Hi friends,

A short note this time—I gave two sets of remarks this week, one prepared and one impromptu, and I thought I’d share them with you here.

On snacks, AI, and informed consent

The first was on Wednesday night at a CEC meeting, where I was invited to give the president’s report. CECs are New York City’s version of school boards, but entirely performative. Parents have no real power in the country’s largest school system. In December, our CEC was the first to adopt a resolution calling for a two-year moratorium on AI, and in response we’ve been ignored. Our district is also one of the loudest champions of HMH, an increasingly AI-enabled curriculum that has, at its core, no books. I used my time to ask the question: if I have to consent every time my kid eats a snack at school, why isn’t there an informed consent process around ed tech? You can read it here.

On the vital importance of humans in the writing process.

The next day, at my school’s school leadership team meeting, we were charged by the district to watch two propaganda videos made by HMH and evaluate whether we thought an AI program was helpful or harmful for student learning.

When we talk about learning, we need to define our terms. What do we want kids to be able to do? I teach people how to write for a living, and nothing I do is aimed at getting them to write a sentence that will pass Grammarly’s scrutiny. Instead, I think of writing as a fundamentally human process that allows us to share ideas, hopes, and art across time and space.

This is what we owe our students: we don’t take forklifts to the gym so that weights can get lifted, and we don’t use machines so that great sentences can be crafted. The world doesn’t need more essays on Romeo and Juliet. It needs humans who have struggled through writing the essay. We entrust teachers to help our kids explore their thoughts, ideas, and visions through words. You can read a more expanded version of my thoughts here.

I continue to believe that, as I shared with my writing community earlier this year, “the world needs your work more than it ever has. We need you to be writing, researching, thinking, teaching kids how to think and analyze and write—we need you to be doing what makes us most human. The work that you do is part of an intensely democratic project.”

When the same AI companies and funders that are helping our government wage an unjust war so badly want to take books out of schools and teach your children to write for machines, insisting on human writing taught by humans is a profoundly revolutionary idea.

On that note, I’m going to go read some bedtime stories—Matilda, Isadora Moon, and the Golden Compass.

Come join us tomorrow in Manhattan! We have songs, snacks, and signs!

xoxo

Kelly