Dr. Andrew Johnson is a Reading Specialist and a Distinguished Faculty Scholar and Professor of Literacy at Minnesota State University. I, David Boulton, am a Learning Activist with Learning Stewards. Dr. Johnson and I have very different views about reading and the process of learning to read. We agreed to learn together and respectfully […]
“There is no greater injustice than to wring your profits from the sweat of another man’s brow.” — Abraham Lincoln There was a time in the U.S. when it was perfectly legal to own people and treat them like livestock. Juneteenth is the date the laws forbidding slavery reached the last remaining jurisdiction. While remembering and […]
It’s Time to Awaken Your Learning Rewind your life twenty minutes or twenty years. Now ask yourself: “What’s the difference between my innermost me back then, and my innermost me now? What’s the difference in how I am who I am? What about ME has changed?” Now ask yourself: “Within what’s changed, what’s not a […]
NAEP (K-12) scores aren’t perfectly accurate measures of grade-level reading proficiency. NAAL (17-year-old and up) scores aren’t perfectly accurate measures of adult literacy. The fact that they are separate assessment systems used to report on very different populations and yet come pretty close to predicting each other suggests they are both in the ballpark and […]
Bill Maher is known for pushing boundaries, criticizing and provoking both political wings, and for hosting conversations on a wide variety of important topics. During his April 21 2023 “Real Time” HBO show, Mr. Maher seemed startled as he read the headlines from a recent newspaper piece: “One in three children in America can […]
“It blows my mind that people can’t apply exponential growth to the capabilities of AI. You would’ve been called a *lunatic* a year ago if you said we’d have GPT-4 level AI right now. Now think another year. 5yrs? 10yrs? It’s going to hit them like an asteroid.” “I saw it happening from well before […]
This clip begins with Dr. Peterson suggesting that motivating kids to learn to read is key to improving our educational and societal improvement efforts. He then proceeds to provide an overview of the conventional (Science of Reading) model of teaching reading. The clip ends with the prescient statement: “if the faculties of education were […]
Learning genderizes our gender. Learning doesn’t determine gender – learning determines genderization.
The most powerful shame motivates us to avoid what might lead to feeling it. It’s how body-shame limits our clothing choices and performance-shame limits our singing and dancing. Most importantly, it’s how mind-shame limits our learning. For more see: Mind-Shame
It’s not sentient terminator or big brother AI. It’s AI used like a superweapon by political and corporate predators.
