@teachkate
Educator helping connect the realities of actual classroom teaching to the ideals of pedagogy, research, and common sense. My new book, The Heart of Fiction: Reading for Character, Theme, and Craft, is out now at kateandmaggie.com
1. This morning, Texas AG Ken Paxton just released a chilling new declaration:
Mental health therapists, counselors, and psychologists must cease affirming trans youth - using their name and pronouns - or potentially face child abuse charges and loss of licensure.
Its a horrifying escalation.
Kansas invalidated a trans woman's license even though she never changed her gender marker.
It's not about the gender marker. It's about targeting trans people and making their lives unlivable.
The glibness. The indifference. The carelessness. The utter lack of planning for a war against a country of 90M. The sickness of a man who acts on whim that will kill thousands not hundreds. The horror of a regime that enables this sickness. The broken body politic that votes in such malignancy.
Being able to take classes with her before she passed was an honor. She was the real deal: philosopher educator ❤️
stop calling us nazis just because we are invalidating IDs and rounding people up based on their skin color and putting them in concentration camps and sending them off to foreign gulags and using all that nazi imagery and banning books and dont forget about all the pedophilia. so just stop alright
Remind me, when you beat up a blind old refugee and then dump him out to die in the cold, are you the good guys?
The level of rage I have towards the New York Times that enabled this while blaming us for it is indescribable.
Kansas just invalidated the drivers licenses of every trans person in the state. They’re being told to surrender their current licenses and get new ones listing their birth sex. No grace period. Get caught driving with your now-invalid license and you’re looking at jail and a fine.
Fun fact, US passports did not have a gender marker until 1977, when a rising trend in unisex fashion started freaking the government out.
Yes - until you see it firsthand, it’s hard to understand how upsetting and enraging it is to see these guys operate in your community. They are dressed for war, they beat civilians up, they openly antagonize neighbors, they’re masked, they carry people away. Everyone is livid at every scene.
A picture of green jay feathers (Cyanocorax luxuosus). They are all lined up and organized: primaries, secondaries, coverts, tail feathers. Most of the feathers are gray with a green tip.
I just stumbled upon featherbase, a database of feather pictures from a bunch of bird species.🪶
So pretty!
www.featherbase.info/zh/home
One poster: "this is so scary to me. i recommended a book to a friend recently and she came back to me a day later saying it was really good and i asked if she finished it already and she said “yeah i got chat gpt to summarise each chapter into 3 paragraphs to it was easy to read” ... responding to this earlier post: "Personally, | read a bunch of classics in high register in college. | guess it was fun. | recently ChatGPT'd Aristotle into readable English, finished it around 5x as fast as a translation, and felt | got the main gist of things...."
We may be heading toward a world in which it seems peculiar or even foolish to read an article or book in its entirety. Incredibly, schools - K-12 & higher ed. alike - seem reconciled to becoming the accomplices of Big Tech by pointing us there.
One of the things that happened is that reformers + their allies shifted "HQIM" to include only materials produced by a corporate vendor.
They don't believe teachers, students + communities can produce "HQIM" because they don't trust or believe in teachers, students + communities.
The best AI-detection/-avoidance software available is a well-compensated teacher who spends time getting to know their students and their work because they have small classes
So when we keep phones out of class time it works - and kids somehow still learn to use phones. I wonder if there is an attention and effort killing technology out now that we could apply the same theory too? 🧐
I'd love to talk with some teachers and students about this. DM me if you're up for it.
There’s a direct line from ‘just asking questions about women’s sports’ to criminalizing our health care, we warned you it was coming, you said it would be fine and you just had a few more questions.
They developed the "high school girl's sports" angle as a wedge issue, to lever their way up to full society-wide discrimination. What's endlessly stunning to me is how many purported liberals a) helped them when it started & b) are still helping them even after the larger purpose has become clear!
This is too much.
I’ve been feeling like chicken little except the sky is actually falling you guys
"Fairness in school sports"
So you're controlling access to professional trainers? No? Or accounting for developmental stage differences within the same age groups? No? Creating budgets to keep every kid fairly equipped? No? So what is it that defines a fair sporting experience exactly, I wonder?
An issue we're seeing at all levels of university is that many students are simply refusing to do *anything*. They aren't reading the syllabus, aren't following assignment guidelines, aren't engaging with material, ignoring deadlines. And this might seem like old news, but it truly has ramped up.
We advocate for reading and writing in authentic ways because we know that control and lock step and excerpts and demands don’t work beyond (maybe?) a test that tests weird things. These pedagogies often stifle everything good and human about the classroom. We will not stop. I will not stop.
Wait. It’s past mid November? What is happening? What is time?
I like em dashes. Am I AI? Maybe I’m AI.
Am I intending to use Bluesky to offload my deep intense FOMO at not attending #NCTE25? Indeed.
So many gardening metaphors we could make: planting pruning watering transplanting…how are you Brett! Going to NcTe?
