There’s a somewhat frustrating series of arguments going around right now about standardized testing, admissions, anti-racism, and a few other related topics. There’s Matthew Yglesias writing an op-ed in the Washington Post that Ibram X. Kendi’s anti-racist response to testing ignores real academic disparities that can’t all be attributed to different forms of cultural knowledge. There’s Jamaal Bowman linking to an NEA report on the racist legacy of standardized testing and adding that standardized testing is a “pillar of systemic racism.” There are arguments about eliminating testing as a means of screening students for magnet programs. And on and on.

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The other day my kids were fighting with each other over a Frisbee. One wanted to play with it, and the other had created a “game” in which he tried to throw it at the other’s head. They came to me crying and screaming.

This is a pattern they fall into about once or twice a day. They have learned to play nicely with each other, particularly when there is no chance of parental supervision (early in the morning, say). But conflict inevitably arises, and I fall back on a routine that I now initiate almost unconsciously.

In this case…

There is a scene in the fourth and final season of Halt and Catch Fire that features a video game so fiendishly difficult that beta testers trek through its mid-90s 3-D graphics landscape for hours, trying in vain to solve puzzles that more often than not just return the player to the beginning. In one sense, the game is a minor variation on one of the show’s ongoing themes: the characters of Halt and Catch Fire consistently fall just short of capitalizing on successive tech breakthroughs of the 1980s and early 1990s. …

My youngest son has decided that, for now, he will be Bjork. He has imbued her with superpowers and makes strange loud noises in his bedroom. He portrays her as a cross between Elsa from Frozen and…well, Bjork. He kind of nailed it.

He imagines Bjork singing to enemies at night, scary phantoms dissipating in the strength of Bjork’s voice. His Bjork character also has a magic wand to channel what he has decided are her “purple fire powers.”

I went through a Bjork phase recently myself, after the host of one of my favorite podcasts wrote a beautiful essay…

Most of my work for the past year has been developing techniques, curriculum, and workflows for supporting low-digital-literacy adults with using a computer and navigating the internet. As schools have moved online, I think that the needs of adult learners help shine a light on some of the unique issues that I see unfolding in K-12 education right now, especially in younger grades. Below is a sketch of four ideas that may help to think about what learners (and teachers!) may need as they get more comfortable with virtual school environments.

1. Most people who are comfortable with computers have…

My son got his hands on a joke book a few weeks ago and read it from cover to cover. He read every joke aloud to me, then explained his reasoning about why it was supposed to be funny. He mispronounced lots of words, some because he’d never heard them and others because he had read them but never spoken them, or knew them but had never seen them in print. I would gently correct him; he would repeat the joke with the correct pronunciation. I would groan. Repeat.

“What does a rabbit like to eat for dessert? A hopsicle…

I have felt somewhat numb to national politics in the past few months, so I was surprised to find myself moved to tears during Joe Biden’s acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention. It was when he addressed the mass death and derangement we have been experiencing, speaking with a bluntness and genuineness that I had not heard from him yet:

“I know how it feels to lose someone you love. I know that deep black hole that opens up in your chest. That you feel your whole being is sucked into it. …

I have been spending some time during the pandemic relearning the piano. I am focusing on jazz piano because it lends itself better to the stray ten or fifteen minutes I get to play in a given day. At first I felt that the playing was wooden and awkward — it had been years since I played with any regularity. After a few months, I not only regained the little I knew of jazz piano, but I started to get better. A few online tutorials helped, as did listening, imitating, and taking notes. At some point the momentum of this…