Claude Is Free for Teachers. Here Are Fifteen Things I Use It For.
Stefan Bauschard,
2026/08/03
This is quite a good article, and while I know there are AI sceptics, especially when it comes to teaching, it would be well worth reading this, not so much as a list of things to do with AI, but for its focus on the really pragmatic and practical uses to which it can be put. In none of these is the teacher's judgment being replaced by AI; rather, what we see is an emphasis on saving time and improving quality in rote tasks. The author uses AI to update examples in a debating textbook, for example, instead of not doing this at all. Or for looking up 'Boltzmann brains' to learn something about which he knows nothing. Or writing camp reports where this would have been impossible previously. Turning "distribution into a five-minute job instead of an hour of clicking."
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Is AI Reasoning Right for the Wrong Reasons?
John Pavlus,
Quanta Magazine,
2026/08/03
The real question being considered here is I think buried in the second half of this article: "How much does it matter whether or not we can accurately observe, characterize, and validate the processes at work inside large reasoning models?" And the answer is: it depends. "If LRMs can supercharge mathematics research the way AlphaFold did for computational biology, this line of thinking goes, why not embrace them, idiosyncrasies and all, and just verify the results?" Which makes sense to me. Indeed, the idea of 'reasoning' as "arriving at a sound conclusion by linking together intermediate steps that logically follow from each other" might itself be wrong, an artifact of centuries of rationalization rather than rationale. "When an LRM produces a correct answer — along with pages of 'thoughts' showing how it got the result — intuition tells us that the two must be linked. It's hard to imagine that process and outcome may have little to do with each other." But intuition may well be wrong.
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The Pseudoscience of Reading
2026/08/03
I was raised on phonics but early in life discovered there was a second way to read that did not involve sounding out words. This way, I could read a lot faster without losing comprehension. I don't begrudge the phonics; it helps my writing a lot to be able to 'speak' it internally as I compose. But I would never have wanted to depend on phonics alone. Even as it is, it left me with a deficiency in formal and abstract thinking, which again I had to painstakingly recover later in life. That's why this article - and the research it references - is important to me. As Catherine Compton-Lilly and colleagues argue, "based on decades of reading research, continuing to focus only on phonics is educational malpractice." There's no one best way to teach reading; it depends a lot on context. "Complexities related to the teaching of reading lead to different children learning to read in different ways."
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A Classroom Ritual for Peer Affirmations
Marcus Luther,
Cult of Pedagogy,
2026/08/03
A classroom is like a little society (as no doubt many others have observed). It is a closed information environment, especially if external media are banned and if the students don't rotate teacher to teacher. It is (as the title of this blog suggests) something that can come to resemble a cult. Therein lies its strength - and its danger. Take this post about creating, supporting and recognizing a set of values over the course of a year. This can be a powerful tool for conditioning students - but we need to understand that it's a form of conditioning, and not a learning or cognitive exercise. Are the underlying values freely chosen by the student? No. Is there room for an alternative set of values? No. This is why education has become so politicized in some societies, and why it's so important to push back against this.
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Tech oligarchy
Kean Birch,
Science as Culture,
2026/08/03
This article could be much more clearly written, but the basic argument is this: a 'tech oligarchy' has emerged that uses private ownership, market concentration, venture capital, tax strategies, regulatory influence, and control over infrastructure to defend and expand its wealth. What is significant is that this tech oligarchy defines itself as significantly more intelligent than the rest of society, and that therefore the oligarchy, rather than (say) democratic processes, should define the future of society. Intelligence, on this account, is identifies with wealth accumulation; great wealth is the surest evidence of great intelligence. If that doesn't seem right to you, it is not only because you are not intelligent enough to see it, you "have no idea what's even going on at those levels." If this is true (and this is me speaking now) then the sole function of education ought to be to teach people how to acquire wealth; and the sole measure of innovation ought to be whatever people will pay for. This function alone defines what people need. But (of course) it is not true.
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