Category: Education

(This is my twenty-fifth post in a series of entries I’m using to participate in Blaugust for 2026.)

The Hechinger Report has some great writers who hit important points as they cover news stories about education. They also have frequent “Opinion” pieces which tend to be guest essays, frequently written by someone with a vested interest in having you buy into the idea(s) they’re selling.

They might be good ideas! However, it’s always a good idea to understand bias exists and look at the work through that lens. (I don’t exempt myself from this. Everything I put on this site has bias, because it’s MY website. We tend to see news sites in a different light, though.)

Take, for example, a recent opinion piece by Lenore Skenazy on letting children play rather than providing guided instruction.

The author has a book on the subject as well as a nonprofit to promote these ideas. The bias is clearly there. This is not a news story so much as an ad read for their ideas.

They aren’t bad ideas.

One of the things I enjoy doing in my K-5 classes is giving students a day to just experience a new tool. Most times I’ll go over some basics “Your brush options are over here on the left, the color picker works like this,” but after that I let them loose.

I never go over everything. First, there’s too much. The only ones who’d get to play with the tool would be the ones who stopped paying attention.

Just as important, though, would be how the students learn after that. Invariably, someone does something they think is cool. They yell to the rest of the class in a way that, for other lessons, would be seen as disruptive.

Suddenly, there’s a crowd of kids around one computer learning how to do a thing from one of their peers. They all go back to their seats, eager to try it out for themselves.

This usually happens several times in the same lesson. On occasion, I learn something new as well.

Later on I’ll come in with a more narrowed scope, where we use that same tool to make a certain kind of artwork. They learn new skills and techniques, then, often ones that translate to a variety of media in an outside of my classroom.

But they remember the joy they got from trying things out. That sticks with them as they incorporate those first day lessons into the new one.

That sticks with them.

(This is my twenty-fourth post in a series of entries I’m using to participate in Blaugust for 2026.)

Edsurge has an article by David Weldon on Middle School reading scores and their continued decline. As much as I’m tempted to turn this post into another rant against high stakes testing and its effectiveness, I’m just going to ask you to review your notes for that chapter and move on.

My own love of reading stems in part from my mother. She was a kindergarten teacher and frequently read to us before bed. (Sometimes she sat in the hallway so all of her children could hear the same story at the same time.) On long car trips, SHE was the audio book.

I read my first book without assistance because I’d gotten so tired of my sister asking for the same story over and over again that I just grabbed something else and read it to myself out of spite. Not the best motive, perhaps, but I was a child and that was the memory.

This of course required a lot of books. We had a bunch, sometimes found at yard sales and flea markets, but as someone who’s recently taken up thrifting as a hobby I can tell you that still takes money, and what you save in finances you lose in time and energy.

Fortunately, we had a solution: Our town’s public library.

My mother left the classroom when she had me, so she had the time to bundle us kids up and drive us to the most exciting building in town once a week. We each got books that seemed interesting to us, with the curation mostly limited to “get it from the children’s section” up until I was old enough to walk there after school on my own.

This seems idyllic in part because I’m viewing it through the lens of nostalgia, but also in large part to my mom’s hard work.

… and there’s the cost.

Libraries are free to the public, but if my mom had still been teaching I’m not sure we’d have been able to go once a week, or even once a month, during the school year. My father worked much harder to make ends meet so that we could have the privilege of growing up with a stay-at-home mom.

Finances aside, wrangling children is an adventure of its own. My sister (not the one mentioned earlier) is the most put-together makes-the-right-parental-choices person I’ve ever met, and I’m not saying that lightly. It still takes her a significant amount of time to load her two small children into a vehicle to go on a short trip.

She’s also a stay-at-home mom.

So how do two income families manage library trips?

How do single parent families manage library trips?

There’s an ongoing theme of people below a certain economic threshold having a very hard time to get above it. Everything requires money, it seems, and if you want to save money you either need to already have enough money or have enough time.

Those who are struggling frequently have neither.

Libraries are painfully aware of this, and are here to help.

The last place I lived, I signed up for a library card without ever walking through the door of their local branch. I went to the website and entered some information, then *poof,* I had an identification number that was effectively my card.

(It was faster to go into the library near my current place and get a card, but I’m privileged to live very close to that library.)

At the time, I used it to sign up for Libby. It’s a great service provided by many libraries that offers free books in both text and audio formats. These are still considered loans from your local library so if 4 people want to check out a book and they have authorization for 3 copies, one of them will have to wait, but you’re not paying a monthly Audible subscription or Amazon membership for the privilege of downloading books to your phone or tablet.

I’m not going to say Libby’s a perfect solution because there isn’t any. It still requires you to have an online device and, as ubiquitous as phones tend to be these days, they aren’t always available.

But my love of reading comes from my mother reading to me, with weekly trips to the library.

If Libby or something like it had been around back then (and the internet … this was before then, too), those weekly trips could have been daily.

She wouldn’t have even had to load up the car.

(This is my sixteenth post in a series of entries I’m using to participate in Blaugust for 2026.)

Emanuel Maiberg has an article on 404 Media that tells the tale of Microsoft saying “No, not like that!” after insisting that their employees should all be diving head-first into the slop-fest that is AI.

It turns out that AI use can get expensive, and when you expect those under you to use the expensive things more and more, you start realizing how wasteful that is.

One could draw parallels to school level high-stakes testing. We talk a lot about “teaching to the test” like it’s a bad thing, but very little is done about it because those tests are how we measure student success.

If those in charge (we’re talking politicians and those appointed by them, here) thought teaching to the test was actually bad, they wouldn’t make the test so darned important.

In a recent post on this very site, I mentioned that until recently the big event for digital media arts programs in my district is a district-wide Film Festival. It’s still seen as the biggest thing, with more pomp and circumstance pumped into that than most events.

This, in spite of the push to cover the other aspects of digital media covered in our curriculum. It’s slow going, in part, I think, because the big prize is for video production, not the other things.

We have other awards, now, an I welcome the improvements. Inertia’s a pain sometimes, though.

I think about stuff like this when I’m writing my rubrics. What’s that particular project’s big thing? If that’s not the part getting most of the instructional time, why not?

And if I don’t like the results I’m getting, what do I need to change? How much needs to be changed, and how do I present those changes to my students?

(This is my fourteenth post in a series of entries I’m using to participate in Blaugust for 2026.)

Ars Technica recently reported on Mexico’s largest university doing a completely remote entrance exam, and the disaster that resulted from it.

I won’t be using this to rant about AI, though the anti-cheat cameras were “AI powered.” I won’t be using this to rant about anti-cheat lockdown procedures either, though I’m also not a fan of those.

Neither of those would be needed if we didn’t still rely on high-stakes testing as a measure for student aptitude and accomplishment.

Now I’m not opposed to the occasional quiz. More often is better, because one off day can be balanced out by the rest. If done well, quizzes can even be used as tools for reinforcing the information students need to know.

But the big chunks of a student’s assessment should be evaluated by looking at what they can do, and I’m not going to get that by looking at how often they picked the right answer out of four possible options.

Show me a movie they made, an image they painted, a book they wrote, a business they planned, a robot they built, or anything other than a series of A, B, C, and D answers.

There’s a reason why some colleges have stopped caring about SAT scores, and it might be related to the reason why there’s no peer reviewed evidence showing a correlation between high test scores and success after school. (I vaguely remember Pearson publishing a study on their website that showed it, but their bias alone would probably prevent it from getting through peer review.)

If there’s one thing the SAT is known to show, it’s how wealthy the students’ parents are.

But we still use them, because, and say it with me, now: “We’ve always done it this way.“

And of course we have.

Multiple choice questions are easy to grade. Easier, now that we can have computers do it for us, but I’m old enough to remember Scantrons and hand grading.

We picked the easy over the good, because we have so many other things we’re told to get done and, quite frankly, grading tests is tedious.

(I will not segue into complaining about AI here, but I want you to know there was effort involved in that decision.)

There’s so much more value and reward in seeing students make something. It can still be graded objectively, you just need a rubric.

What amazes me is how many teachers don’t even know how easy rubric grading can be. They’re taught the test and then told to teach to it. I don’t have an article to link for that one, but I recall my days as a traveling art teacher where the principal specifically asked me to show sample rubrics to the teachers in her building because the teachers didn’t know how to use them.

The Better Way: Rubrics

When I’m making a rubric, I ask a simple question: “What do I want the student to accomplish with this specific project?”

We’re not talking a course-long activity here, we’re frequently looking at a single day’s worth of work (maximum 2 weeks, for my older students).

This is where my ADHD comes into play. I’m going to have a short list, because if I start getting distracted while writing it there’s no way I should expect a student to focus through the whole list.

The result is going to be 3-5 things I want their work to include. My youngest students might only have 3 “look-fors,” and even the older students are usually going to have 4. Point values may or may not be distributed evenly, depending on what I want valued.

My older students, for example, will usually have a list of 4 requirements, each worth 25% of their grade. In the beginning of the year my youngest students might instead have a ranked list of scenarios, where managing to log into the computer without help gets them most of the way to an A.

“When the ink was still wet on my certification I sometimes made a list of 10 things I needed to see. Granted, I was teaching high school at the time, but that was still a lot to get done. I like my current method much more.

“But Aaron,” you might ask, “How do I make sure they know everything the test checks in Chapter 5 of the math textbook?”

Great question.

How do you know they’ll remember any of that the day after the test?

My students don’t forget how to make movies, because it’s interesting and compelling enough that the knowledge sticks with them. If I have them make a movie covering a math concept they might not memorize a whole chapter, but they’ll be more likely to have that part down.

Now have the rest of the class make videos about the other sections in that chapter.

Have everyone in the class critique each other’s videos. Give them the rubric, and ask for positive and constructive feedback.

I do this in my classroom. The Critique Days count as an assessment score. My classes aren’t small enough for everyone to watch everything in one day, so I limit them to 10 critiques, with any extras as extra credit.

(I sort them alphabetically by student name and have every student start with their own video, so ideally no two students are grading the exact same list of videos.)

If you want to be really daring, you can average the scores the students give together and have that be a portion of the grade. Reserve the right to override the result, though. I’ve found my students collectively tend to be on the mark for a lot of things but every now and then a misunderstanding results in what would result in an unfairly low grade without me correcting things.

(I’m not the only voice in my classroom, but I reserve the right to be the loudest one.)

So, yeah, ditch high stakes tests. They’re bad. The people who make us have to use them should feel bad for doing so. Assign a project. Use a rubric. Everyone’s going to have a lot more fun learning that way.