness is cheating. And cheating is easier than ever. Just look the answer up and not think about what the internet spits at you, the work, or the concept. The goal is just getting the thing done, right? 

No. 

Cheating on even small things in class is still cheating, and you’re a cheater. But the thing that’s being cheated is you. You’re giving away an opportunity to learn. 

By cheating, by giving up your agency to others (people or machines) to solve the problem for you, you’re not thinking. 

Thinking is the most beautiful thing we can do. Why would you give up your ability and opportunity to learn to reason? Why give that away willingly? It’s a muscle — if you don’t practice thinking and reasoning, you won’t suddenly be good at it when you need it because there are no other resources to help you.

And get your faces out of your goddamn screens. All of your screens. 

Your eyes go dead when you do it. Any light I see in you, any sign of intelligence, just goes right out of you when you’re staring into them. And usually, your jaw opens a little, too, leaving you looking slack-jawed and dead-eyed. It’s not the look you’re going for. 

That look y’all get is why I’m not on socials that much. I hate it in you, my fellow teachers, when we’re in meetings and other adults. Harrison Bergeron, by Kurt Vonnegut⁶, is the story you want to read to get my full feeling about the dumbing-down machines that we willingly expose ourselves to and have been exposed to since y’all were littles because shiny things made you stop crying in the grocery store.⁷  

Four minutes ago, I guarantee you Miss Sassyboots was throwing a fit, and Mom relented and gave her the tablet.

Why choose to dumb yourself down? 

Because that’s what you’re doing. 

You’re not interacting with real people; you’re interacting with the idea of people. Fake people - the people we all pretend to be online. And I know, I know - typing something out is far easier than saying something in person. But if you’re not talking to people in person, you’re losing your ability to read people’s faces and their emotions, to think about how they’re reacting to what you’re saying. Those skills make us better people, and you're choosing not to practice them. Or even learn them from the start. 

I know, “Phones aren’t allowed in the classroom.” Do you think I don’t know that some of y’all sneak them so you don’t have to give them up during class? That doesn’t make me mad. It makes me sad. Sad for the person you could be if you weren’t addicted to your phone. 

And it’s harder because the school district has a strict limit on how much it cares about you and your phone.

They’re fine with you rushing, like lemmings, to get your phones at the end of class and staring at them for a couple of minutes before you slide in some earbuds and NPC⁸ out into the hall with the other NPCs. They’re fine with you clocking out during lunch to watch videos, check socials, or otherwise not interact with humans if you choose not to. 

They’re fine with that, and it makes it harder for you because it places the work to break your addiction squarely on your shoulders. And do you want to know a secret? 

You can’t do it. 

And they know that.

They know the research says that. 

And they’re fine with that, with you being among three-quarters of people addicted to devices who can’t quit them.

---

I worry that this public education system we’ve allowed to be gutted and beaten up from what it used to be will never again be enough. 

We used to be unafraid to push students. 

To challenge them. 

To get them to achieve things they didn’t think they could. 

And the students responded. And grew into young adults. 

We used to hold students accountable for their behavior and their academic performance.

And thanks to the above, they became self-reliant, confident, and sure of themselves and their place in the future. They were not scared of it or the world and knew they would one day, change it. They were not apathetic about the world and didn’t have what seem to be damn contests about who can know and care the least about what’s going on outside of their screens.

Your apathy and cynicism are so hip and cool there, Ponyboy. Really.

As I’ve said before, I feel like with y’all; it’s some kind of badge of honor not to know what’s going on in the world, even when that means people are dying and entire communities being wiped out 80 miles to the west of us.⁹

But now, we step back. 

And expect less from you, not more.

As a district and school, we give reasons and allow revised guidelines that lower our standards. That’s, sadly, been the story of my career teaching science in this district—lower our standards and cheer when y’all leap over a bar that’s two feet high. I guess we’re supposed to forget that five years back, students were easily clearing the academic four-foot bar and asking us to put it up to six so they could try it up there.  

Yes, even here. Did you think I was talking about a different school? 

I mean, does anyone think it's weird that our ACT scores¹⁰ are drifting lower year over year, yet grades and GPAs are all staying the same or going up?¹¹  

This is overall, but our data mirrors this. Different numbers, since we’re a high-performing school, but it mirrors. However, I’m sure I’m reading this graph wrong since all data in our district points to mind-boggling growth and success.

And we used to listen when our students had complaints or ways to improve things. And if they had a point, incorporate those ideas, not ignore them. Or find a way to silence them. You, after all, are the customer of this great enterprise. We’re here for you. Even though many times, it feels like that’s been turned around, even to me.

Also, please get off your screens. 

There’s a whole world filled with amazing people, places, things, sights, and experiences. And really - seriously, you may have to take me on faith here, but it’s a good place. And overall, people are good too. They are not all trying to “get” you. The world is not a dark and cynical place. It’s all in how you view it. People are good. 

There are mysteries to figure out and stories to tell— and to hear if you have ears. 

A quick shout-out to older people—we often know what we’re talking about and can tell you amazing stories about history and how the world works. We can often guide you—not solve your problems—but offer the best thing that comes with age: wisdom. 

You’re a fool if you do not seek out or scoff at your elders' wisdom.    

Sorry — had to give a shout-out there for the home team. 

And beyond this world world, there’s a moon, and space, and other planets, and the galaxy, and the entire friggin’ universe. NASA just launched a rocket that will look at Jupiter’s moon, Europa. That’s friggin’ science fiction in so many ways, but reality. 

I mean…goddamn.

A dark and cynical view of the world doesn’t include interplanetary probes looking at ice-covered ocean worlds, does it? But here we are. Maybe the world’s not so dark and cynical. 

And I didn’t even mention books! Or art! Or plays! Or great movies and television! All the world is trying to communicate with each other to show us that we’re all connected and are all after pretty much the same things - to feel like we belong. To feel like we contributed. To know we’ve been loved and to love others. To know that we did a thing. To know that we mattered. 

Because you do.

You matter. 

In my darker moments, I worry. Our current education system is geared against what makes the world wonderful: creativity, independent thinking, nonconformity, time to play, time to do nothing, time to daydream, and time, room, and opportunities to fail. 

As it stands now, I cannot see how our education system will ever produce another Walt Disney, Carl Sagan, Steve Jobs, John Lewis, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Jim Henson, Jane Goodall, Steven Hawking, or even another Greta Thunberg.

Brad and Chris’ books are wonderful. Buy them all.

There are times when I wonder if we will ever produce a truly creative spirit who is not beholden to the opinions of others to the point of suppressing them for the sake of “what the world wants " or one who’s crushed into conformity and compliance, which, after all are the top two goals of public education.

Or if we’ll ever create anything other than automatons that follow the status quo because that’s the message that school gives you, while the world is (for now at least) filled with examples of people, companies, and leaders who threw the status quo out and achieved amazing things because of it. 

On a side note, I know there are amazing individual artists with clear, strong voices. Still, so many of their origin stories are ones of rebellion against the system holding them back for years, not of a system that recognized their ability and gave them a place to thrive.

This world can be a wonderful place and is already in so many ways. 

I just want it to be better, faster. So I’m here, day in, day out. And still, I worry about y’all—a lot. 

So, we start with that learned helplessness. We work through that. We teach ourselves how to solve problems here and transfer those skills to other classes and our outside-of-school lives. We become better—not just people with better grades, but better people. And by doing that, we can make each other better. And by making each other better, we can make the world better. 

But it starts right here. Right now, with work. 

I have two final stories. First, one about President Jimmy Carter, who just celebrated his 100th birthday. He is, objectively, a great man. But he had to go through tough things as well. As a Naval Academy student, he was looking to get into the new nuclear submarine program—not easy. While Carter was known for being all genteel South and mellow, he knew his math and physics inside out. 

Let me read author Ryan Holiday’s account.

In 1952, Jimmy Carter secured the opportunity of a lifetime: an interview with Admiral Hyman Rickover for a chance to join the nuclear submarine program.

This kid…

Admiral Rickover, the father of the nuclear Navy, was not just one of history’s most brilliant minds, he was also one of history’s most hands-on leaders. He interviewed every single candidate for the submarine service himself, including the future president. These were long interviews. For two to three hours, Rickover asked Carter about strategy, tactics, physics, literature, and history. Carter had prepared for days, weeks even, and the interview seemed to be going well when Rickover asked, “Where were you ranked in your class at the Naval Academy?” Now, it’s only going to get better, Carter must have thought as he swelled up with pride, “I was ranked 59th in a class of 840, sir.” Carter would recall the surprise of not receiving congratulations, but instead, another question:

“Did you always do your best?”

Carter began to instinctively answer that of course he always did his best, but something inside of him caused him to pause. “I recalled several of the many times at the Academy when I could have learned more about our allies, our enemies, weapons, strategy, and so forth,” Carter would say. So he was honest, “No, sir, I didn’t always do my best.” Rickover didn’t say anything and just looked at Carter for a long time before asking one final question “Why not?” Then he stood up and walked out of the room.

Carter would never forget this question. In fact, his campaign memoir from his run for governor of Georgia is titled, Why Not The Best? This question became the lodestar of Carter’s life, as it should be for ours.

Did I do my best? Am I giving my best? Am I really trying?

…you don’t control much else except how you respond to the world around you. All you control is that you do your best. “If you can manage this,” Roman Emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius would say, “that’s all even the gods can ask of you.”

This last quote is from the Stoic philosopher Epictetus, and it provides the same meat as Carter’s story, but in beef jerky rather than steak form. 

The quote goes something like this: “How long are you going to wait before you demand the best of yourself?”

It’s a question with only one answer: Not One Second Longer. 

What are you waiting for?

I love you guys. I want to see you all succeed beyond your wildest dreams. Let’s do this together.

And also, get off your screens.

Canaries and Coal Mines

So that’s what I said.

I wish I could say it was working, that I never had to remind them about it.

I wish.

Back in the day, it was said that miners would take canaries (or other small birds, I’d assume) down into the mines with them. Rather than “bring your bird to work day,” the canary, with its quick metabolism, small mass, and high respiratory rate, would die first if the air were to go bad.

If the canary dies, we all die unless we get the hell out of the mine.

Yeah, little bro is getting sleepy.

Based on my kids’ befuddled looks, when I say that phrase, it’s fallen out of use, which my Gen X self hates. The Police recorded a song about it, for god’s sake. And it’s good.

In his 2016 TED Talk, Cal Newport¹² talked about college students’ dependency (and we know now, addiction) to social media as being the “canary in the coal mine,” and they were. They were showing us what would come with Jean Twenge’s iGen, just as the attention economy was picking up steam and social media companies were dropping their morals and ethical practices as fast as possible. Anxiety disorders skyrocketed among social media’s regular users, along with rates of depression and overall malaise; as Newport says, “This type of behavior is a mismatch for our brain wiring and can make you feel miserable.”

We’re not talking about the same kids eight years later, but they are still canaries. Add in more social media manipulation, misinformation, and influence of and interaction with AI, not to mention the problems boys and young men are facing and female-specific pressures, and these kids are nothing that the status quo school system is able or willing to confront or deal with.

For Twenge, they are iGen, and Jon Haidt calls them The Anxious Genration¹³ (it’s the kewlest flex to have your copy of that book lying around your office or on your desk these days in public education—especially when you do absolutely nothing to help kids out of what he describes). It’s more. It’s worse. Twenge and Haidt, I fear, are only scratching the surface.

Our kids are not doing well.

Sure, they can continue to parrot out the correct answers and write enough to make teachers’ eyes glaze over and give them good grades. Jump into discussions on books they haven’t read but can fake caring about for the participation grade. But they’re not…there. Not like they used to be.

As an institution, we don’t care what this generation has become. What the saturation of phones, social media and now AI has done to them to make them different from students who’ve come before. We just need them do fit in the boxes we’ve had around for generations. Smash them in, hammer them in. And if they push back, get them support tiers, or interventions, or maybe, when they finally respond negatively enough, punish them.

We’re not taking our time to understand them.

And we’re paying that price. As these kids go, so goes the future.

No call to action, just a lede buried under a mountain of words. We can’t fix our problem until we admit that we have a problem. Our kids need our help. They’re not one-size-fits-all. We need to take the time to find them so we can help them.

The canary is woozy.

1. Gosh. If there were only some way we could’ve known that would…wait a minute! There was!

2. Fun fact: Are there any students or parents of seniors out there? If you’ve asked for a letter of recommendation for college admission, I’d wager my paycheck that the teacher did it using AI. It’s 100x easier and stupid fast. And the cool thing is, when the admission package finally gets to the college admissions office, the AI-written letter of recommendation will most likely be evaluated by an AI. Progress! Or Star Wars! I’m not sure.

3. Nerd joke. For the last 30 years, we’ve been about “10-20 years away” from fusion energy. We’ve been hearing that top men are working on the A.I. rollout for the district for about…six months now? I have the utmost confidence we’ll see something. Some day.

4. Sorry, metal detector days that ensure our school is a safe and secure learning environment (at the expense of instructional time) at least on the “random” days that we have the metal detectors out.

5. AP by the College Board: making school challenging for a few and way less fun for a whole lot more for years! But remember - the pressure to take AP classes will be increasingly unbearable as you move through the years of high school. Just give in and start to take them. Join them…join them…ignore the hair in the shower drain and the weird itches that cause you to pick at your skin. Join them…and also - hydrate, because there will be tears.

6. Part of me hates bringing this story up in case some of my Central office warmbody readers actually reads it and thinks that, in their weird basket full of definitions of equity, Vonngegut’s future is a good idea. I mean, we’re already taking steps in that direction, so you know, why not get ‘em the earpieces?

7. In the phone-free movement, I live on the outskirts of the village because I argue (a lot) that parents bear some of the responsibility of their device-addicted children, thanks to giving it to them when they were (a) far too young to make a choice, and (b) unable to resist the lights, colors and addictive natures of…everything aimed at kids online, from Club Penguin onward. I don’t get to come in and speak by the fire in the village all that often.

8. A Non-Player Character in RPG and online games. They do nothing besides keeping the player on track with the plot or mission. They have no will of their own and are interchangeable and forgettable. It’s an insult to call someone that; students pick it up when I put it down. I said what I said.

9. I presented this to my kids on October 10th. The week previous, I was the news source that informed many of them about the destruction in Western North Carolina, even as they joked about how “stupid” it was that we had September 27th off (the storm was imminent) of school because the weather was fine. That bowled me over. How could they just not…know?

10. This is a solid metric as the state mandates that we inflict the ACT on all juniors. Those ACT $alesmen made a really good pitch to our state legi$lature, I guess.

11. No, I’m not going to get into the ACT’s well-documented biases here and how, as a measuring stick, its usefulness is as good as grabbing a crooked branch from a tree. Anyone who argues otherwise is trying to $ell you $omething—an ACT testing plan, to be specific. And come on, the whole ick factor of the racist and eugenics history of standardized testing as a whole to categorize groups makes me ill.

12. I ADORE this YouTube video being blocked on my school’s network. Love it!

13. Full disclosure: I sometimes get that loopy, alternate reality feeling when I read Haidt’s prescriptions, plans, and ways to amputate kids’ phones. His plans and “advice” (largely just appealing to the better angels of helicopter parents and addicted kids) don’t work in the reality in which I reside, currently.