Tag: creativity

If AI Can Do the Assignment, Maybe the Assignment Isn’t the Learning

“Eighty-three percent of LLM users could not quote a single line from essays they had written minutes earlier.”

That’s one of the headline findings from this opinion piece based on a recent MIT Media Lab preprint that has already begun making the rounds in education circles.

Participants were divided into groups and asked to write SAT-style essays. Those using ChatGPT reportedly struggled to recall exact lines from what they had written.

OK…

Now let’s ask the question every researcher should ask before panicking:

Compared to what?

How many SAT writers in 2005 could quote a line from an essay they had just finished?

How many college freshmen in 1995?

How many graduate students?

How many professors?

Because if we’re going to treat “couldn’t quote a sentence from their essay” as evidence of cognitive collapse, I’d like to see the baseline before we start sounding the alarms.

This article treats AI like the arsonist. Looking at the timeline, AI seems a lot more like the fire alarm.

I have written thousands of pages over the course of my career. Blog posts. Research papers. Grant applications. Professional development materials. Dissertation drafts. Articles.

Y’all, if you handed me something I wrote ten minutes ago and asked me to quote a sentence verbatim, there is a non-zero chance I’d stare at you like C-3PO trying to calculate the odds of surviving an asteroid field.

Human beings generally remember ideas. We remember arguments. We remember stories.

We do not typically store exact wording like we’re running a local backup server.

But the more interesting question isn’t whether ChatGPT users remembered sentences. The more interesting question is why in the hell we think that matters?

What strikes me about the growing conversation around AI is that many of the arguments reveal assumptions we’ve been carrying around for decades without examining them.

The underlying assumption is this:

“If a student produces an essay, learning has occurred.”

Has it?

Really?

Because AI didn’t create that problem. AI exposed it.

For years, we’ve designed assignments where the product stood in for the thinking.

  • Write the essay.
  • Complete the worksheet.
  • Build the slideshow.
  • Answer the questions.
  • Turn it in.

And because producing those things required effort, we assumed the effort itself was evidence of learning.

Now we have technology that can produce many of those artifacts in seconds, and suddenly we’re discovering that the artifact was never the point; it was the thinking.

This shouldn’t be surprising; we’ve seen this film before, and we didn’t like the ending.

  • Calculators didn’t destroy mathematics.
  • Google didn’t destroy knowledge.
  • Spellcheck didn’t destroy writing.
  • Wikipedia didn’t destroy research.

Every few years, society education finds a new villain. Every technological shift produces a wave of satanic panic, followed by cooler heads prevailing and an objective realization that what mattered was never the tool. It was the thinking behind the tool.

The irony is that the Chronicle article cites evidence of declining literacy that predates ChatGPT by years.

  • NAEP scores were falling before large language models existed.
  • Concerns about reading stamina existed before ChatGPT.
  • Complaints about student attention spans existed before ChatGPT.
  • College professors were writing “students can’t read anymore” essays before ChatGPT was even a research project.

The timeline matters.

If the disease existed before the patient was exposed to the virus, we should probably be careful about diagnosing the cause.

And here’s where I may part company with some of my colleagues: AI isn’t the biggest threat revealed by this study. The biggest threat is discovering how many of our assignments can be completed without demonstrating actual understanding. They are, for all practical purposes, “bullshit” assignments.

The questions are all made up, and the points don’t matter. (Thanks, Whose Line!)

That’s uncomfortable because it gets down to the heart of the problem: the education system itself. It’s the tasks, the assessments, the systems we’ve built around compliance, completion, and artifact production.

I’ll take a moment here and step on all my project-based/deeper learning/authentic learning/transformational learning friends here as well: Just because students produced something doesn’t mean they learned anything. Be careful whom you look down upon, o great creators of “we did this really fun thing, and my kids were so engaged and had a blast, but they didn’t really learn anything and didn’t produce anything new.”

The real question isn’t:

“How do we stop students from using AI?”

The real question is:

“What evidence would convince us that learning actually happened?”

Can students explain their thinking? Defend their reasoning? Apply ideas in a new context? Revise their understanding when presented with new information? Transfer knowledge across disciplines? Create something that wasn’t possible before?

Those are much harder questions than “Did you write the essay?”

But they’re also the questions that matter.

AI is not causing the literacy crisis. It’s just bringing it to the forefront because we’ve been ignoring it for years and just kept doing what we always did – god, I hate that phrase – because that’s what was easy for teachers and schools. Keep cranking kids through the machinery of the education system and ignore any type of quality control that’s SCREAMING at you that something is terribly wrong.

All we’ve ever been concerned about is the end product. We’ve never worried about the process. And that, my friends, is the core issue. To quote Brandon Sanderson, “Journey Before Destination.”

Because the journey is far more important.

The Best Books for Understanding AI — A Reading List for Educators and Curious Humans

elderly man thinking while looking at a chessboard
Photo by Pavel Danilyuk on Pexels.com

A quick note before the list: I’ve been living in this space for a while now — as an instructional coach, a Google Certified Innovator, a doctoral student, and someone who uses AI tools daily in my actual work. The books I’m recommending here are ones I’d press into the hands of a thoughtful educator or a curious non-technical reader. This is not a developer’s reading list. If you want to build LLMs from scratch, you’re reading the wrong blog.

What I care about: understanding what these systems actually are, what they can and can’t do, what they mean for teaching and learning, and how to think clearly about the cultural and ethical questions they raise. The AI book market has exploded with hype, doom, and everything in between. Most of it isn’t worth your time. Here’s what is.

Where to Start

Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI — Ethan Mollick (2024)

This is the book I recommend first to every educator asking me where to begin, and it’s not particularly close. Mollick is a Wharton professor who has been using AI in his classroom since the day ChatGPT launched and writing about it — honestly and with genuine curiosity — at his Substack ever since. Unlike most AI books, this one was written by someone with actual daily practice rather than theoretical distance.

The central argument is in the title: AI as co-intelligence, not replacement intelligence. Mollick’s four rules for working with AI are practical enough to start using today and deep enough to keep thinking about. His concept of the “jagged frontier” — that AI is weirdly capable at things we’d consider hard and oddly bad at things we’d consider easy — is the single most useful mental model I’ve found for calibrating what to expect.

For educators specifically, Chapter 7 on AI in schools is worth the price of the book alone. Mollick is genuinely thoughtful about the implications for assessment, expertise development, and what we’re actually asking students to do when we assign traditional work in an era of capable AI tools. He doesn’t hand you easy answers. He asks better questions.

Worth noting: some readers already deep in this space find it a bit surface-level, and it was written in 2023, so some specifics are already dated. Read it for the framework, not the technical details.

Get Co-Intelligence

Understanding What AI Actually Is

Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans — Melanie Mitchell (2019)

Still the best accessible introduction to what AI fundamentally is and isn’t. Mitchell is a computational complexity researcher at the Santa Fe Institute, and she brings real intellectual rigor to a topic that attracts an unusual amount of noise. This book predates the LLM explosion, which is actually part of what makes it valuable — it gives you the conceptual foundation to understand why systems like GPT surprised even the researchers who built them.

Mitchell is especially good on the gap between narrow AI capability and what we loosely call “understanding.” If you want to have an informed opinion about whether AI is “really” thinking, read this first.

Get Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans

The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-First Century’s Greatest Dilemma — Mustafa Suleyman (2023)

This is the big-picture book. Suleyman co-founded DeepMind and Inflection AI before becoming CEO of Microsoft AI — he is, in other words, someone who has spent his career at the center of this thing. The Coming Wave is his argument that we are facing a genuine civilizational inflection point with AI (and synthetic biology), and that the window to build appropriate containment structures around these technologies is narrowing rapidly.

What distinguishes it from most AI doom-or-boom books is specificity. Suleyman doesn’t deal in vague anxieties — he makes concrete arguments about the concentration of power, economic disruption, and the structural problems of trying to regulate technology that spreads faster than governance can follow. Readable, serious, and useful for understanding why AI isn’t just a productivity story.

Get The Coming Wave

The Ethics and Alignment Problem

The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values — Brian Christian (2020)

If you want to understand why making AI systems that reliably do what we want them to do is genuinely hard — technically, philosophically, and ethically — this is the book. Christian spent years interviewing researchers at the leading AI labs and built a rigorous, human-readable account of the problem at the center of AI safety.

The alignment problem isn’t abstract. It shows up in recommendation systems that optimize for engagement and produce radicalization. It shows up in hiring algorithms that encode historical discrimination. It shows up every time a system is optimized for a measurable proxy of what we actually want, rather than the thing itself. Christian is excellent on how this happens, why it’s hard to fix, and what the researchers working on it are actually doing.

This book complements Mollick’s more optimistic framing well. Read both.

Get The Alignment Problem

Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence — Kate Crawford (2021)

The critical perspective this list needs. Crawford, a researcher at USC and co-founder of the AI Now Institute, makes a compelling argument that AI systems are not software abstractions — they are material, political, and economic objects with real costs and embedded power dynamics. The rare earths in the hardware, the data center energy consumption, the contract workers’ labeling training data in difficult conditions, and the labor displacement — Crawford maps all of it.

I don’t agree with everything in this book, and Crawford’s perspective is explicitly critical rather than balanced. But the questions she raises are important and underrepresented in the mainstream AI conversation. If you’ve read Mollick and want a counterweight, this is it.

Get Atlas of AI

The History and the People

Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought AI to Google, Facebook, and the World — Cade Metz (2021)

The best narrative history of the deep learning revolution. Metz is a New York Times technology reporter who covers this beat obsessively, and he had remarkable access to the key figures: Geoffrey Hinton, Yann LeCun, Demis Hassabis, and the others who turned decades of dormant theory into the technology now reshaping every industry.

This is the book if you want to understand why everything changed so fast after 2012, what the competitive dynamics between labs looked like, and how the researchers themselves thought about what they were building. Reads like a thriller — the science is real, the rivalries are real, and the ethical stakes land harder when you know the people involved.

Get Genius Makers

For Educators Specifically

Brave New Words: How AI Will Revolutionize Education (and Why That’s a Good Thing) — Salman Khan (2024)

Sal Khan founded Khan Academy. He’s also an optimist, which comes through clearly in this book. Brave New Words makes the case for AI as tutor, mentor, and educational equalizer — arguing that tools like Khanmigo can bring the one-on-one tutoring advantage (Bloom’s famous “two sigma” finding, that individual tutoring improves outcomes dramatically over classroom instruction) to every student who needs it.

I read this more critically than I read Mollick, because the institutional interests are more directly aligned with the argument. But the core vision — that AI could close genuine equity gaps in access to high-quality educational support — is worth taking seriously, and the specific examples from Khan Academy’s work are compelling. Read it alongside the Crawford book for balance.

Get Brave New Words

The Short Version

If you read only one: Mollick’s Co-Intelligence. It’s the most practical and most directly relevant to anyone working in education or doing knowledge work of any kind.

If you want the big picture: Suleyman’s The Coming Wave. The most serious argument about what’s actually at stake.

If you want the history: Metz’s Genius Makers. The best story of how we got here.

If you want the ethics: Christian’s The Alignment Problem for the technical/philosophical dimension, Crawford’s Atlas of AI for the political/material dimension.

These books sit alongside my broader reading on technology and education — if you’re interested in that context, the Zettelkasten post covers the note-taking system I use to actually hold onto what I read across all of this.


The Eclectic Educator is a free resource for everyone passionate about education and creativity. If you enjoy the content and want to support the newsletter, consider becoming a paid subscriber. Your support helps keep the insights and inspiration coming!

AI doesn’t write well, but neither do most people

Giles Turnbull has some thoughts on AI-generated writing:

First of all, I’ll come clean about where I stand, generally speaking: I’m an AI sceptic, especially on using AI for writing. I can see it being useful for other things – but that’s because I’m a writer, right?

I see AI generated text and most of the time, I think it’s rubbish. It’s dull, it’s derivative, it always sounds like a thousand other things I’ve read before. Because the AI has been trained on those thousands of things, all now easy to find on the internet.

But: do I think AI is quite good at making simple software, or basic web tools? Well, yeah, I have tried it for that, and I thought: “Hmm yeah this isn’t too shabby.”

And of course I would think that, wouldn’t I? I don’t know better. I’m not a software engineer.

I have a feeling that everyone likes using AI tools to try doing someone else’s profession. They’re much less keen when someone else uses it for their profession. I fall into the same trap as everyone else. I recognise, and admit to, my own bias.

Yes, using AI to do a job someone else does is fun. Ultimately, generative AI is an efficiency tool. Writing a first draft, especially for students who don’t have a lot of experience, is absolutely something AI can do for you. It will give you structure. It will help you overcome the blank page.

Should you then take up the writing task on your own? Sure. The only way to get better at writing is to write, whether it’s a human or AI.

Write more. Use whatever tools you have to get it done.

Source: gilest.org: AI and the human voice

VOLUMES: ONE (SELECTIONS FROM MUSIC CONCERTS 2019-2023 BON IVER 6 PIECE BAND) | Bon Iver

11 track album

Finally got the chance to put this in my ears with the onset of Spring Break. Justin Vernon never ceases to amaze me with his inspired combination of analog and digital music tools. This is tons of fun, gotta pick up the vinyl soon.

(Update: grabbed it on vinyl — if you’re a Justin Vernon fan and don’t have a turntable yet, that’s a hole in your life you should fill. I use this one, and it’s been rock solid.)

Source: VOLUMES: ONE (SELECTIONS FROM MUSIC CONCERTS 2019-2023 BON IVER 6 PIECE BAND) | Bon Iver

Bon Iver - Volumes: One - Album cover

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

Curiosa Physica

I want to tell you about a library in Amsterdam housed in a 17th-century building called the House with the Heads, funded in part by the author of The Da Vinci Code, with a collection that was granted UNESCO Memory of the World status in 2022, and whose digital archive you can browse for free from your couch right now.

The Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica — the Ritman Library, now housed at the Embassy of the Free Mind — contains roughly 30,000 titles on Western esotericism, mysticism, alchemy, astrology, Kabbalah, Rosicrucianism, and related traditions. In 2018, after Dan Brown donated €300,000 to fund the digitization project (he’d visited the library multiple times while researching The Lost Symbol and Inferno), the library launched what they called, with genuine wit, Hermetically Open: a free, publicly accessible digital archive of its rarest pre-1900 texts. As of 2025, 2,178 books are fully scanned and available online.

The collection includes the Corpus Hermeticum from 1472, Giordano Bruno’s work from 1584, the first printed visual representation of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life from 1516, alchemical manuscripts with intricate hand-drawn diagrams, and hundreds of texts in Latin, Dutch, German, French, and English that blur every boundary we’ve drawn between science, philosophy, theology, medicine, and magic.

My first thought when I found this collection was: this is exactly what I want students to encounter.

Why “Occult” Is the Wrong Frame for This

The word does its work on us. “Occult” conjures Halloween aesthetics and conspiracy theories, and it’s easy to dismiss the whole thing as fringe material with no serious application in a classroom.

That reaction, though, says more about our current assumptions about knowledge than it says about these texts.

For several centuries of Western intellectual history, there was no clean dividing line between alchemy and chemistry, between astrology and astronomy, between hermetic philosophy and natural science. Isaac Newton — who gave us calculus, the laws of motion, and the theory of universal gravitation — spent at least as much of his intellectual energy on alchemy and Biblical prophecy as he did on physics. His alchemical manuscripts are available online too, through Cambridge’s digital library. The man who arguably launched the scientific revolution was also, by any contemporary definition, deeply engaged in occult practice.

This isn’t an embarrassing footnote. It’s actually essential context for understanding how scientific knowledge develops — through the messy, often wrong, often ideologically entangled process of humans trying to make sense of the world with the conceptual tools they have available. The Ritman collection is a primary source archive for that story.

As a doctoral student who has spent years reading about how knowledge is constructed, organized, and transmitted, I find this collection genuinely thrilling. These books are where the medieval and the modern collide. They’re where you can see what people got wrong and what they got surprisingly right, often in the same text, often for reasons that have nothing to do with intelligence and everything to do with the conceptual frameworks available to them.

That’s exactly what I want students to sit with.

What Makes This Useful for Teachers

The collection isn’t neat. It’s multilingual, dense, and built for scholars. That’s part of the point — it’s not pre-digested curriculum content, it’s actual historical material that requires work to interpret. For teachers who believe students should wrestle with primary sources rather than always receiving polished summaries of them, this is a goldmine.

A few ways I’d use this across disciplines:

History and Social Studies — Trace how alchemy became chemistry. Look at how astrology shaped political decisions in early modern Europe. Ask students why the intellectual tradition represented here was systematically excluded from what we now call the history of science, and what that exclusion says about how we decide what counts as legitimate knowledge.

English and Literature — The visual and linguistic strangeness of these texts is remarkable. The archaic spellings, the “long s” that looks like an f, the allegorical imagery, the blend of Latin and vernacular — all of it offers material for close reading and for connecting to the Gothic, Romantic, and magical realist traditions that drew heavily from this well.

Science — Contrast alchemical “recipes” with modern chemical procedures. Examine how flawed models of the cosmos were still generative — the people using them weren’t stupid, they were working at the edge of what was knowable. What does that say about our own current models?

Art and Design — The illuminated manuscripts and alchemical diagrams in this collection are extraordinary visual objects. The symbolic language is dense and codified and genuinely beautiful. There’s serious material here for design history, visual communication, and semiotics.

Philosophy — The Hermetic tradition represents a sustained attempt to synthesize Greek philosophy, early Christian theology, Jewish mysticism, and natural observation into a unified account of reality. That synthesis didn’t work out the way its practitioners hoped. But the attempt itself raises questions about knowledge, interpretation, and the limits of any single framework for understanding the world — questions that don’t go away.

The cross-disciplinary angle is what I find most powerful. One of the things that frustrated me most in my years as an educator before moving into instructional coaching is how thoroughly we’ve siloed knowledge. Students take chemistry, history, and English as separate things, as if the history of chemistry weren’t fascinating, as if the literary history of science didn’t exist. The Ritman collection doesn’t respect those boundaries because it predates our drawing of them.

The Resource

The collection is free, fully accessible online, and searchable — though the search interface takes some patience. The direct link to the digital catalog is here. I’d recommend starting with the “Digital collection” page, which gives you some orientation before you dive in.

A few things worth knowing:

  • The majority of texts are in Latin, Dutch, German, or French. English-language texts exist, but aren’t the majority. For classroom use, this is actually an opportunity — translation, context-building, and working with unfamiliar material are valuable skills.
  • The image quality varies, but the rare and fragile items were prioritized for digitization, so many of the most valuable texts are well scanned.
  • The broader collection, which includes 30,000 titles and continues to grow, is housed at the Embassy of the Free Mind in Amsterdam. If you’re ever there, it’s worth visiting.

The collection earned UNESCO Memory of the World status in 2022, a designation UNESCO does not hand out lightly. This is genuinely important cultural heritage, now freely available to anyone with internet access. That’s remarkable.

Dan Brown’s novels that led him to the Ritman Library — The Lost Symbol and Inferno — both draw heavily on the kind of Hermetic and esoteric tradition documented in this collection. If you want a somewhat lurid but surprisingly well-researched tour of the ideas, they’re a decent starting point. Brown is not a subtle writer, but he did his homework.

Related on this site: the AI books post covers how knowledge evolves and what it means to think critically about the tools we use — a thread that runs directly through what this collection makes visible.

New Tools I’m Trying in 2026

black and red headphones beside black smartphone and white earbuds
Photo by Tara Winstead on Pexels.com

I’m revisiting some of my everyday tools as we head into 2026. Why? Because… reasons…

Mostly, I’m thinking about how I move through my days and how I combine analog and digital tools to keep my monkey brain moving and productive.

Tool 1: I’ve moved away from Google Search. Face it, friends: it’s trash. Whether beset by so many ads you can’t find actual sites or that actual, worthwhile sites are pushed further and further down the page because of the ongoing enshittification of Google and other services, I’ve switched to Kagi.

I won’t go into all the details of why here (soon), but suffice it to say that Kagi just works like a good search engine should. Yes, I now pay for the privilege of decent web searches. Or, I ask ChatGPT for an awful lot of things before I try any searches at all.

Tool 2: I’m abandoning Notion for all but one thing, and that’s tracking my reading. I’ve got a database for all my books (read, TBR, and want to buy) in a Notion database and using a tool called NotionReads, I can easily add books to the database, pulling necessary data for each book.

I thought about just using a Google Sheet for this purpose, but Notion works well for this process. For my daily note capture and digital Zettelkasten, I’m moving to Obsidian. I’ve had it for a few years but initially went with Notion for note-taking. However, after dealing with more software bloat than I wanted and only seeing more of it on the horizon for Notion – why do we always want a tool to do everything rather than just doing one thing really well? – I’m jumping ship to Obsidian.

I’m still using Readwise to capture highlights from the web and the few remaining Kindle books I’ve yet to read – more on my shift from digital to physical books soon – and I can import those highlights seamlessly into Obsidian. I’m using Steph Ango’s usage strategy for setting up my Obsidian vault since it makes the most sense to my seeing-all-things-as-an-interconnected-web brain. More on how that progresses soon, too.

Pulling into the final year of my dissertation journey, there’s more to come from me this year. Besides, this year marks 20 years of publishing web content, so we’ll see what that brings.


The Eclectic Educator is a free resource for everyone passionate about education and creativity. If you enjoy the content and want to support the newsletter, consider becoming a paid subscriber. Your support helps keep the insights and inspiration coming!

MP Daily Telegraph: October 15, 2025

The Atlantic Telegraph 1866
The Atlantic Telegraph 1866 via Internet Archive
  • Illustrative Math’s CEO on What Went Wrong in NYC and Why Pre-K Math is Up Next – Illustrative Mathematics created a K-12 math curriculum used in many U.S. schools, but its rollout in New York City faced challenges due to implementation issues. The curriculum encourages students to think about problems before teachers explain solutions, blending direct teaching with student exploration. The organization is now focusing on early math by developing a pre-K curriculum to help students succeed from the start.
  • Mark Rober’s underwater search for a flooded Gold Rush mining town – (This is so FREAKING cool) Mark Rober used sonar and a small submarine to search for a flooded Gold Rush town under Folsom Lake in California. The town was covered by water after a dam was built in 1955. Despite challenges, the team found interesting shapes and objects on the lakebed.
  • D’Angelo: 14 Essential Songs – D’Angelo was a talented soul singer, songwriter, and producer known for his unique style and deep musicianship. He released three important albums blending soul, funk, jazz, and hip-hop, influencing the neo-soul movement. Despite personal struggles, his music remains powerful and full of emotion, exploring love, pain, and social issues.


The Eclectic Educator is a free resource for everyone passionate about education and creativity. If you enjoy the content and want to support the newsletter, consider becoming a paid subscriber. Your support helps keep the insights and inspiration coming!

A Quick Zine Resource Guide for Teachers

how to use zines with students

I’ve been on a zine kick for a while now, and recently had the chance to walk teachers through making their first zine.

We worked on creating their own zines, which was fun and made many of them uncomfortable, which is perfectly OK. I compiled some quick links and information, and we discussed potential ideas they might consider and run with when working with students.

Oh, and here’s the zine I made during one of the sessions. Feel free to use it to introduce the idea of zines to your peers and admin.

a zine about zines

Download the Zine About Zines

What Is a Zine?

  • A zine (short for “magazine” or “fanzine”) is a small-circulation, self-published work, often made by hand, that can take many forms—comics, essays, art, collages, instructions, etc.
  • Because zines are informal, tactile, and often DIY, they offer a low-stakes way for students to share voice, experiment with layout or narrative, and synthesize content in creative formats.
  • Zines are used in classrooms to teach skills such as media literacy, personal narrative, research synthesis, visual thinking, and more.

Folding a Zine — The One-Sheet Method

One of the simplest and most powerful forms is the one-sheet zine (fold, cut, fill).

Tools, Templates & Digital Zine Options

ResourceWhat It OffersLink / Notes
Zine-O-SphereSubstack exploring zines, art, culture, and DIY publishing.https://abigailschleifer.substack.com/s/zine-o-sphere 
“Using Zines in the Classroom and How to Make a Single Page Booklet Zine” (OER)Includes guidance + printable master flat for one-page zinesCUNY Academic Works
SCU Library’s Zine GuideWalkthroughs for physical & digital zines, plus design tips, templatesSCU Library Guides
The Arty Teacher: How to Make a ZineStep-by-step guide with photos, cutting/folding instructions, and classroom ideasThe Arty Teacher
“Teaching with Zines” (ZineLibraries.info)A compiled zine (yes, a zine) with resources, best practices, and reflections on using zines in educationzinelibraries.info
Barnard Zine Library – Lesson PlansSample lesson plans, ideas across content areas, ways to scaffold, suggestions for grading/feedbackzines.barnard.edu
TUIMP: The Universe In My Pocket“Using Zines in the Classroom and How to Make a Single-Page Booklet Zine” (OER)arXiv

Prophets of a Future Not Our Own

Photo by Zhimai Zhang on Unsplash
Photo by Zhimai Zhang on Unsplash

A friend made this prayer into a short video and, while the focus is on the work of Christians (real Christians, not the power-mad Christian Nationalists currently trying to ruin literally everything in the world), I can’t help but see our work as educators reflected here, as well.

This prayer was first presented by Cardinal Dearden in 1979 and quoted by Pope Francis in 2015. This reflection is an excerpt from a homily written for Cardinal Dearden by then-Fr. Ken Untener on the occasion of the Mass for Deceased Priests, October 25, 1979. Pope Francis quoted Cardinal Dearden in his remarks to the Roman Curia on December 21, 2015. Fr. Untener was named bishop of Saginaw, Michigan, in 1980.

It helps, now and then, to step back and take a long view.

The kingdom is not only beyond our efforts, it is even beyond our vision.

We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction of the magnificent
enterprise that is God’s work. Nothing we do is complete, which is a way of
saying that the Kingdom always lies beyond us.

No statement says all that could be said.

No prayer fully expresses our faith.

No confession brings perfection.

No pastoral visit brings wholeness.

No program accomplishes the Church’s mission.

No set of goals and objectives includes everything.

This is what we are about.

We plant the seeds that one day will grow.

We water seeds already planted, knowing that they hold future promise.

We lay foundations that will need further development.

We provide yeast that produces far beyond our capabilities.

We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that.

This enables us to do something, and to do it very well.

It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way, an
opportunity for the Lord’s grace to enter and do the rest.

We may never see the end results, but that is the difference between the master
builder and the worker.

We are workers, not master builders; ministers, not messiahs.

We are prophets of a future not our own.


The Eclectic Educator is a free resource for everyone passionate about education and creativity. If you enjoy the content and want to support the newsletter, consider becoming a paid subscriber. Your support helps keep the insights and inspiration coming!