Alfie Kohn

When this happens, it will obviously be Biden's fault.

"Friendly Excursions into Disequilibrium," my new podcast episode, argues that the ideal arrangement in a classroom (or workplace) consists of cooperative conflict, where spirited disagreement is non-adversarial and nested in a caring environment: www.alfiekohn.org/podcasts/

Weren't the British similarly aggrieved about the American colonists?

Just imagining the names of other, larger companies in place of "BuzzFeed"...

The Politics of the Paragraph The tale of a high school English teacher's journey into—and out of—formulaic writing programs as her school struggles with high-stakes exams.

Formulaic templates, cutesy acronyms, and other gimmicks that teach kids to write badly....but score well on tests: goo.gl/RIVJ49. And every example of good scores for mediocrity - or poor scores for impressive thinking - reminds us never to judge kids or schools on the basis of standardized tests.

When listening to tech bros pontificate, I think of how the economist John Maynard Keynes was thoroughly unimpressed by the corporate leaders of his time. When someone asked him how, in that case, they were so successful, he replied, "By competing against one another."

They read, "You will not earn a Ph.D" and think, "That'll change once dissertation committees are replaced by LLMs."

Add India and Israel to increase the number of such theologies to four. Yet partisans of each fail to see how much they have in common with the others.

I cannot describe properly in words how much it infuriates me to my bone that there were people out there that were allowed to act like Right Wingers, RIGHT WINGERS, were free speech champions

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Even a math score rests on judgments: what topics were taught, which were tested (and how), how credit was awarded, etc. Subjectivity is inevitable in human activity - and, by the way, not objectionable in itself. The problem is with disingenuous attempts to circumvent or hide those judgments.

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One more time: Quantified evaluations such as (machine-scored) standardized exams are no more "objective" or value-free than are narrative reports or other qualitative appraisals. Neither are rubrics. Their numbers just conceal the subjective judgments that necessarily underpin them.

Your first impulse might be to stammer something like, "But that would destroy democracy..." -- to which people like him would just smirk and say, "Well, duhhh!"

"We started a war of aggression for no reason & commenced it by accidentally bombing an elementary school & killing over 100 kids."

That simple fact is so horrific that it's just kind of bouncing on the surface of our collective consciousness. We can't absorb its full implications & significance.

Plus ça change....

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Along with English teachers, fiction writers - well, all good writers - might as well call it a day if this sort of thing catches on.
Or, as the app itself would reword this critique: "Magibook bad."

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Not from The Onion. It's real - and further evidence of how AI (as wielded by for-profit companies) can transform education.

BTW, their website says "Featured on [sic] the NY Post" even though the Post's article is titled "Reading for Idiots" and it quotes an expert who calls it "alarming."

BREAKING:

This is Beirut right now.

Israel is MASSIVELY bombing Lebanon’s capital in the middle of the night — deliberately wiping out apartment block after apartment block.

Civilian homes. Residential buildings.

No justification. Just pure terror.🤬🤬🤬🤬

Huh. I wonder what that person's "values" and "lifestyle" were. To make a living, pursue one's interests, have friends, find love -- in other words, the sorts of things that are obviously incompatible with Chili's?

Next he'll lash out at the press for quoting him accurately because of how poorly his comments reflect on him.

Question on psych final: Just as bullies may themselves be victims of bullying, so sadism and machismo posturing can be symptomatic of a fragile ego. Discuss.

"Has raised gas prices" - not "Has killed a thousand men, women, and children"

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This shouldn't be surprising when you realize that the individualist ideology underlying an emphasis on self-help and self-care distracts us from systemic problems, perpetuates the status quo, and benefits those in power. A good resource: the late Barbara Ehrenreich's book "Bright-Sided."

The January 6 Report and Trump’s Gospel of Success On the anniversary of the insurrection at the Capitol, the House select committee’s report documents the former president’s culpability—and his state of mind.

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Today's "Did you know?": Norman Vincent Peale, whose self-help gospel birthed a thousand pop-psych books, seminars, and podcasts,"was an ardent political reactionary; he composed The Power of Positive Thinking on a union-busting junket": is.gd/Ze1hVq.

We are doomed.

Test Scores Tell You Who Your Child Beat, Not What Your Child Knows I’ve spent 30 years in standardized testing. I couldn’t make sense of my own kids’ score reports. New research blames parents for trusting grades over tests. Wrong diagnosis. Here…

@akilbello.bsky.social has some interesting thoughts about this same report: is.gd/dFA4Py. I'd note, though, that the fact that scores tell you only who your child beat can't be fixed by reporting them differently; it's inherent to standardized tests. (Also, as I noted, grades are problematic, too.)

Absolutely! It's a hell of a lot easier to end the wars that you, yourself, started.

Am I the only one who feels a little guilty for reacting with relief that the stock market is recovering its early losses today? A dented portfolio seems like a small price to pay if it leads the Sociopath-in-Chief to stop killing Iranians.

An important read