As some of you may know, I’m writing a book on the history of high school English in the United States, and I’m excited to share a new article from that project—“High School English and the Making of American Readers”—out today in American Literary History! 🧵
academic.oup.com/alh/article/...
The transition to a new semester always brings a new appreciation from your former students. Big smiles and waves, "we miss you, please teach this class next year", sharing all their new adventures. It is heartwarming.
#edusky #iteachEnglish📚
Excellent PD and resources from our Indigenous Ed. department yesterday, particularly around appropriation in light of Thomas King.
Collaborating with colleagues is so professionally refreshing!
@elanontario.bsky.social #onted #EduSky #iteachEnglish📚
"Peer observation fills a gap in teachers’ professional development" - research regularly shows educators learn best when working with other educators.
Did anyone ever use pineapple days?🍍Invitations for colleagues to informally observe?
@elanontario.bsky.social #iteachEnglish📚 #EduSky #onted
Exams are here, which means it's time to share my #markingmusic ! 🎶 📝
I learned about this opera as a piano student decades ago, but never listened until recently. So began my descent into minimalism.
open.spotify.com/track/5TYFw3...
Really interesting multimodal PD opportunity for English teachers at the AGO this weekend!
@elanontario.bsky.social #EduSky #onted #iteachEnglish📚
ago.ca/events/teach...
Tried something new with "Maus" in ENG3U - turning response journals into POV character letters. Students wrote to each other from different POVs as they discussed inner thoughts on themes.
@elanontario.bsky.social #iteachEnglish📚 #EduSky #onted
“When I speak about making our city more affordable, my vision is not limited to the homes that we live in or the child care that we’re making universal — it’s also a vision where we make it possible for working people to afford lives of joy, of art, of rest, of expression.”
I actually think "Literacy" is a more accurate title for the content and practices, but it's such a clunky, uninspired word. "English" does have gravitas.
Me: There is no such thing as the perfect Christmas gift for me.
My students:
The ending of "Romeo & Juliet", where Juliet awakens and finds Romeo dead.
There is nothing like this scene from Baz Luhrmann's "Romeo + Juliet" to elicit screams of RAGE from a Gr. 9 English class 😂 💔
@elanontario.bsky.social #EduSky #iteachEnglish📚
Gr 11s developing their multimodal skills by creating graphic novel one pagers on "Maus". Graphic novel features used to communicate relationships between image, theme, and plot.
@elanontario.bsky.social #iteachEnglish📖 #EduSky
The five-paragraph essay is the most common and obvious example of an intervention that actually discourages thinking, but there's many others, many of which I once employed because I thought I was helping students get better grades. bookshop.org/a/1793/97814...
I will add the following: our students lack the research skills required to audit an LLM essay for errors. They don’t arrive on campus with these skills; we teach it to them over four long years. So throwing freshmen in the deep end and saying “swim your way to a shore of rectitude” is folly.
For the 9s, I've seen lots of success with: Eleanor & Park; every day; All American Boys; The Kite Runner; The Boy in the Black Suit; and Walking in Two Worlds.
Haven't read but have heard good things about: Darius the Great Is Not OK; The Sun is Also A Star; and American Born Chinese.
We were inspired by the work of @amnesty.org in defending Indigenous rights, specifically with the Sami people of Norway. Fantastic mentor text!
www.amnesty.ie/fighting-to-...
I wanted an authentic writing task for my destreamed Gr 9s that mimicked the skills required in an essay. We came up with writing letters to the federal government asking for movement on the 94 Calls to Action, based on evidence from "The Marrow Thieves".
@elanontario.bsky.social #iteachEnglish📖
Best compliment I got at parent-teacher interviews:
"Sir, I tried to use ChatGPT for your assignments but they're just too weird. The results were nonsense. I had to do it myself."
*yesssss*
@elanontario.bsky.social #EduSky #iteachEnglish📖
Working to get English class into a position where it can ask as much of students as STEM courses do
Gr 11s are starting Maus by examining the modalities of the graphic novel form. We began by examining this selection from the Toronto Public Library.
I take for granted that I can just walk in, grab a bunch of high quality texts, and walk out 📚 ❤️
@elanontario.bsky.social #EduSky #iteachEnglish📖
Gr. 9s used mind maps to develop a better understanding of themes in "The Marrow Thieves" 🧠🗺️
I was surprised that mind mapping was a new concept for some of them. Took more direct instruction than I had planned for, but the results were worth it!
@elanontario.bsky.social #EduSky #iteachEnglish📚
Absolutely - analysis for the sake of analysis is stifling. I've been trying to incorporate reflection, multimodalities, and trying to emphasise that (IMHO) we should be teaching communication more than "English".
Voice in writing is hard to develop, and harder to justify as a fungible skill in our STEM-crazed society. I've always thought our voice as a writer is our inner voice to ourselves. I hate that we are subcontracting the challenge, and joy, of navigating our human experience to inhuman tech.
🧵/end
Anecdotally, I've noticed the following consistancies in the samples I've worked with over 3+ years of reading this slop:
- Always lists qualities in groups of 3
- Forces connections w/out evidence
- Qualifies with "may", "might", "could" (coward)
- Overuse of complex-compound sentences
🧵/6
"ChatGPT is informationally dense and uses content words more often."
It is a torrent of content over contexts or connections. It values technocratic lists data points over an actual iterative thinking process - because it doesn't think or feel! Only we can do that! Remember?
🧵/5
"ChatGPT texts are characterized by a maximization of nouns and adjectives over all other word classes [...] ChatGPT also avoids the use of adverbs and passives."
Not only is its syntax more limited, but it opts for blunt "formal English" even in contexts where that tone is inappropriate.
🧵/4
"We clearly see that all AI-written texts are much more similar to each other [...] than they are to human texts, which show far more pronounced patterns of register variation."
Human (aka real!) language embraces variation; AI embraces standaridzation and sterilization of content and form.
🧵/3
First - the assertion that language is what defines humanity, for, as Bertrand Russell quipped, "no matter how eloquently a dog may bark, he cannot tell you that his parents were poor but honest".
AI is not human and does not have language; only simulacra of the two.
🧵/2
I've read so much AI writing lately that its "voice" is clearer to me than that of my students 🤮
This paper is a fascinating look at whether or not AI has an idolect, and how it can be discerned.
My key takeaways in the🧵 below:
#EduSky #iteachEnglish📚
www.arxiv.org/pdf/2508.16385
Great examples of hexagonal thinking from #NBE3U and The Rez Sisters. They were struggling with connecting overarching ideas to textual specifics...so why not make literal connections?
@jcasatodd.bsky.social , this is always such an eye-opener!
@elanontario.bsky.social #iteachEnglish📖 #EduSky
