Nate

Speaking as a DC resident: statehood now. It is absurd that Trump can do this in our city.

“Dems shouldn’t gerrymander just because Texas is gerrymandering! Two wrongs don’t make a right!!”

Yeah well, two wrongs might make a not-authoritarian regime and the death of democracy as we know it, so I’m gonna say go for it.

I understand why people believe Trump’s invasion of Washington DC is The Event but I think it’s more helpful to understand it as dialing up the heat on the boiling frog. Trump did this in LA. He’ll do it in D.C. with more boldness. And then he’ll do it again. Fascist takeover is never one event.

There is so much grief right now. I highly recommend having an intentional grief practice. On some days it will be rage, on some days it will be sorrow. But what I know is unprocessed grief leads to the very behaviors that we are watching and abhor in this moment. Move it out of your body and heart.

I also work in a small (alternative) school with students who aren’t known for enjoying change … so our ability to attend to the affective will be essential for being successful in helping them reach IEP goals this year.

What I have going for me in terms of buy-in is that we’re going through a lot of changes this year and I already know where some teachers are at with that… and a LOT of it is the affective stuff. So naming it and working on it so that we can model for kids will be valuable.

It’s that time to come up with my own goals … and I think focusing on this affective side of things with my Ts (for all the reasons mentioned in that 🧵) is the big goal for me this year. I envision that starting with their vision for their classroom and the path+necessary supports to get there.

Whenever I see actors from period dramas appearing as themselves in interviews promoting the show, it feels like seeing my teacher at the mall after school.

Dr. Phil opens up about his role in Trump’s police state "I don’t think I’m qualified to talk about politics," he told the New York Times.

Dr. Phil has gone on ICE raids for content, spoke at Trump's NYC rally last year, and has been appointed to the White House Religious Liberty Commission.

But he tells the NYT he doesn't think he's "qualified to talk about politics," and wouldn't even say if he voted Trump. 🤡

@motherjones.com

Compare this list to "just telling them."

What’s notable to me: a lot of that is ground in decades of cognitive science research … it’s just not so narrowly constructed 🤷🏾‍♂️

My teenager just returned from an intensive music program, and I've never seen him more...himself.

It's 2025 in fascist America. There is no "safe" life path. Your MBA will not save you or your soul. So: devote your life to your art. Create beauty + joy + space + possibility in our broken world.

Every time I see one of these things on the road I'm re-struck by how dumb they look. Combine that with the fact that it's apparently rather flawed as a working vehicle and you have a customer-base limited to man-children with too much money. 2025's Delorean.

Are We Cooked? Probably, but what are we supposed to do about it?

"Because I know [AI models] do not work from a process of thinking, feeling, or communicating with intention...I therefore cannot respect their outputs as meaningful. Put simply, I cannot bring myself to care what they say when used in this particular way." - @biblioracle.bsky.social

It’s so hard - maybe close to impossible - to really understand what teaching is until you do it for awhile. I know I had no idea before I did. I think undervaluing the profession for generations has made even supporters vulnerable to persuasive people who are mostly just selling something.

Yes. Yes. Yes.

No 1 thing is going to work all the time for all kids, or in the same way every time; learning can shift because of time of day, day of week, week of year, child/teacher experience(s), the human, the class, the year, etc. Teachers need many things (in their 🧰 2 make learning happen

The Elements of Great Teaching – Dimension 2, Element 1 Podcast Episode · The Evidence Based Education Podcast · 01/27/2025 · 1h 9m

I’ve said enough lol but I do want to close with an ep from the *Evidenced Based Education* Podcast that addressed how the cogsci purists miss the need to address the affective elements of teaching. And we fall for it when we privilege economic outcomes over intellectual & social; that’s spot on.

What do I want Ts to learn more of in ed school? History and philosophy of education… so when charlatans come along and tell them they have brand new ideas that will solve everything, they can recognize that the cognitive revolution happened almost 70 years ago & wasn’t the magic bullet then either.

There could justifiably be more time spent on a LOT of things in ed school, but what’s evident is that we need to value the profession as a human endeavor in which we are cultivating the emotional, intellectual and social capacity of human beings. It’s affective work & we can’t dismiss that aspect.

What really annoys me whenever someone rants about how “these woke ed schools aren’t teaching the research on best practices!” is that it’s naive. There’s A TON of stuff they DO do that matters. A LOT of that is embedded in things like crafting unit/lesson plans, content area methods classes, etc.

This discourse of “teachers aren’t prepared to do the things research tells them to!” is silly — think about how many things a first year teacher needs to be prepared for and the time needed to do that. Now add in the cost of schooling and lack of apprenticeship programs. What do you prioritize?

And, full disclosure: I studied learning sciences in grad school. I worked on research teams with some oft-cited people in learning sciences. None of this cogsci stuff is new. The reason people haven’t just embraced cogsci wholesale is the realization that humans require a more holistic approach.

Here’s what bugs me most about the cogsci purist perspective on pedagogy: it largely ignores the affective side of teaching AND learning, which can entirely tank efforts to just tell Ss what they need to know. For first year/struggling Ts, that affective stuff is often central to overcoming barriers

There's nothing inherent about math that says it has to be taught in a clinical setting with individual desks in rows facing a single instructor. 🤷🏼‍♂️

But our belief structure about how and why we learn and what learning looks like shapes both what math is learned and how it is taught.

To underscore the point:

Two different people have responded with the role of snow — a naturally occurring phenomenon — as a potential distraction. That would clearly not ever factor into my thinking as a Bay Area teacher.

See how that works? 🤷🏾‍♂️

“Last period on a Friday” definitely made me lol… because I think you can just extend that principle to ALL Friday before a break … the whole week before Christmas … the first day after a break …

Like we’re dealing with humans here and those humans experience human rhythms that affect behavior 🤷🏾‍♂️

This.

When people throw around "evidence-based practices" and "science of ______," they aren't engaging in conversation or nuance. They aren't acknowledging complexity or, consequently, reality.

These have become euphemisms for "My way or the highway" in education. And they're being weaponized.

This is spot on… and on point #1 here: as a profession, we really need to do a better job of appreciating our own history. The cognitive revolution was decades ago. There’s a whole field of learning sciences; the principles have been taught in ed schools and are baked into methods/pedagogy classes.

Like I hate to shoot the messenger(s), but … when the messenger goes around saying that he’s responsible for authoring a movement… 🤷🏾‍♂️

Even the notion of free floating “clear explanations” that you can “just tell them” is maddening to me — there’s this set of universalist assumptions (rooted in EXTREMELY problematic first principles) underlying all of this discourse that fundamentally make it impossible to trust any of these ppl.