English Teacher Weekly for Sept. 19th
Welcome to English Teacher Weekly—your source for what’s worthwhile from the worlds of literature, education, Christian thought, and the humanities. We have a lot to cover this week, so we’ll get right to it.
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THIS WEEK’S FEATURES
The Homework Apocalypse
There have always been ways for students to fake homework assignments and not learn anything.
is doing some of the best thinking I’ve come across about how AI is impacted education. In this recent post, Brake considers chatbots slouching toward our classrooms, bringing a “homework apocalypse.”He says, “The Homework Apocalypse is here not because AI has eliminated homework's usefulness but because it has revealed something that has always been true but is rarely forthrightly articulated: engaging with what homework asks of us is a choice.”
From “AI Didn’t Make Homework Ineffective”:
What generative AI has revealed to us is what has always been true in education: our time is much better spent breaking down walls between us and our students rather than trying to erect new ones. Trying to defend our existing pedagogy by making it harder for our students to cheat themselves out of learning is a battle that's lost before we start to fight.
Instead of making our assignments harder to game, what if we took a different tack? What if we modeled vulnerability and honesty with our students to help them understand the reasons for the work we're asking them to do? What if we helped them to understand that they are the primary victim of a decision to sidestep the work of learning? What if instead of acting in a way that shows our students that we don’t trust them, we instead spent time building trust with them as we ask them to engage with the work in our classrooms?
Why TV Is Wrong For Tolkien
Evan Puschak’s recent video for The Nerdwriter YouTube channel is an interesting examination of how different genres of storytelling work (or don’t work) when you change the medium. His case study is The Rings of Power series, now entering season 2. Any fans out there? At the time of my writing, the series has an 85% score on Rotten Tomatoes, which seems higher than the word on the street would suggest. Puschak doesn’t throw the series under the bus though. What you’ll find here is an honest critique with the support to back it up:
Riddle of Fire
’s favorite movie of the year so far is Riddle of Fire. I couldn’t help but share the trailer with you: Here’s a bit of Priebe’s review of the film. He likes to hit the caps lock for movie titles, and I can’t blame him.
It’s shot on 16mm Kodak film. It’s gorgeous. It’s hilarious. It’s weird. It’s like LORD OF THE RINGS meets MOONRISE KINGDOM meets STAND BY ME and THE GOONIES….but also feels like OUR GANG films from the 1930s, throwback Disney films from the ‘70s like ESCAPE TO WITCH MOUNTAIN, a touch of Manson-family ‘60s vibe, flavors from animated Ralph Bakshi fantasies like WIZARDS, and dashes of Cartoon Saloon treasures SECRET OF KELLS and WOLFWALKERS. The inclusion of iPhones and GPS devices set it in modern-day, but the way they are used feels futuristic, while its overall retro aesthetic could easily place it into any era from 1965 to 1985 — making it strangely timeless, set in a universe that could be any time, all the time. It’s all at once dark and spooky, cute and charming. It’s a thing of joy and natural beauty, full of surprises…and did I mention it’s really weird?
The Folio Society
Speaking of the fantasy genre, check out this story from The Guardian about how TikTok has attracted a new generation of readers to The Folio Society, a London-based group that makes fancy illustrated editions of classic books, like this $80 All the Pretty Horses, or this $130 Neverending Story. A great gift for a super-fan with expensive tastes.
Founded in 1947, the Folio Society was once a membership club known for publishing classic tomes and history books, with a customer base of predominantly “old white men”, according to its boss.
Now, however, more than half the people who buy its books are aged between 25 and 44, and it is selling more sci-fi and fantasy titles, boosted by BookTok and growing gen Z interest in “artisanal” editions.
The publisher, which produces illustrated editions with elaborate covers, has seen sales soar 55% since 2017-18.
Joanna Reynolds, chief executive since 2016, said: “We’ve completely changed the sort of books that we sell. We developed fantasy, sci-fi and more children’s. Particularly the fantasy and sci-fi have made a massive difference to us. Game of Thrones was literally a gamechanger … It made so much money for us.”
It warms my heart to know that there’s someone out there producing high quality bound books. But as for me and my house, we’ll keep buying used books in dubious condition via our local shops and eBay.
Two-Step Devil by Jamie Quatro
One of my most highly anticipated novels of the year is out now. Jamie Quatro’s Two Step Devil is the story of The Prophet, a backwoods Christian artist who paints the visions he receives from God, and Michael, a girl rescued from a sex trafficking operation. The devil also gets to have his say.
Sam Sacks’s review for the WSJ:
The outcome holds cosmic as well as personal significance, as Ms. Quatro is a rare novelist for whom a religious belief in good and evil is not merely a plot device but a genuine guide to describing reality.
From Melissa Broder’s review for the NYT:
Theologically avant-garde and emotionally supple, “Two-Step Devil” is a Southern Gothic novel for fans of Denis Johnson, Frank Stanford and Wendell Berry, infused with the genre’s requisite imagery of “thick blankets of kudzu” vines and smells of “blood, grease and sweat.” And, like her forebears, Quatro wrestles with what it might look like to find and embrace a living faith in the modern world.
If you’d like to hear about it from Quatro herself, check out this interview on the Across the Pond podcast. It starts at about the 15-minute mark. And if you’re into Outsider Art, the Prophet character was inspired by Ralph Vaughn, an artist and self-made pastor who lives on the back of Lookout Mountain where he paints his visions and gives away his vegetables.
Here’s a profile of Vaughn by Max Heine, published in the Front Porch Republic last year: “So yes, Vaughn can come across as a rural version of a street-corner Jeremiah. But there’s more: a generous artist and farmer with an off-the-chart work ethic.” Heine made this YouTube video that showcases his art and music. Makes you want to pay the man a visit.
Ourselves Online
The New Consumer recently published some disorienting survey findings.
Could these results overrepresent the “online” results because the survey was completed online? That’s just my guess. Or could it be that “feeling most like myself” isn’t necessarily a good thing?
There were some slight changes since their last survey in 2022, but the Boomers are changing the most dramatically:
The biggest shift among generations was for Boomers: 16% now say they feel most like themselves online, up from 10% in 2022. “Online” also picked up around five percentage points for Gen. X. Meanwhile, “offline” grew a tiny bit among younger consumers.
How to get Unstuck
has some good advice for climbing out of a creative rut in her post “Things to do when you’re stuck.” Here’s item #8: Stop trying to be good
Style is a major obstacle to writing. I don’t mean innate style - the natural voice of the writer - but instead the self-conscious seeking of a certain style, the belief that it has to sound a certain way in order to be good, or the idea that you have to sound clever enough to justify your existence. All of this makes it very hard to get any words onto the page in the first place. You can pre-edit yourself into oblivion if you’re not careful. When I feel this creeping in, I head off in the opposite direction: I’m going to write an absolutely terrible draft, I tell myself, and I will hate it. The thing is, I hate a lot of my first drafts anyway, but I know I can edit them into something better. The worst ones of all are always the ones when I tried too hard to sound like a writer. I give my present self full permission to be terrible, and leave it to my future self to deal with.
The more time I spend writing and teaching writing, the more I believe in building a fence between creating and editing. The fence should be sturdy and tall, with a small latched door in it just in case.
THE HYPERLINK GARDEN
For The New Yorker, Kathryn Schulz investigates what makes Norman Maclean such a brilliant writer, a man who only published a small collection of work in his lifetime—and nothing until he was seventy-three years old.
I’m not an “ungrading” teacher—I just try to use grades as a roughly hewn piece of feedback for my students and spend my energies elsewhere. But I do find it very helpful to hear from teachers who are embracing an alternative model of student assessment. Check out
’s approach to framing her “gradeless” model of assessment on her course syllabus.- ’s podcast: “Education as Hospitality and Healing”—“Christians are called to offer hospitality to those in and outside the household of faith.” You can find his Renewing Classical Education newsletter here.
From NPR: E-cigarette use is declining — even as the industry eyes teens for new products
In case you haven’t watched it in a while, here’s Charlie Chaplin’s famous factory scene from Modern Times.
15 of the Best Bookshops in Europe according to The Great Women Artists newsletter—a veritable cornucopia of eccentric, independent delights.
Speaking of shops, Shopkeeping: Stories, Advice, and Observations is a new book by Peter Miller. From
’s review in : “Over its scant 136 pages, in airy, straightforward paragraphs, Miller makes the case that shopkeeping is a kind of meditative art form, a holistic practice that requires not just enlightened taste but intense discipline, thinking about everything all the time.”Kelly Gallagher’s new book To Read Stuff You Have to Know Stuff is out now. It’s all about how to help students develop a sufficient framework of knowledge so that they can read complex texts with success.
The astoundingly hip “sletter”
on the way our instant, always-at-our-fingertips access to art and music is changing how we experience it. I love this analogy: “Take surfing again. Imagine if it somehow consisted of nothing but waves, 24 hours a day, no waiting required. So many waves you could hop from one to another to another before any of them subsided, experiencing ‘all’ of them while experiencing none of them, because no single swell would feel particularly meaningful. That’s kind of what ‘surfing the web’ is turning out to mean…”