jessenathaniel.bsky.social
Black. High school Special Education teacher. Holding fast to the belief that education and restorative justice can meet the political moment. Committed to racial justice inside & outside of school.
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The way I’ve always thought about it is that if we want students reading rich texts — even at their independent reading level—then they probably benefit from some level of guidance / discussion of perspectives to really appreciate it. So …IDK… bc I get the appeal of encouraging free reading habits 🤷🏾♂️
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I don’t have any good answers to this even though I began my career as “the tech guy”…but this question from that 2008 article is going to ring in my head for a while: we all see what’s happening here, but do we see a problem with it? And do we laugh off the question or slow down to think about it?
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17 years later, as tech has become ubiquitous in schools and a pandemic forced its embrace upon us, people are saying, “You can save time with AI!”
*Here’s more tech to make it easier to use the tech that you adopted before!*
And we’ve been in free fall down this spiral rabbit hole for decades.
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Back in 2008 — in response to LAPTOPS — McFarlane begs a question that was as simple as it was prescient: why are we not more carefully and patiently weighing the cost and benefits of this thing we’re spending so much time on? Why are we in such a rush to embrace technology?
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Schooling has gotten increasingly transactional for decades for numerous reasons (that others have detailed well); tech has only intensified that — as schools have faced more and more pressure from various directions, the focus on speed and efficiency of information flows & “content” continues.
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To be clear, I was already well-aware of our ongoing technology fetish — my first job in a school was as a computer lab director. But what’s particularly striking is how similar the underlying concerns are: tech implementation necessitated a move away from the human aspects of education.
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Any of these concerns look familiar to anyone?
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Oh yeah - you’re clearly right about that. Lol I’m really surprised that didn’t leave more of a negative impression on my HS experience (as many other things after that did lol)
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(Answer to why I might not see it negatively: in 4 years at that school, I was assigned 3 things by Black authors; that freshman summer read was one of them 🤷🏾♂️ … so I guess it set a tone that I appreciated entering high school…?)
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My HS did this for all freshmen (it was a K-12 private) … and I suspect their argument was that they wanted everyone to have SOME common ground coming in regardless of whether they were promoted from 8th grade or coming in from another school.
I’m surprised at how ambivalent I am about that tho 🤔
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And what Chanea said in that ep about it not being about “AI-proofing”, but actually just humanizing education was perfect in that regard — I hadn’t even thought about it that way, but that’s the more valuable frame because it’s an affirmative statement about what we WANT and who we can be together.
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Literally just finished the ep! (I could’ve made it clearer it was a response to the whole thing.) Really great conversation and incredible framing of those issues I’ve had bouncing around my head loosely.