International Mother Tongue Day is next week Friday, but my students and I will be embarking on their annual Week Without Walls trip so I’m a week early with this post – hopefully it will be of some use to those of you planning on celebrating it in the library. I will be upfront about my objection to it being called Mother Tongue Day – as it denies all the families where the language of other significant family members are spoken at home. I prefer the term “home language”. This year is the silver jubilee of the event. Despite all efforts, languages are becoming extinct at an ever increasing rate, and unfortunately this doesn’t attract quite as much attention as pictures of cute or not so cute animal. Schools and other educational institutions are complicit in this – something I’ve been banging on about for years, the lack of multiple-lingual home and heritage language education I still see as a failure of imagination rather than a failure of resources in this day and age. Ok, off my soap box and back to the practical.
These lists started with a casual conversation with KD as to what I had planned for the day, as my passion for language is well known. Which led to a discussion on which books one would consider and then, as usual things got a little out of hand and now I have 9 pages of posters of books that feature language. Language in all its glorious and inglorious forms. Learning language, struggling with a language, speaking or not speaking. Sign language. Heritage language. Language and thought, language and power or control. Selective mutism. Denial of language, erasure and extinction of language.
As for what to do – if I were here, these are the things I would do.
Have big sheets of paper our where the community could write down the languages they speak / read / write. The languages they’re learning. The languages of their fathers, mothers, grandparents.
I’d have them make a language family tree. Have a poster with a QR code that led to this quirky test on Language.
As usual here is the link to the template / books used. In return I’d love some comments on the books you recognise and the link to language! And any displays or activities you’re planning. And of course if you have suggestions of books I’ve missed I’d appreciate you adding them in a comment.
I am thinking a LOT about AI. My participation in thinking and reading as a factor of my actual usage would be something in the realm of 1 million to 1 at the moment. Save for some tedious bits and pieces like analysing surveys and the occasional laziness in making very short book summaries (which I then have to correct extensively anyway) I’m just not feeling the joy. Please do not construe in any way that I am therefore “feeling the fear”. No. I’m just spending a lot of time exploring and thinking about it. And what it means. And in particular what it means for the current generation of students / young people.
I started blogging in 2003, and blogged about losing my identity as a person while I spent time being a SAHM, holding the threads of my existence together through bringing up children internationally, nuturing bilingual and multi-cultural beings. I then deleted that blog as it had become too personal, too well known and I had become too identifiable and my children had become adolescents and had a right to their own privacy and thoughts and being. Then I started studying to become an educator and librarian and spent four years in academic pursuit, where for many of my courses, blogging was a course requirement. It was a really good thing to make reflections on learning via blogs a course requirement. At WAB (my previous school) elementary students also blogged and I think there can be nothing as wonderful as seeing the thoughts, words and intellectual development of young people developing and maturing and growing over time. Nothing makes better writers than doing a lot of writing. And through writing, one does tend to become a better writer and find your “writers voice”.
Last week our school shut Grammarly off for students. It’s a tool that has always personally irritated me, as I still grew up with the luxury of uninterrupted schooling where we went to school for our lessons, did all our sports and activities after school at school, had no internet, and government controlled TV that only came in after I turned 12. It was a plain vanilla, no frills government school and there wasn’t even enough money for an arts programme. Yes, huge deficits in my education but I did get grammar. The old fashioned way. Swings and roundabouts.
What did Grammarly do? Well, the new update allows students to highlight a paragraph and request Grammarly to rephrase or improve their writing three times a day for free using AI. And teachers were being given work that didn’t reflect the thoughts, intents, abilities or voice of their students. Teachers care. They care deeply that tools can be used to aid the students that need it the most. They also care that tools don’t get in the way of intellectual and skill development. Writing well takes a LOT of practice and also a LOT of reading and if there are any short cuts I’m not aware of them.
The word of the year in 2023 was “Enshittification“, a termed coined by Cory Doctrow and explains the process of platforms first being good for their users, then abusing the users so businesses can make money off the users, then abusing the businesses go get a piece of the pie and then dying. It is the first two parts of the equation that are of most interest to me viz a viz education and AI.
“Being good for their users” needs a modifier – “appearing to be good for their users”. In his long form article Andrew Nikiforuk touches on “whole foods are being replaced by ultra-processed stuff” which was exactly the analogy I was thinking of while reading NYTimes wellness challenge of this week – the article talking about “Are ultraprocessed foods really that delicious?” and asking readers to compare an ultraprocessed product to its natural equivalent. Unfortunately for many young people when they compare their complex pubescent self to what media is telling them is “the real thing” they feel like they come up short, not the artificial reality. One of the disturbing trends with young people is their anxiety and obsession with being perfect (and not just academic – look at the beauty / makeup thing – talk about a distraction) – some of which is parent / adult driven through a failure to understand or recognise that young people are not hatched with perfect writing, grammar, thought, and research skills. That is the whole point of being at school. We’re seeing a bunch of ultra-processed writing and assignments and research at the moment and I’m not sure that it’s leading to better learning.
I’m currently reading “We do not welcome our 10-year-old Overlord by Garth Nix” – it’s a great middle grade version of this process of something external to humanity trying to take over under the auspices of “being good and doing good”. What I see, even with the most simple of all tools – a spelling check – is that students will type without any attention to spelling or capitalisation and expect the computer to mop up after them. And the next time the word / phrase is used they will continue to use it incorrectly and have auto-correct sort it out. The question then is whether there is any learning happening. And the meta question whether that learning needs to occur or not? Do we enter dangerous territory when we start deciding which students need to know things or not, develop skills in certain areas or not? We do not know what we don’t know and they definitely don’t. It would be way to easy to decide that perhaps some students don’t need to develop a writing voice and that it’s all so hard for them that it’s OK for AI or other tools to just take care of writing and editing what that tool thinks it is that the student is trying to express. Can you see where this is going? Because if we are not exposed to many ideas and thoughts and schools of thought and philosophies and histories how can we have enough information and knowledge under our belts to know what it is that we want to express? How can we know what OUR thoughts and feelings are when we’re in a feedback loop echo-chamber?
Back a little to the blogging thing – if students reflect on blogs that are open to the community it is so much easier to see what is normal and appropriate for each age group. Now we have writing that is largely hidden except to the teacher and their peers if they do comparative grading, and perhaps the adults in the lives of some of the students who will judge it by their adult standards AND whatever tools that are on student computers that again will transform the writing to some external adult standard. I’m also fascinated with, within the context of the apparent need for grading and scoring the work of students how granularity has decreased to the absurd point of students getting a score out of 4 for their efforts. Really? While packing up my life yet again for the move from China to Dubai I came across my old school reports. Everything was graded from 0-100 and there was plenty of room to improve from say a 69 to a 75 or an 89 to a 95 and no one ever ever ever got 100%. There was nuance. A lot of nuance. In the IB system scoring is to 8 and now in the American system it’s to 4. Talk about a blunt tool with which to sculpt learning!
I was just listening to Maggie Appleton (whose writings, as a cultural anthropologist turned Tech person on AI I really appreciate – particularly this one on the dark forest and generative AI) on the HanselMinutes podcast and I love her ideas about using AI for rubberducking – not just for IT debugging but for debugging your ideas and thoughts – although as she says it’s not really built for that as it’s more inclined to “yes AND” than to be a critical partner. I’m so long in the tooth that I remember when blogging was the medium for rubberducking your thoughts and every post got good handfuls of thoughtful comments by real people who would challenge or corroborate on your thinking. I made a lot of IRL friends off the back of blogging back in the day!
I’m fascinated about what other people think about student writing and student voice in writing as opposed to all that is being written about adult voice being taken over by AI – it is terrible, but how fortunate we have been to be allowed to develop a voice in the first place. Are we denying that to this generation of potential writers? Here is a link to one article in Writer’s Digest – of interest are all the other related articles at the bottom including some on maintaining voice as a comedian.
My good intentions to blog more have come to naught, but here’s some of the stuff I’ve been busy thinking about / learning / pondering / contemplating.
Read Around:
One of the things I’ve noticed moving from PYP / elementary librarian to Middle School is the apparent lack of curiosity in the students coming into the library. I’m sure there are many developmental and sociological reasons for this – not the least the necessity to belong and be cool. This combined with my drive to help “sense-making” in the library for our students – where a plethora of books is wonderful from a curation point of view but hopeless from a choice POV (POV is a very important thing in middle school parlance at the moment) means I’m spending a lot of my spare time (haha, not much of that unfortunately) making “read around” posters that go into look books that are a non-digital physical way of signposting books and hopefully stimulating curiosity and interest beyond what’s going on in the curriculum.
It’s still in a pretty messy form, so I’m not quite yet ready to share my Canva templates, but here are a few examples.
Kind of related to that Katie Day and I are busy creating the “Essential Middle School Nonfiction book list” – a “best of” in our opinion of the books now available for Middle School Students – and tagging the books along a bunch of dimensions of format, topic, geo-location etc. That should be ready soonish.
Learning and AI
Again, with my partner-in-learning, Katie, we’re preparing a talk for educators and parents for the Neev Literature Festival (if you’re anywhere near Bangalore India, that’s the place to be next week – an amazing line up of authors and speakers).
I became somewhat interested in AI, Blockchain and learning and matters related in the summer of 2018 thanks mainly to an article by Jeremy Howard on learning Chinese since at that point I was still in China and actively learning Chinese and I’m always fascinated and very fond (in an intellectual sense) of people who were climbing that mountain with me – this is a more recent podcast featuring him on the subject. I’ve since moved on to learning French and German using Duolingo – which I’m still somewhat deeply sceptical about, but more or less sucked into a learning streak which I suspect is more algorithmically behaviourally induced than true learning. I remember moments learning chinese when I literally was feeling my brain creaking – something Duolingo hasn’t managed to re-create.
Where am I now? Well, AI has progressed a lot faster than my interest in it, if I am completely honest. I’m not sure if it’s a result of a fundamental distrust of whatever the “latest thing” is, or I’m joining Socrates and Plato on a distrust of a new technology – their view being “writing is a fundamentally representational activity. The act of writing only records ideas; it cannot generate them” and I’m with the AI camp saying “AI is a fundamentally regenerational activity; it can only regenerate ideas; it cannot generate them”. Actually I must say I disagree that writing only records ideas – through the process of writing and researching in order to write I do think I generate ideas … maybe not world-changing ones, but ideas nonetheless.
A few things I’ve been watching / reading that I think are of use have been:
Rory Sutherland’s “Are we too impatient to be intelligent” two quotes I particularly liked were “…a problem, I think, which bedevils many technologies and many behaviours. It starts as an option, then it becomes an obligation. We welcome the technology at first because it presents us with a choice. But then everybody else has to adopt the technology, and we suddenly realize we’re worse off than we were when we started.” and “there are things in life where the value is precisely in the inefficiency, in the time spent, in the pain endured, in the effort you have to invest.” – thinking about what he is saying resulted in the title of this blog.
Jay Caspian Kang’s “Does A.I. Really Encourage Cheating in Schools?” with this message “school isn’t about creating new scholarship or answering questions correctly—it’s about teaching proper work habits. A young person who takes the time to go into a library is more likely to develop the types of work habits that will allow him to find accompanying bits of information that might be useful in creating a novel, an algorithm, or a convincing argument. Setting aside the obvious offense of dishonesty, the problem with cheating isn’t so much that the student skips over the process of explaining what they learned—it’s that they deprive themselves of the time-consuming labor of actually having read the book, type out the sentences, and think through the prompt.”
Joshua Rothman’s “What Does It Really Mean to Learn?” – I really loved this article about Leslie Valiant’s book “The Importance of Being Educable” – our ability to learn over the long term. I started reading the book but think the article actually covers the most important points very well.
I’ve also been reading around various academic papers in search of some kind of a framework within which to think about how to teach critical information literacy towards AI. There are a lot of very interesting “click-bait” titles, but so far not very much in the way of substance – so watch this space.
I’m wondering if it’s time for a renaissance. At least in the conversations I’m having with some educators we’re moving back to using nonfiction books for research, printing out articles from databases, using fewer resources more intensively and other such retro ideas. Faced with 22 students aged 10-12 learning about inventions in Mesopotamia I am resisting using the phrase “skim and scan” before they can actually read a paragraph, a page, a chapter and be able to tell what the main idea is and how that relates to what they already know and what they think they still need to find out.
It’s been a little while – but I’m going to direct you all to what I consider to be one of the best series of articles the NY Times has brought out – Errol Morris’ “The Anosognosic’s Dilemma: Something’s Wrong but You’ll Never Know What It Is” about the Dunning-Kruger effect “When people are incompetent in the strategies they adopt to achieve success and satisfaction, they suffer a dual burden: Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it.” besides American (and other) politics, there are few places where this is more rampant than in middle school. It’s not our role as educators to point this out to our students, but rather to bring them to the point where we create the environment where they are nudged into making the right choices – at the very least around learning and to commence that journey of being able to glimpse the horizons of knowing what they don’t know.
Informative Flights - Musings of a Teacher Librarian 