Zach Czaia
@zachczaia.bsky.social
Poet. High School English teacher. Substack, "Teacher / Poet" here: https://zachczaia.substack.com/
It’s official: the Nerd Reich podcast is getting banned from YouTube….the week of my book launch! Incredible timing, since I’ll be all over the media next week talking about tech fascism. They can delete my account. They can’t stop my work. Buy the book: www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Ne...
The notion that Black people are uniquely unethical or have greater propensity to plagiarize is harmful. Toxic, even. White supremacists believe we don't have the IQ to read and write. And so, standards must be lowered, etc. White supremacy assumes the worst of our character and our intellect.
Perhaps uncomfortably for Bluesky users: no evidence that the left wing of the Democratic Party (Bernie, AOC, Mamdani etc) actually care about reorienting public education around human development à la the 1976 party platform. Maybe they’ve said something but if so it hasn’t been widely reported.
The thing is, I think these are all fundamentally correct & completely reconcilable political economies of the contemporary.
We're in the era of incompetence & cybercrimes headlined as "unprecedented model capabilities gone rogue." So OpenAI & Anthropic are trying to one up each other with such incompetence because the "press release as a service" performing media & clueless politicians parrot pre IPO CEO talking points.
"The entrepreneurs of materialized science fiction do not necessarily believe that 'all science fiction eventually comes true,' as Spielberg phrases it, but that all science fiction contains a submerged potentiality waiting to be activated by the heroic application of their surplus capital."
2026: A SpaceX Odyssey
The Empathy Aliens Are Not Coming To Save Us
theamericanvandal.com
the tests have changed, the scoring’s changed, the courses have, in many cases, changed www.the74million.org/article/sett...
Settling Scores: Experts Debate Why AP Performance Has Soared
Since the College Board began changing its grading criteria for Advanced Placement exams, scores have climbed rapidly.
the74million.org
"During the meeting, Ianetta and one other CCCC officer were told the “culture” of CCCC threatened NCTE’s nonprofit status. She did not receive further explanation about what that meant, she said." Many people--me included--would like further explanation. www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty...
NCTE Dissolves 77-Year-Old Composition Association
The National Council of Teachers of English’s decision was met with swift backlash from Conference on College Composition and Communication members, who say their organization is vital to advancing co...
insidehighered.com
“In the end, then, it all boils down to one word: property.” @yanisvaroufakis.bsky.social , as always, keeping his eye on the ball.
Yanis Varoufakis@yanisvaroufakis.bsky.social · last mo.AI & the False Consciousness Trap: "Ascribing human traits, consciousness in particular, to chatbots bestows upon techlords additional powers over us... " unherd.com/2026/07/ai-a...
it’s funny you’d think the classical ed guys would be celebrating this but no
Ignacio Gallup-Diaz@igallupd.bsky.social · 4w ago“A Penn professor thought she’d sell 1000 copies of her ‘Odyssey’ translation. She sold a million this year alone, thanks to Christopher Nolan.” “West Philly's Emily Wilson, who penned a highly acclaimed translation of the epic poem in 2017, is having a big summer.”
To be #Catholic is to practice solidarity and work for justice in the world. Proud to have led a prayer at a rally for two nurses illegally fired for leafleting. #union #UnionStrong
Here @mraleosays.bsky.social surveys the counters to The Atlantic’s viral “End of Reading” essay. He intuits from a skeet & an earlier essay where I’m headed with Deliberate Deliteracy: “The real threat is the war against the infrastructures & institutions that make all forms of literacy possible”
Three Theses On the Literacy Crisis
Why The Atlantic and the Moral Panic Machine Are Misdiagnosing the "End of Reading"
open.substack.com
As I'm browsing the @versobooks.bsky.social Summer sale, I'm thinking about how for what turned out to be my final birthday present from him, my father said he only wanted to "buy books which you can imagine might one day be illegal to sell."
New substack post up reviewing @doctorow.pluralistic.net 's excellent REVERSE CENTAUR'S GUIDE TO LIFE AFTER AI. Hope I did justice to this wonderful book. zachczaia.substack.com/p/lets-pop-t...
Let’s Pop That Bubble
A High School English Teacher’s Notes on Cory Doctorow’s The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI
zachczaia.substack.com
"The system, in its irrationality, has been driven by profit to spend billions for weapons of destruction and virtually nothing for children's playgrounds, to give huge incomes to men who make dangerous or useless things, and very little to artists, musicians, writers, actors." Howard Zinn, 1998
I just had this conversarion with an editor yesterday. If you start hedging for imagined bad faith readers, you have stopped writing and started journaling a fan fic to them.
BeijingPalmer@beijingpalmer.bsky.social · 4w agothere is literally no amount of caveats or careful wording that will protect you from stupidity or bad faith, so you might as well say things straightforwardly and strongly to begin with.
"AI products are designed to answer, never to say 'I don’t know.' The humans using them are learning to do the same." This feels, um, not good. thenextweb.com/news/ai-advi...
AI advice made people three times less accurate but twice as confident, researchers found
A study found that access to AI advice collapsed people's willingness to say "I don't know" from 44% to 3%, while accuracy dropped from 27% to 9%.
thenextweb.com
I almost can't take these people seriously because this Jeremy Wayne Tate dude reached out to me in his early days because he thought I'd be agreeable to his SAT alternative and it became clear in just a handful of emails that he is a goof. Now this goof is going to control curriculum for everyone
Annie Abrams@annieabrams.bsky.social · last mo.they're going for broke classiclearningtest.substack.com/p/welcome-to...
go on and mock but this is an improvement from the current dem position
Daniel Drezner@dandrezner.bsky.social · last mo.Klein argues that a liberal arts education has to be about not just preparing folks for jobs but providing guidance for how to live a freer life.
Behind all the crazy reactionary proposals for education is an imaginary where the pinnacle of scholastic best practices was like 1978-1987. I find that pretty much every non-educator over forty that I know, even those who are otherwise pretty sane, shares this delusion. I blame John Hughes.
Ed Reform Influencers Be Like, Maybe if we posted everybody’s grade in a public hallway! Maybe if all the men teacher wore jackets with elbow pads & all the women had perms! Maybe if sharpening a #2 pencil was a bigger struggle every day! Maybe if everybody was less hydrated!
A great read about a topic that deserves to be analyzed with nuance, but rarely is these days - phones. I think we're kidding ourselves if we think the Haidts of the world are right that just taking the phones away will instantly solve everything - and Luther does a great job of pointing that out.
Marcus Luther@marcusluther.bsky.social · last mo.Full piece here laying out the messiness of my thoughts around this: ⓵ strict, all-day phone bans made a clear difference ⓶ they also came at a cost with our students/families ⓷ ...we're still waiting on evidence that they do much good? thebrokencopier.substack.com/p/a-year-of-...
this program is going to sound great to some people who are talking about, for ex, horowitch's essay, who read the atlantic but not the national review, where tate published his pro-indoctrination essay, and there are potential implications for college admissions
Annie Abrams@annieabrams.bsky.social · last mo.they're going for broke classiclearningtest.substack.com/p/welcome-to...
Also books were written in actual space and time that really matter when it comes to understanding their meaning. Too many programs functionally treat them (esp Plato and the gang) as universal texts that don't need context. Okay, now I'm really going back to editing. 2/2
Some people have said to my face that AP's illiberal turn is "not a real problem," this is what they have in mind, and I understand where they're coming from, even as I disagree.
This is basically my entire educational philosophy in six words.
Alpha has a bevy of CogSci influencers, including folks like Carl Hendrick, on their payroll to paper over and obfuscate the behaviorism and surveillance with authoritative sounding words and phrases about “cognitive rigor” and the “science of learning.”
Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 2mo agoVery cool too how this chain of schools gets a glowing profile every few weeks even though reports like this exist.
