Mike Paul

What Trump Is Really Up to in Washington

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You do not need the strongest powers of observation to see that crime is a pretext — and not the main reason — for the military occupation of Washington by federal agents and troops from the National Guard.

– Jamelle Bouie

You Might Be Trying to Replace the Wrong People with AI

I was at a leadership group and people were telling me “We think that with AI we can replace all of our junior people in our company.” I was like, “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. They’re probably the least expensive employees you have, they’re the most leaned into your AI tools, and how’s that going to work when you go 10 years in the future and you have no one that has built up or learned anything?

So says Matt Garman, CEO of Amazon Web Services. A better question to ask: What do you mean, you don’t want to teach your high school students how to use AI to help them write code and solve problems more efficiently?

We live in weird times when people constantly retreat to what came before and avoid any intention of moving on.

Life is the future, not the past.

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Black, Latino & Low-Income Kids Felt Better Doing Remote School During COVID

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The dominant story about COVID-era school closures has been simple: remote learning hurt kids’ mental health. And for many, that’s true. National data show American teens reported more loneliness and more suicidal thoughts between 2019 and 2023, with isolation during lockdown often cited as the culprit.

But a new study complicates that narrative. Researchers analyzed survey data from more than 6,000 middle schoolers during the 2020–21 school year and found a striking divide:

White and higher-income students were significantly happier and less stressed when attending school in person.
Black, Latino, and low-income students often reported the opposite—feeling less stressed and sometimes even happier when learning remotely.

In other words, remote school wasn’t universally worse. For some groups, it offered a reprieve from stressful in-person school environments, from health risks during the pandemic, or from inequities baked into the classroom experience.

The findings don’t suggest remote school is “better” overall. Academic setbacks during closures were real and disproportionately hurt the very students who sometimes felt mentally healthier at home. Instead, the study is a reminder that school isn’t a neutral space. How students experience it depends deeply on race, income, and environment.

As the researchers note, it’s not enough to flatten the pandemic into a single story of harm. Different groups of students experienced it differently—and will need different supports moving forward. If schools want to be places where all kids can thrive, they’ll need to reckon with why in-person learning left some students more stressed than staying home.

From Counting Blocks to Bias: Rethinking How We Teach Young Children Math

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Math is supposed to be the most “objective” subject in school. Two plus two equals four, no matter who you are, right? But research shows the way we teach early math is full of bias—and those inequities start shaping kids’ identities before they even reach third grade.

That’s the focus of the Racial Justice in Early Math project, a collaboration between the Erikson Institute and the University of Illinois Chicago. The team is developing resources—books, classroom activities, teacher trainings—to help educators confront racial bias in how young children experience math.

As project director Priscila Pereira points out, bias isn’t just an individual teacher problem; it’s baked into structures like scripted curricula, under-resourced schools, and practices like ability grouping. Danny Bernard Martin, a professor at UIC, highlights how stereotypes like “Asians are good at math” and deficit narratives about Black children filter into classrooms, shaping expectations in damaging ways. Even the smallest teacher choices—who gets called on, whose creative solutions are validated—can reinforce or disrupt those narratives.

The initiative is working to equip educators with not just strategies but reflective spaces: webinars, fellowships, and immersive experiences where teachers and researchers can rethink what it means to create racial justice in early math classrooms. As Pereira puts it, “We just have to keep doing the work, because we know what’s right.”

It’s a reminder that math isn’t just about numbers—it’s about identity, power, and whose ideas we choose to value.

Why Cellphone Bans Fail: Teens Always Find a Way

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From the Department of Banning Those Cell Phones Sure Did Wonders for No One comes a story out of South Carolina about… disposable cameras…

When South Carolina rolled out its statewide school cellphone ban this year, most stories focused on parents’ frustrations and kids’ grumbling. But at Woodland High School, one student decided to get creative.

Inspired by flipping through her mom’s old high school photo albums, Alianna Alston showed up with a disposable camera instead of a phone. The idea caught on fast—soon classmates were snapping candid moments without worrying about likes, filters, or notifications. “It was just straight happy vibes,” Alianna told Live 5 WCSC.

What started as a workaround to the ban has become something bigger: a way for students and teachers to connect, to capture real, unpolished moments, and to rediscover a technology that defined the ’90s and early 2000s. The humble disposable camera, once a vacation staple, is suddenly a symbol of presence in the age of digital distraction.

Of course, the irony here is delicious. Lawmakers ban cellphones to keep kids “focused,” and within weeks, teenagers are turning Kodak throwaways into a cultural moment. It’s almost like blanket bans don’t actually stop creativity, connection, or rebellion—they just reroute it. Students will always find ways to hack the system, bend the rules, and make something cool out of the scraps adults leave behind. Maybe that’s the real lesson: you can ban the phones, but you can’t ban the vibe.

Fugazi, GWAR, and a Teenage Cameraman: The DC Punk Archive Goes Online

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Between 1985 and 1988, a teenager named Sohrab Habibion lugged a bulky Betamax camera into punk and post-punk shows around Washington, DC. What he captured wasn’t slick production—it was sweaty clubs, blown-out sound, and raw energy. Decades later, his 60+ tapes have been digitized and uploaded to YouTube thanks to Roswell Films and the DC Public Library’s Punk Archive.

The collection is a time capsule: Fugazi tearing through songs a year before their first EP, the Descendents at their peak, the Lemonheads in their scrappy punk days, a feral GWAR in 1988, and even Dave Grohl behind the kit in Dain Bramage, years before Nirvana and Foo Fighters.

Habibion admits the footage is rough, shot by a teenager with no lighting and zero sound engineering—but that’s what makes it so authentic. It’s the kind of archival project that makes you wonder: how much of music history is still sitting in basements and closets, waiting to be rediscovered?

Wednesday Assorted Links

Tuesday Assorted Links

Democratizing AI in Education: David Wiley’s Vision of Generative Textbooks

David Wiley is experimenting with what he calls “generative textbooks” — a mashup of OER (open educational resources) and generative AI. His core idea is:

What if anyone who can create an open textbook could also create an AI-powered, interactive learning tool without writing code?

From Open Content to Open AI-Driven Learning

For decades, Wiley has championed open education resources (OER)—teaching and learning materials freely available to adapt and share under open licenses like Creative Commons. With generative AI now in the mix, Wiley sees a unique opportunity to merge the participatory spirit of OER with the dynamic adaptability of language models.

The result? A new kind of learning tool that feels less like a dusty PDF and more like a responsive learning app—crafted by educators, powered by AI, and free for students to use.

The Anatomy of a Generative Textbook

Wiley’s prototype isn’t just a fancy textbook—it’s a modular, no-code authoring system for AI-powered learning. Here’s how it works:

Learning Objectives: Short, focused statements about what learners should master.
Topic Summaries: Context-rich summaries intended for the AI—not students—to ground the model’s responses in accuracy.
Activities: Learning interactions like flashcards, quizzes, or explanations.
Book-Level Prompt Stub: A template that sets tone, personality, response format (e.g., Markdown), and overall voice.

To build a generative textbook with ten chapters, an author creates:

One book-level prompt stub
Ten learning objectives (one per chapter)
Ten concise topic summaries
Various activity templates aligned with each chapter

A student then picks a topic and an activity. The system stitches together the right bits into a prompt and feeds it to a language model—generating a live, tailored learning activity.

Open Source, Open Models, Open Access

True to his roots, Wiley made the tool open source and prioritized support for open-weight models—AI models whose architectures and weights are freely available. His prototype initially sent prompts to a model hosted via the Groq API, making it easy to swap in different open models—or even ones students host locally.

Yet here’s the catch: even open models cost money to operate via API. And according to Wiley, most educators he consulted were less concerned with “open” and more with “free for students.”

A Clever—and Simple—Solution

Wiley’s creative workaround: instead of pushing the AI prompt through the API, the tool now simply copies the student’s prompt to their clipboard and directs them to whatever AI interface they prefer (e.g., ChatGPT, Gemini, a school-supported model). Students just paste and run it themselves.

There’s elegance in that simplicity:

No cost per token—students use models they already have access to.
Quality-first—they can choose the best proprietary models, not just open ones.
Flexibility—works with institution-licensed models or free-tier access.

Of course, there are trade-offs:

The experience feels disjointed (copy/paste instead of seamless).
Analytics and usage data are much harder to capture.
Learners’ privacy depends on the model they pick—schools and developers can’t guarantee it.

A Prototype, Not a Finished Product

Wiley is clear: this is a tech demonstration, not a polished learning platform. The real magic comes from well-crafted inputs—clear objectives, accurate summaries, and effective activities. Garbage in, garbage out, especially with generative AI.

As it stands, generative textbooks aren’t ready to replace traditional textbooks—but they can serve as innovative supplements, offering dynamic learning experiences beyond static content.

The Bigger Picture: Where OER Meets GenAI

Wiley’s vision reflects a deeper shift in education: blending open pedagogy with responsive AI-driven learning. It’s not just about access; it’s about giving educators and learners the ability to co-create, remix, and personalize knowledge in real time.

Broader research echoes this trend: scholars explore how generative AI can support the co-creation, updating, and customizing of learning materials while urging care around authenticity and synthesis.

Related Innovations in Open AI for Education

VTutor: An open-source SDK that brings animated AI agents to life with real-time feedback and expressive avatars—promising deeper human-AI interaction.
AI-University (AI‑U): A framework that fine-tunes open-source LLMs using lecture videos, notes, and textbooks, offering tailored course alignment and traceable output to learning materials.
GAIDE: A toolkit that empowers educators to use generative AI for curriculum development, grounded in pedagogical theory and aimed at improving content quality and educator efficiency.

Final Thoughts

David Wiley’s generative textbooks project is less about launching a product and more about launching possibilities. It’s a thought experiment turned demonstration: what if creating powerful, AI-powered learning experiences were as easy as drafting a few sentences?

In this vision:

Educators become prompt architects.
Students become active participants, selecting how they engage.
Learning becomes dynamic, authorable, and—critically—free to access.

That’s the open promise of generative textbooks. It may be rough around the edges now, but the implication is bold: a future where learning tools evolve with educators and learners—rather than being fixed in print.

Bonus reading & resources:

What are OER and open educational practices?
Explore Wiley’s earlier thinking on prompt-based textbooks
The VTutor project, AI‑U framework, and GAIDE toolkit showcase related innovation.

2,178 Digitized Occult Books: Strange Treasures for Authentic Learning

In 2018, Dan Brown (yes, that Dan Brown of The Da Vinci Code) helped fund a project at Amsterdam’s Ritman Library to digitize thousands of rare, pre-1900 books on alchemy, astrology, magic, and other occult subjects. The result, cheekily titled Hermetically Open, is now live with 2,178 digitized texts—freely available in their online reading room.

At first glance, this might feel like a niche curiosity, the kind of thing best left to academics or fantasy novelists. But the truth is, these works are a goldmine for educators looking to spark authentic learning across disciplines. They’re messy, strange, multilingual (Latin, German, Dutch, French, and English), and they blur the boundaries between science, philosophy, medicine, and mysticism. And that’s exactly why they’re valuable.

Why Teachers Should Care

For a few hundred years, it was nearly impossible to separate theology, philosophy, medicine, and natural science from alchemy and astrology. Isaac Newton himself famously spent as much time on apocalyptic prophecies and alchemical experiments as he did on calculus and optics. To engage students with these texts is to remind them that knowledge has always been interdisciplinary, networked, and evolving.

That makes them perfect material for authentic learning and connectivist classrooms: students work with primary sources, make connections across fields, and grapple with how humans have always sought to explain the world.

How Different Subjects Can Use the Collection

English & Literature (HS & College):

Analyze archaic language, quirky spellings, and “long s” typography in original texts.
Compare occult poetry or allegories to Romantic and Gothic literature.
Use passages as mentor texts for student-created “modern grimoires” or magical realism writing.

History & Social Studies (MS–HS):

Trace how alchemy influenced the rise of modern chemistry.
Explore how astrology shaped political decisions in early modern Europe.
Debate the blurred lines between science and mysticism in intellectual history.

Science (HS Chemistry & Physics):

Contrast alchemical “recipes” with modern chemical equations.
Investigate how flawed models of the universe still paved the way for discovery.
Discuss how cultural context shapes what gets counted as “science.”

Art & Design (All Grades):

Study illuminated manuscripts and esoteric symbols as design inspiration.
Create modern visual interpretations of alchemical diagrams.
Explore symbolism as a universal language across time.

Philosophy & Civics (HS & College):

Debate the tension between hidden vs. open knowledge.
Compare Platonic philosophy, Christian theology, and occult traditions.
Examine how fringe ideas challenge (and sometimes advance) mainstream thinking.

Why It Matters

When students encounter these texts, they’re not just paging through dusty old curiosities. They’re stepping into a world where knowledge wasn’t siloed, where science, spirituality, and imagination lived side by side. For teachers, this is a chance to create assessments that matter—projects where students remix history, art, and science, using both ancient texts and modern tools like AI.

It’s weird. It’s wonderful. And it’s exactly the kind of resource that can make authentic learning feel alive.