I work in IT. I spent all day reminding people we stopped using that system years ago.
One thing I learned during 30 years in education: while you are focusing on improving one thing, another becomes a crisis.
Classroom grades reflect one’s capacity to succeed in a social hierarchical situation. Let’s recognize that and teachers’ biases… it easier to call them out as they can’t hide behind “objectivity.”
Your data… that “evidence your interventions work" may well be the Hawthorne Effect.
Abandon topics and outcomes to focus lesson. Use questions or problems instead. It will improve your teaching and students’ learning.
“Explain you thinking” helps until it doesn’t. The trick is for teachers to know when to stop.
I work in IT. I spend all days watching spinning icons.
The more teachers talk about how they report only academic learning in their grades (whatever they are), the more “other stuff” is included in what they are evaluating.
Over the weekend, I watched no football games, but many matches.
In education, we do some things very well. Unfortunately, they are not necessarily the things we should be doing.
Classrooms with seats in rows.
This elicits vastly different responses from teachers.
This elicits vastly different responses from teachers.
When I was an undergraduate student doing botany research, we realized our measurements were proxies for something else. They were not reified in our minds. One thing that drive me out of k-12 teaching in the US, was the fact that test scores had become reified.
It never ceases to amaze me to observe two or more people discussing “learning” and seeing they each have vastly different concepts of it but no one realizes it, yet they argue on. #education #teaching
“Taking a class in it” and “knowing it” are not the same thing.
Learning. A human activity full of myth and mystery, and dedicated to creating fading and false memories.
Learning. Such a simple idea. We all have done it for our whole lives. As humans, we have done it since the inception of the species. It has been the subject of philosophical discourse for centuries. Yet we seem to act like we have no idea how it might work.
"We are taking accessibility seriously," but we excuse leaders whose presentations are not.
If you can’t tell me what’s wrong with your data, I’m not interested in hearing what you think is right about it.
So many who argue “it will motivate them” do not understand motivation nor do they understand the individuals who are to be motivated.
When the consequences or rewards don’t work, don’t look for effective ones, look for a different theory.
One event isn’t a trend. Two aren’t either. Once you get to three, you can start being curious… but get some math to back up your argument if you start claiming a trend.
You say, “it’s this or that,” but in reality, there are far more options. Digital processing is the one obvious exception.
Objectively measuring the value of anything seems dubious… except maybe money and votes.
“As work turns into a contest, your livelihood becomes the prize.” -Madhumita Murgia
Those subject matters that are so important in school do not exist outside of it.
A blog post for my students studying for the AWS Cloud Practitioners exam focusing on economics and billing.
hackscience.education/2025/10/05/a...
hackscience.education/2025/10/05/a...
A Cloud Practitioner’s Guide to AWS Economics and Billing
128: AWS Cloud Practitioners: Economics and Billing Cloud computing has revolutionized how organizations manage infrastructure, scale operations, and innovate. But beneath the surface of elastic co…
hackscience.education
The best path forward rarely comes in survey results.
"Isolation is a surprising reality of an educator’s life." This isolation stems from a lack of meaningful, peer-level collaboration