“We didn’t ban calculators. We taught math differently. We didn’t ban the internet. We taught research differently. So why are we trying to ban AI instead of doing the same?” We’ve been here before. I was a young teacher when the internet showed up in classrooms in the 90s. Educators panicked. Teachers worried it would make students lazy, that it would only be used for cheating, and that memorizing facts and dates would go out the window. They were right. Sort of. The internet did change things. But it didn’t destroy learning. It made us rethink what was worth teaching and how we wanted to spend instructional time. It pushed us away from memorizing trivia and toward analyzing, questioning, creating, and connecting. The same thing happened with calculators decades before. There was real fear that students would lose the ability to compute. But what actually happened was that students stopped getting stuck in multi-digit calculations and started spending more time doing real math. They m...
Finding the Sweet Spot: Rigor, Relevance, and the Real Work of Equity (Considering the Pedagogy of Paulo Freire)
“Students don’t need to choose between rigor or relevance, and neither should we. If we want learning to matter, it must challenge their minds and connect to their lives. Anything less isn’t equity.” There’s something timeless about Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed . His insistence that education must be a practice of freedom challenges us to rethink what it means to teach, to learn, and to improve systems that have long failed too many students. Freire didn’t just ask teachers to inform; he called on us to engage, to listen, to honor the lived experiences of our students, and to co-create meaning with them. That’s powerful. But it’s also a bit complicated. In today’s classrooms, teachers face so much pressure to accelerate learning and close gaps that reflect years, sometimes generations, of inequality. For those who value the efficiency and effectiveness of direct instruction, Freire’s ideas can seem to be pulling us in the opposite direction. I am an advocate fo...