Clarify Priorities Constalty

Clarify Priorities Constantly from Leadership Freak

Fuzzy priorities waste energy. What is your priority today? This week? This month?

If you can’t list your priorities, you don’t have any.

If you have more than five priorities, you don’t have any. 

Is AI making us stupid?

 ​Just sharing:  You probably know Cal Newport ("Deep Work").  Here's a short excerpt of an interview where he's talking about AI and students (he teaches at Georgetown).  Seems wise.  I really like the "10,000 steps" metaphor.  

 Is Artificial Intelligence Eroding Our Ability to Think?

In this Chronicle of Higher Education interview with Evan Goldstein, Cal Newport (Georgetown University) talks about his worry that artificial intelligence is making us stupid. Some excerpts:

“When AI automates tasks that are repetitive or time-consuming,” says Newport, “or that you would be willing to hand off to a research assistant, I’m not so concerned. If a political scientist can use an AI coding agent to do a more comprehensive and faster data analysis to help them form an argument, that’s good.”

But he sees many students using AI to automate thought. “Think about having to write something and facing a blank screen. Blank-screen writing is hard. You might want to avoid that cognitive strain. You can get a good enough draft from AI and maybe edit it. You are spared cognitive strain. That worries me because cognitive strain is at the core of the entire post-Paleolithic human experience. It’s at the core of all big ideas. It’s at the core of empathy, morality, ethics, notions of justice and human rights, and religion and philosophy… Yes, automate drudgery. But automating hard thought is a dangerous direction to go.” 

The combination of distracting social media and artificial intelligence “is a powerful one-two punch,” says Newport. “This is a problem that’s 15 years in the making. The smartphone revolution and social media kicked this off. Now here comes AI at the worst time from the perspective of human thinking.”

“We need to think about cognitive fitness the way we think about physical fitness,” he continues. “There should be a simple rule for being a thinker in an age of AI: don’t let AI write anything for you. Writing is to cognitive health what steps are to physical health. Write that e-mail from scratch. Write that memo with the bullet points from scratch. Don’t flee the strain. You need it as much as you need those 10,000 steps a day.” 

How about the student experience? “We are going to look much more like classic Oxford than we do today,” says Newport. “More in-person testing, more blue books. Also, more Oxford-style tutorials where you sit with a proctor and walk through an argument and they assess how well you understand the material.” 

“Is AI Making Us Stupid? Cal Newport Is Worried” by Evan Goldstein in The Chronicle of Higher Education, March 27, 2026 (Vol. 72, #15, pp. 24-29)

NPR on the value of homework

 NPR on the value of homework:

This NPR discussion features two education writers who both support homework but from different angles, creating some interesting tensions:

The Core Agreement: Both Holly Korbey and Elizabeth Matthew support homework, particularly for older students. They compare it to practice in sports or music—you need repetition to build skills.

Key Tensions:

Why homework disappeared: Elizabeth blames higher education's "equity" approach—eliminating achievement to close achievement gaps. Holly focuses more on public perception that learning should always be "fun and creative," unlike how we view athletic practice.

What homework actually does: Elizabeth emphasizes executive function—having deliverables, meeting responsibilities to non-parents, building independence and routine. Holly stresses cognitive benefits—storing knowledge in long-term memory rather than relying on Google, practicing foundational skills like multiplication tables.

The class contradiction: Elizabeth points out that upper-middle-class parents complain most about homework burdens, yet lower-income families (who may actually struggle more with time) could benefit most since their kids have fewer structured activities and homework provides screen-free constructive time.

The research: Clear benefits for middle/high school students, but elementary school evidence is mixed. Both acknowledge there was too much bad homework in the mid-2000s, leading to overcorrection.

The alarm: Both worry about declining national reading and math scores over the past decade, suggesting the no-homework trend may be contributing to academic decline.

Students Reading Challenging Texts

 From Marshall Memo 1115

 Timothy Shanahan on Students Reading Challenging Texts

In this online article, Timothy Shanahan (University of Illinois/Chicago) responds to a teacher worried that students will be frustrated and discouraged if they’re required to read material above their current level. “I don’t want to undermine anybody’s motivation or love of reading,” says Shanahan, and he acknowledges that reading difficult texts can be frustrating and sometimes leads to off-task behavior and discipline problems, especially if students are trying to do so without support. But easy, boring texts can also lead students to act out, especially if they sense that their teacher has a negative mindset about “low readers.” 

“Let’s face it, motivation is complicated,” says Shanahan. “Difficulty can lead both to withdrawal and intensification of effort.” Students can feel incompetent struggling with a difficult text or get a sense of efficacy mastering it. They can feel inept or be driven by a desire to please a teacher, learn new information, and connect with peers. Simply adjusting the instructional level of a text to a child’s “just right” level doesn’t solve the problem of motivation – and risks the stigma of being assigned to a low reading group. Most important, leveling won’t accelerate students’ reading level and give them the feeling that they’re catching up.

“Instead of avoiding challenge,” says Shanahan, “I think it better to introduce it intentionally, placing students in books that they cannot already read well” – and then provide scaffolding and emotional support that encourage persistence and build skill, fluency, and background knowledge. Three important elements:

• Choose texts that connect with students’ interests and are worth reading.

• Give students a sense of the progress they’re making, emphasizing a growth mindset.

• Don’t overdo it; not every text has to be above level, especially independent reading.

“Won’t Challenging Texts Discourage Young Readers?” by Timothy Shanahan in Shanahan on Literacy, November 29, 2025; Shanahan can be reached at shanahan@uic.edu. 

Excerpts or whole novels - Tim Shanahan

 link to his article

How to Get High-School Students Reading More Closely

 How to Get High-School Students Reading More Closely

from Marshall Memo 1111 (Nov 3, 2025)

In this Cult of Pedagogy article, Jennifer Gonzalez says that with so much text reading
in schools, “sometimes, in some classes, with some students, it can get pretty boring. Pretty
dry.” She interviewed high-school English teachers Brian Sztabnik and Susan Barber, who
have an online presence (Much Ado About Teaching) and recently published a book of
strategies for getting students more engaged with texts. Here are three of their ideas:

• Reconstructing poems – A poem is cut up (into lines, phrases, or individual words)
and students put the poem back together, annotate their version, and compare it with the
original. “It’s forcing students to do a close reading of the poem,” says Barber. “If I would
have passed out this poem and said, I want you to do a close reading, their eyes would be
glazed over.” Putting the pieces together gets them slowing down and thinking about lines,
phrases, words, punctuation, and meaning.

• Inferential timeline – Each student is assigned a few pages from a section of the novel
being read by the class and writes on an index card or sticky note the most important thing that
happened on those pages, with a quote that illustrates it. “This is all about decision-making and
cutting out the extraneous details and just focusing on what’s really important,” says Sztabnik.
“Often it’s either character development or increasing conflict or maybe a symbol finally
emerges.” Students post their cards on a timeline on a wall.
Students then stand up, choose another student’s card, and add a new card under it with
an explanation of why they believe that moment was significant in the grand scheme of the
novel. Finally, students do a gallery walk of the whole timeline, taking notes on the inferences
their classmates made.

• Text rendering – The class reads a passage and each student chooses the sentence or
line they think is most important, then the most important phrase within that sentence, then the
most important word in that phrase. Students defend their choices to the full class, then small
groups work together to draw general conclusions about the passage. Barber says she came up
with this idea because students were often vague about where they got an idea from a text (It’s
just there, they’d say). Text rendering gets them reading much more closely and zeroing in on
specific language and meaning.

“3 Fresh Strategies That Get Students Engaged with Texts” by Jennifer Gonzalez, Brian
Sztabnik, and Susan Barber in Cult of Pedagogy, October 26, 2025; Gonazlez can be reached
at gonzjenn@cultofpedagogy.com . Sztabnik and Barber’s book is 100% Engagement.

Know the signs of AI writing

 

Know the signs of AI writing

from this website

There are telltale signs of AI writing. If you’re new to teaching or unfamiliar with AI, just knowing these can help grow your AI Spidey Sense. Here are some to look for:

• The Em Dash – AI, ChatGPT especially, loves to use the em dash (—). And it usually uses it incorrectly, substituting it for a comma. Students, however, almost never use an em dash, especially below 11th grade. (For lovers of the em dash, like myself, this royally sucks.)
• Parallel Structure – AI frequently leans on triplets or balanced phrasing (e.g., “She was strong, she was brave, she was determined”). Students usually don’t polish structure that deliberately.
• Empty language – AI was designed to fill a word count. It’s very good at using vague, meaningless, or unnecessary words, often culminating in a bland and empty essay.
• Overly tidy paragraphs: Each one often follows the same rhythm (topic sentence + evidence + conclusion) with no natural tangents, quirks, or false starts.
• Smooth but generic transitions: AI loves words like moreover, furthermore, consequently, in conclusion. Real students are more likely to mix “so,” “but,” or skip transitions entirely.
• Vague sophistication: AI favors slightly elevated but non-specific words (significant, crucial, deeply, inherently, resonates, underscores). Students tend to swing between too casual or too forced.
• Clichéd analogies: AI might drop clichés like “a double-edged sword,” “a beacon of hope,” “paints a vivid picture.”
• Balanced but bland tone: One nice thing about grading AI-generated work in upper level ELA classes is that it isn’t that good or interesting.
• Symmetrical answers (usually in 3s): If the writing prompt a 3-part question, the response will almost always have three neat sections, each similarly sized. AI loves 3s: three main ideas, three body paragraphs, or even just the number three.
• Perfect grammar: This may be dependent on your students’ grade level, but if a sixth grader writes a 4-page essay without a single error, I might be impressed…or suspicious.
• Impersonal responses: AI writing usually removes 1st person POV from student writing. If you required a personal response, AI writing might come off as a level or two removed from this.