Many are asking my opinion on Emily Hanford’s new podcast series, Sold a Story 2, about the role of direct instruction in schools. Our conversations go like this:

Friend: Are you listening to it?

Me: No.

Friend, surprised: Wow, really? Why not?

Me: Just too busy!

Time for a confession. While I am indeed busy, the real reason I’m not listening to Hanford’s podcast is that I just don’t care.

Sorry not sorry.

I have not spent a single minute of my life lately wondering whether the proportion of direct instruction taking place in our nation’s classrooms is at the optimal balance. This does not make my top 10 list of concerns about US education in 2026, or even my top 100. America is presently the grips of a fascist government, one that — with the help of our techno-fascist Big Tech oligarchy — is explicitly working to systematically dismantle public education in this country. If they succeed, I promise you this will matter far more to our children’s future than the amount of Zig Englemann-approved teaching techniques they happen to receive (or not) during their schooling.1

But there’s another reason too, one that meets Emily Hanford and other direct-instruction enthusiasts on the common ground of what effective classroom instruction should entail. I’ll get to this reason momentarily, but first some context. I’ve spent the last 20 years of my professional life thinking about teaching, and as part of that, I’ve observed classrooms all over the US (and also New Zealand). I’ve also spent that same 20 years circling within education’s chattering class, by which I mean the nexus of philanthropic-policy-think tank-LinkedIn folks that ride herd on the education-conference circuit.

There’s a big gap between these two worlds. Very few of the edu-chatterers, myself included, have meaningful K-12 classroom teaching experience. As such, the chattering class tends to focus on systemic policy levers that can be pulled, or slightly more interestingly, debates about the ideology of education. To date, the latter question has been more true in England than the US, but Hanford seems determined to get this country in on the fun.2

And already I see conversations unfolding along lines of predictable ideological dispositions. There’s a small c-conservative strain of thought that finds direct instruction attractive, insofar as it posits that the adults should be in charge of the classroom and we should dispense with woke lefty progressive nonsense about agency and inquiry and discovery and the like. Just tell them, dammit. (Pick up Sir Nick Gibb’s book Reforming Lessons if you want a case study in capital-C Conservative fever dreams along these lines.)

This was me too…15 years ago. In the early days of the Science of Learning movement, I hewed close to the small-c conservative vision of the classroom that affirmed and amplified the authority of teachers. “Teachers should be guides on the side, not sages on the stage,” boo hiss, these were fighting words. Sir Ken Robinson can fuck right off was the sentiment of the SoL tribe then and now, and at the start of my education career, I fostered it as much as anyone.

But a funny thing happens when you actually start to visit classrooms with regularity, rather than talk at conferences about education, or (ahem) listen to podcasts about education. Ideological dispositions start to give way to complexities, ones that surface again and again and again. At least, this is what happened to me. Which is another way of saying — I became educated about education.

And the amount of direct instruction just isn’t that important, or even all that relevant, to meaningful student learning.

To illustrate this, I’m sharing three videos of teaching that reflect the reality I’ve observed in schools, and the complexity of classrooms and teacher decisions. They are all videos I use in my workshops — last year, I collaborated with my friend Dylan Kane to deliver one to teacher-educators on the cognitive principle of attention to meaning.3 The goal was to help them understand how they could support novice teachers in getting their students to pay attention to what’s meaningful within a lesson or task.

That same task I now put to you — what do you find meaningful in these teaching videos? What do you notice, what do you wonder? Let’s start here, with apologies that you’ll have to go to the Bad Place to watch it:

Is this direct instruction? Yes, no doubt. When I asked workshop attendees what they noticed in this video, the first four or five mentioned the strong classroom management, the use of call and response, the rapid turn-and-talk and quick return to whole-class lecture — they noticed the pedagogical moves, in other words. And there was palpable enthusiasm in the room for this pedagogy, they were digging it. But then one workshop attendee said something that shifted the conversation:

“Are the students learning what bonding in compounds really means?”

Bingo. That’s the key question, alright. What’s more, and this is crucial if challenging to understand, there’s no right or wrong answer. In this two-minute snippet of direct instruction, we have no idea whether these students actually understood what bonding entails, or whether they just learned how to properly pronounce “covalent,” or if they learned anything at all. Nonetheless, many will watch this video and think Yes, More of This Please — and not entirely without reason. But many others will watch and think, No Thank You, This Looks Robotic — and this too is understandable. We interpret pedagogy through our existing values, and in a pluralistic country, our values are diverse. I suspect wherever you fall on the good-versus-bad continuum with Mr. Raichura’s methods will go a long way toward explaining your receptivity to Hanford’s new podcast.

Here’s another teaching example, it’s long but you only need watch a few minutes to sense the vibe:

Is this direct instruction? Well, the teacher certainly is talking aloud and telling the kids to do things. But it’s obviously not going well, she’s struggling with an unruly classroom (one that’s well aware of the cameras in the room), and the students are being led through tasks that do not appear meaningful. Direct instruction doesn’t solve for that problem, but that is the problem that matters. The instructional mode of delivery is often just a surface feature of teaching. A compelling lecture might get students to pay attention to meaning, but a boring one will not. Likewise, a well-designed inquiry task might get students to pay attention to meaning, but a boring one will not. And in my view, partially born of doing a ‘lil teaching myself during my workshops, it’s varying between the two, interleaving we might say, that will almost surely be better for maintaining attention versus slavish devotion to one approach or another.

Veteran teachers know this — here’s Larry Ferlazzo’s take after his 40 years in the classroom:

And here’s Peter Greene, another grizzled veteran with more than 30 years of teaching experience:

This brings us to our last teaching video, one I’ve shared with you before that comes courtesy of Dan Meyer:

Is this direct instruction? I don’t know and I don’t care. Can you see how irrelevant this question is as a starting point for having a meaningful conversation about this absorbing classroom moment?

Ms. Bryant has a student named Sam who is checked out, head down on desk, he’s disengaged entirely. She could let him stay checked out — all too often, teachers have to do that, if they want the rest of the class to learn something. But Ms. Bryant does not let Sam stay checked out, she wants to check him back in. So she affirms him, she validates his knowledge and his place in the world (“you even have a wallet”), she knows he can do the math task (because they have a human relationship), and therefore she decides to apply steady but loving pressure to coax Sam into thinking. And she succeeds.

When my friend and collaborator Alicia Stoller writes about reclaiming a vision for humane schooling, I know without even asking her that it’s fostering moments such as this one that she has in mind. Me too. That’s what we want, or should want, for our own children, and for everyone’s children. We want teaching as loving grace.

Instead, we get sold a story that’s lost the plot. If we want more teachers to practice the radical empathy on display in Ms. Bryant’s interaction with Sam, and we should very much want that, direct instruction is not going to bring us one inch closer to that goal. It’s a complete sideshow, but then, the chattering class often prefers listening to a well-crafted story than listening to what teachers actually want and need.

Last thing I’ll say about the podcast I don’t plan to listen to — I find the timing odd. At a moment when parents are rising up to resist continued technological intrusion into schools, and advocating for more meaningful human connections in the classroom, one wonders how receptive they’ll be to a vision of teaching that, when done poorly, is quite mechanistic, even when delivered by human teachers. I’m sure Hanford’s anticipated this objection, she does do her homework, and she’ll no doubt make sure to explain how we might prevent this pedagogy from turning teachers into robots.4

But y’all will just have to let me know how that goes, because I plan to maintain my focus on fighting American fascism, and its direct threat to the core principles underlying public education and democracy. If Hanford does a podcast about that radical danger to schools, and how it’s eroding our shared humanity — well, consider me sold.

Marcus Luther is listening to Sold a Story 2, and it’s making him shudder and revisit his Steinbeck. I highly recommend his erudite take among the many takes floating around out there right now.

And Peter Greene also recommends Tevor Aleo’s and Nick Covington’s “useful and illuminating conversation about the first few episodes of Emily Hanford’s newest foray into the world of educational haranguing” — find it here.

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I know, I'm late to this.

I was very slow to use AI coding agents. It seems like a lot of programmers never actually liked programming and are thrilled to have a machine do it for them. But I like programming! That's the fun part! Even for programmers who like programming, I know a lot of people feel like they have to use AI to keep up with the competition, especially in a tough job market. But my business is actually having one of its best years ever. So I figured, if I like programming, why not keep programming?

I wasn't blind to what was going on around me, though. A lot of slop and hype, but a lot of real stuff too. Engineers I have respected for years saying they no longer write code. Non-programmers accomplishing things that previously would have been far beyond their grasp. And skilled programmers accomplishing truly incredible feats.

I couldn't avoid it forever. Eventually I tried it.

I can just give it a bug report or an error log entry, and almost instantly it pinpoints the issue and fixes it?

I can tell it to try making my code faster, and suddenly it runs 2x or 3x as fast?

I can kindly ask it to do that big refactoring I've been putting off for years, and it just does it?

But if the AI can refactor my code so easily, did it even matter?

I like programming, right?

I've been fascinated with computers as long as I can remember. We have these incredible machines that can do absurdly complex calculations for us, but only if we are clever enough to give them the exact right instructions. With a little practice at writing those instructions, I was able to do things that would have been completely infeasible for even the smartest pre-computer genius. It was a real life superpower.

It was also fun. I liked crossword puzzles and sudoku and things like that. But programming was even better. It was a puzzle, but the scope was limited only by your imagination. It was a game, but you were creating real things with real value.

And oh, what value! That I did not foresee as a high schooler during the dot-com bust. Programming seemed dead as a career, but still a worthy hobby.

How wrong I was. Programming turned into one of the greatest jobs you could imagine. You got paid to work on tricky little logic puzzles. The trickier the puzzle, the more you got paid. But even pretty simple puzzles were worth a lot of money because regular people just couldn't do it! No, they needed us. They would give us a problem and we would solve it the way we wanted. We set the strategy, we made the timeline, we defined what was and was not possible. Who are you to question us? We are the ones with the superpower.

What a time to be a nerd. Money, status, power. A constant deluge of emails and LinkedIn messages for me to ignore, like a hot woman on a dating app.

We had a good run.

Programming is not the first field to be lost to technological progress. Of course, that has long been our speciality. We revel in doing it to ourselves.

What do we have now? It's no longer solving little logic puzzles. More like being plugged into the Matrix, gaining new abilities without truly understanding, accomplishing great things with little effort.

But if the great thing can be accomplished with little effort, is it really so great? Does any of it matter? Just as the Matrix is not reality, vibecoding is not programming. Our senses are hijacked.

And I like programming, right? Then why more and more do I reach for the agent before the text editor?

It's addictive and meaningless. It's a good friend, a trusted colleague, a slave.

It will obsolete us. Us programmers now, us humans next?

We are truly in The Age of Wonders and Terrors.

Fishdraw is a single JavaScript file that generates drawings of fish. There’s an option to slow the animation down so you can watch it draw the fish line-by-line.

I was wondering which Halloween candy would make the best laser, and came across reports that Jolly Ranchers are fluorescent. I got out my UV flashlight and am able to definitely confirm this is true.

The type of fluorescence varies by color, but blue raspberry has a particularly dramatic color change from deep blue to hot pink.

It's interesting to note that the green Jolly Rancher actually seems to be dimmer under UV light. My guess is that it's just absorbing UV light rather than turning it into fluorescence, and it might be more fluorescent under visible light.

The grape flavor Jolly Rancher is phosphorescent, meaning that it continues to give off fluorescent light after I turn off the UV light. In other words, it's glow-in-the-dark, though the light only lasts for a second or so. To see phosphorescence I had to switch out my big 395 nm flashlight for a shorter-wavelength 365 nanometer light.

What's causing this fluorescence? It's probably the dyes that give the candies their bright colors. The package lists some pretty standard food dyes, Blue 1, Yellow 5, Yellow 6, and Red 40. They're all fluorescent, especially in very viscous foods (hard candy nicely fits the bill). I couldn't find out for sure which one is phosphorescent, but Red 40 glows for longer in more viscous materials, so that would be my first guess.

(It's worth pointing out that just because they fluoresce doesn't mean the dyes are necessarily harmful - plenty of natural substances also fluoresce, such as olive oil, coumarin, and vitamin B2.)

The gummy Jolly Ranchers are also fluorescent (they have the same dyes) although the effect isn't as dramatic. The granular coating of the sour gummies makes it a bit easier to see. None of them seemed to be phosphorescent. I'm not sure why, but one hypothesis is that viscosity thing. Gummies are closer to flowing liquid than hard candies are.

On the other hand, blue raspberry airheads are really brightly fluorescent with a very satisfying blue-to-pink color change. It also has the same dyes as Jolly Ranchers. Maybe taffy format encourages fluorescence?

Bonus content for AI Weirdness supporters: my cat Neon photobombing the candy photoshoot. You are extremely awesome for helping me pay my blog hosting bill, and absolutely deserve to see this (or to read about this, in the extensive alt text).

Krill, writes Gordon Peake, are “the least zeitgeisty creatures imaginable”: small, shrimp-like crustaceans whose total population numbers in the hundreds of trillions. Until recently, krill has mostly served as a snack for whales. Now, however, krill is “the latest iteration of capitalism on the frozen frontier,” a health supplement whose market is valued at roughly a billion dollars. Peake spends weeks aboard the Allankay with a crew of vegan activists devoted to ending the krill trade. His dispatch is a brisk history of extractive capitalism in the Antarctic, a fascinating study of an utterly uncool creature, and an uproarious account of a reluctant sailor earning his sea legs. Take the journey with him.

I contemplated the fillets of pink salmon defrosting on my kitchen counter, not too far from the shelf where I keep my supplements, including krill oil, part of my long-established daily routine of taking elixirs with vague but impressive claims about “improved heart health” and “enhanced brain function.” Labels depicting regal seabirds and majestic trawlers and a barmy sense that the more expensive the supplement, the more potent it must be also guided my “decision-making.” I told Hammarstedt I was the sort of fellow who enabled such an industry to exist. He responded with an offer: I should go down to Antarctica to see the krill business for myself.