Gary Ackerman @garyackerman@qoto.org

Education is about changing humans. When our students leave our classrooms, we expect they can do things, see things, and think things they could not before the class. If our students leave with their abilities unchanged, then they (and we) have wasted their time and energy.

My blog post reviewing Code Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI by Madhumita Murgia
tl;dr Read this book! Seriously, read it.
https://hackscience.education/2025/10/08/review-of-code-dependent-living-in-the-shadow-of-ai/

Did you ever notice those emails to "clarify the process" rarely do?

I work in IT. I spent all day reminding people we stopped using that system years ago.

One thing I learned during 30 years in education: while you are focusing on improving one thing, another becomes a crisis.

“There is a free tier” isn’t “open source.”

Classroom grades reflect one’s capacity to succeed in a social hierarchical situation. Let’s recognize that and teachers’ biases… it easier to call them out as they can’t hide behind “objectivity.”

Your data… that “evidence your interventions work" may well be the Hawthorne Effect.

I work in IT. I spend all days watching spinning icons.

Abandon topics and outcomes to focus lesson. Use questions or problems instead. It will improve your teaching and students’ learning.

“Explain you thinking” helps until it doesn’t. The trick is for teachers to know when to stop.

The more teachers talk about how they report only academic learning in their grades (whatever they are), the more “other stuff” is included in what they are evaluating.

If you can’t tell me what’s wrong with your data, I’m not interested in hearing what you think is right about it.

Over the weekend, I watched no football games, but many matches.

In education, we do some things very well. Unfortunately, they are not necessarily the things we should be doing.

Classrooms with seats in rows.

This elicits vastly different responses from teachers.

When I was an undergraduate student doing botany research, we realized our measurements were proxies for something else. They were not reified in our minds. One thing that drive me out of k-12 teaching in the US, was the fact that test scores had become reified.

It never ceases to amaze me to observe two or more people discussing “learning” and seeing they each have vastly different concepts of it but no one realizes it, yet they argue on. #education #teaching

“Taking a class in it” and “knowing it” are not the same thing.

Learning. A human activity full of myth and mystery, and dedicated to creating fading and false memories.