Gary Ackerman @garyackerman@qoto.org

Being skeptical and denying reality are different approaches to the world.

I’m always in awe of the foolishness of those “experts” who think they know other fields better than those experts.

Our town has been targeted for a mass mailing of religious propaganda. I opened the book randomly and read three sentences. I’m a pretty good reader, but I could not make sense of any of the sentences.

If you can’t identify data that would prove you wrong, you are not really data-driven.

My hunch based on my experience teaching other fields and hanging out with skilled reading teachers for a few decades… is that there is no one single approach that teaches the diverse set of skills we call reading.

Your goals and your students’ goals are likely not the same.

If we didn’t believe the pattern existed in the data, we wouldn’t see it.

I attended class in which teachers wrote text on boards. Now I see video of it and I really don’t see that as an effective or efficient strategy.

Reading Jared Diamond confirms that one cannot look to “primitive society” for any answers. Their cultural practices vary… some depending on circumstances, some (seemingly) depending on whim.

Challenging conventional thinking and denying it are different things. One move it closer to reality, the other further from it.

Yes, you are entitled to your opinion.

No, I’m not obligated to take it seriously.

If students can be excluded from class for not having a pencil, can teachers be excluded from training for the same reason?

Remember when we used to block Wikipedia? I do.

One reason educators are reluctant to change is they interpret change as “what I’ve been doing isn’t good.”

I’d like to interact with you, but I have no idea what the acronyms mean.

It we could engineer schools that “work,” we already would have done it. The reality is that learning and being “smart” are multifaceted, complex, context-dependent, and changing. When we engineer for one part, everyone complains we’ve missed the others. #education

Real life is on-going, open ended, uncertain. Laboratories and classrooms are not.

I don’t worry much about grammar errors or typos… but I do smile when I see folks misuse whom and myself in an attempt to seem “smarter” than they are.

I heard during my career that many of the “tough” students turn out fine. That motivated me to just treat them with respect and work on relationships rather than interventions

A post on g (intelligence) and its myth.
https://hackscience.education/2025/10/14/the-fraud-and-fallacy-of-g-why-we-must-reject-the-single-number-for-human-worth/