Al Burton

The llama had enough of his shit. 😂

It’s probably fine that vast swathes zoomers and younger millennials exist in a kind of permanent internalized panopticon in which all actions are assumed to be (and interpreted as) performances for a viewer

A short history of American higher education

The key to getting kids to love writing essays is to have them argue a lot first. At The Socratic Experience, students spend months in vigorous Socratic dialogue in order to motivate substantive writing. 95% of writing is thinking. The sentence-level craft matters, but if a student has nothing to argue and no idea how to build a logical case, teaching them paragraph structure is like teaching someone to gift-wrap an empty box. We've discussed a pair of essays on "Should we bring the wooly mammoths back from extinction," one for and one against. Some students are all in with excitement about it; others are concerned about the potential for negative consequences. After spending an hour reading and discussing the ideas in the essays, making and hearing their peer's arguments, they gradually develop their own reasoned opinions on the topic. They are then motivated and ready to begin writing their essays. The oral argument becomes the scaffold for the written one. Students transfer the skills from discussion to writing with the help of their writing teachers: making a claim, supporting it with evidence, anticipating objections, and conceding points where the other side has merit. This is why our students perform well on AP-level writing. They haven't been drilled on essay formulas. They've been trained to think rigorously in conversation, and the writing is then taught using motivated examples from classroom discussion, with students owning their own opinions as they move forward.