Welcome to English Teacher Weekly!
ETW’s mission is to take what’s worthwhile from the worlds of literature, education, Christian thought, and the humanities and deliver it to your inbox for your enjoyment and edification. I provide a sprinkling of context and commentary and leave the rest to you.
Let me put it this way: I have an extensive collection of quotes and hyperlinks.
This week’s edition features the art of Mary McCleary, who generously allowed me to share some images from her amazing website. I would kill to see some of these collages in person, but so far I’ve only experienced her work online. I’m sure we’re only getting half of the full effect.
Enjoy!
THIS WEEK’S COLLECTION
The Purpose of Education
is a must-read if you’re interested in AI and education. Much of it is a response to Salman Khan’s forthcoming book Brave New Words: How AI will Revolutionize Education (and Why That’s a Good Thing).The latest waves of technology are doing some very helpful work: exposing what people think the purpose of education actually is. Unfortunately, Khan—along with a large group of influential education leaders—have a rather impoverished vision of the goal of teaching and learning.
Here’s Warner on the allusive title of Khan’s book:
Choosing a title that invokes a famous technology-mediated dystopia for your book about how technology-mediated education will lead us into utopia makes no sense to me other than someone liked the word play and knew that Brave New World had something to do with technology, so it must be cool.
I’m thinking Sal Khan has neither read Brave New World nor asked ChatGPT for a summary of it.
Warner explains why billionaire-driven economic models don’t work in education—just like why politicians writing curriculum is a recipe for disaster. (Listen to this strange conversation between economist Tyler Cowen and Jonathan Haidt to get a sense of what I mean.) Warner’s post is a small dose of hope in the fight against the lie of technological determinism that’s everywhere these days. I recommend reading the whole thing.
Campbell’s Law
In other John Warner news, he recently relaunched his Engaged Education newsletter, an encouraging development.
As I was perusing his previous posts, I came across this concept of Campbell’s law, which was new to me. And while I’m happy to read anything that has my surname in it, it’s even better when it lends crucial understanding to how education works.
Campbell’s law states that “the more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.”
Campbell’s law was coined by Donald Campbell, a social scientist and founding figure of research methodology. Campbell’s law is perhaps best understood with an example.
Imagine researchers observed that the happiest couples kissed each other goodbye in the morning and that we were then told that the key to a lasting partnership was a peck before parting. While this may be an undeniably nice thing, it’s easy to see that if the peck is not motivated by underlying feelings of love and affection, it does not carry much meaning. If the peck is the point, it becomes meaningless as an indicator of happiness.
Campbell’s theory was drawn directly from observations of schools and teaching. He noted that achievement tests can be useful indicators of what students are learning provided they are preceded by “normal teaching aimed at general competence.” Once scoring well on the test becomes the point, those tests lose their value as predictors of competence.
Campbell’s law helps explain why students trying to make eye contact during a presentation to get a good grade seem creepy, but those who are genuinely trying to communicate something of significance come off as charming. I’m sure we could go on and on with examples.
I’m ready to add Campbell’s law to my social science hall of fame, right up there with Yerkes-Dodson Law and the Dunning Kruger Effect.
Get the Tech Out
Jessica Grose’s recent editorial for the NYT was inspired by Jaime Lewis, the mother of an 8th grader in California. She had reached the point of exasperation with her son’s inability to stay off YouTube during school hours, so she and a group of parents petitioned the administration for intervention.
From “Get Tech Out of the Classroom Before it’s Too Late”:
We’ve let tech companies and their products set the terms of the argument about what education should be, and too many people, myself included, didn’t initially realize it. Companies never had to prove that devices or software, broadly speaking, helped students learn before those devices had wormed their way into America’s public schools. And now the onus is on parents to marshal arguments about the detriments of tech in schools.
The Border Trilogy
recently finished reading Cormac McCarthy’s border trilogy. He has an excellent review over on his SubStack. Not overly ponderous while still getting to the heart of McCarthy’s work.John Grady, our young cowboy protagonist in All the Pretty Horses, asks his friend Lacey if he thinks God cares about people:
“Yeah. I do,” says Lacey, explaining himself: “Way the world is. Somebody can wake up and sneeze somewhere in Arkansas or some damn place and before you’re done there’s wars and ruination and all hell. You don know what’s goin to happen. I’d say He’s just about got to. I don’t believe we’d make it a day otherwise.”
In the worldview of the stories, all the subsequent action in the next nine hundred pages takes place within the fundamental tension of human agency and God’s providence. Characters lean toward one pole or the other. “In history there are no control groups,” says Alejandra’s aunt. “What is constant in history is greed and foolishness and a love of blood and this is a thing that even God—who knows all that can be known—seems powerless to change.”
John Grady vacillates between the two. Following his manifold misfortunes, the corrupt captain asks him if he’s afraid of God. “I got no reason to be afraid of God,” he answers. “I’ve even got a bone or two to pick with Him.”
Women Who Run with the Wolves
For
SubStack, writes about her first encounter with Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype by Clarissa Pinkola Estés.In her early twenties Kelly faced a crisis of identity. She was studying biology in grad school and had let it consume her life:
The staunch, rationalistic scientific road I had walked was filling with potholes. I was having recurring dreams with archetypes and symbolism I didn’t understand. My worldview was far too narrow to explain or integrate my experiences, and it created a near constant tension.
Wolves opened up a world of the spirit that had been absent from her life:
Estes’ writing conveys a deep feeling of connection to all of humanity, to the history of humanity, and not just the whitewashed textbook versions. No main events, no dates, no specific heroes, but pure human experience. Who we all used to be, in some past life that still sits in our subconscious, speaking to our souls. She brings across the truth of the feminine, the ancient and timeless rhythm of life lived as a woman. The folktales she presents give the expansive feeling that we are not just reading or writing stories, we are living them. We live the same stories as those before us, and they pass through our lives like great open ocean swells – long arcs of energy that move across a connected body, rising and falling as that energy influences the water it passes through. As Rumi said, “We are not a drop in the ocean, but the ocean in a drop.”
My favorite story about women who run with wolves? Probably Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams.
Emily Dickinson: Socialite
In light of a new edition of Emily Dickinson’s letters published this month,
writes about how these letters resist the common perception of Dickinson as the pale woman in white, intensely staring out of her bedroom window.But listen, don’t get it twisted. She did wear white. And she definitely spent a lot of time looking out of her window. That’s what poets do. She just wasn’t creepy about it. She was as likely to be thinking about baking a cake for a friend as her next poetic masterpiece. In other words, Dickinson was not mere spirit; she was human.
Say goodbye to the Belle and Recluse of Amherst, Mythic Emily, and every other epithet that scholars, biographers, and critics have coined to stoke the public’s fascination with a human sphinx. Behold, instead, a woman who baked—a lot—for friends, family, and neighbors; who lamented that she didn’t receive any valentines at school (“I have not quite done hoping for one”); who was very often funny and used a prodigious number of exclamation points in letters to her family (“Your welcome letter found me all engaged in the history of Sulphuric Acid!!!!!”); and who, until age 35, traveled and visited friends, before poor health made traveling impossible. Toward the end of her life, in 1884, she sent 86 letters to 34 recipients: the majority express thanks, others include a gift of flowers or food, and a handful convey condolences or congratulations. Her supposed withdrawal from the world—and readers’ continued interest with such a narrative—has an apocryphal dimension we must be willing to forego in order to see and hear the poet clearly, perhaps for the first time.
Thoreau, The Woods Burner
Here is the text that borders Mary McCleary’s collage, seen above.
On April 30, 1844, Henry David Thoreau accidentally started a major forest fire in the Concord woods after his campfire got out of control. The flames burned 300 acres of forest and nearly set the town of Concord on fire. Residents blamed Thoreau for damaging personal property and burning some of the last remaining untouched woodland in the area. For years afterward, Thoreau could hardly walk the streets of his hometown without hearing the epithet "woods burner." There is evidence in Thoreau's journals that the guilt over what he had done stayed with him. In 1850, six years later, he recounts the incident in an entry both remorseful and defensive. He admits he had " felt like a guilty person- nothing but shame and regret," but he insists that he soon realized his guilt was unfounded. "I have set fire to the forest, but I have done no wrong therein, and now it is as if the lightning had done it. These flames are but consuming their natural food... it was a glorious spectacle, and I was the only one there to enjoy it."
A year after the fire, Thoreau went to live at Walden Pond.
You can read more about the incident in this piece at historyofmassachusettes.org.
THE HYPERLINK GARDEN
Finally: well-formatted, properly edited ebooks of works in the public domain—from Standard Ebooks
“It takes trust to move from a war against an enemy to a search for truth with a difficult brother.”—“Mutual Endangerment Society” by Leah Libresco Sargeant for Comment
From The Film Stage: Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of Shūsaku Endō’s A Life of Jesus, “an 80-minute, mostly present-day film in which he intends to capture a universal look at Jesus, will begin production this year.”
Here is a gift link to A. O. Scott’s close reading of Frank O’Hara’s “Having a Coke with You” for the NYT. This is a part of the Close Reading series, a really fun way to interact with art and poetry. You’ll see what I mean.—“ …as with most good poetry, the effects — in this case, of informality, of casualness, of companionable ease — are the products of precise and careful craft.”
- ’s top five favorite poems to teach fifth graders.
From The New Yorker: “The Dumbphone Boom is Real”—on the growing demand for phones without all of the fluff.
Speaking of phones, here’s
on “How to Live Without Your Phone”—“Not using a phone taught me what a phone is really for. It’s not for communicating with other people, getting directions, reading articles, looking at pictures, shopping for products, or playing games. A phone is a device for muting the anxieties proper to being alive.”Check out the reading list for the Eastern Classics program at St. John’s College. Just when I think I’ve read a good bit, I discover I’m barely getting started.
Teaching AP Literature? Need some grounding? May I suggest the AP Lit Collaborative Experience with Susan Barber and Brian Sztabnik?
A new survey of Gen Z by Gallup and the Walton Family Foundation: “3 in 4 Gen Zers consider themselves happy. But much of that happiness is contingent upon feeling they have a purpose in school or work, suggesting that our education system has a significant impact on happiness levels.”
And in another Gen Z poll, the United Way found that our youngest members of the workforce are most interested in mission alignment and good pay when it comes to taking a job.
Via NBC News: When Mr. Moriarty, a science teacher in Rochester, NY, started teaching in 1978, he made a habit of inviting his students to an eclipse party at his house in 2024. Last week, and 46 years later, over 100 of his former students showed up for the party.
Delightful. Thanks!
This edition is particularly meaningful. Thanks so much!