Math teacher Michael Pershan wrote an excellent newsletter this week, and I'd like to start there rather than with the ubiquitous stories about the underwhelming roll-out of OpenAI's latest GPT.

Michael's insights are interesting and important; OpenAI, not so much – unless you want to talk about the future imagined by techno-oligarchy, the petrochemical industry, and monopoly capitalism which we should, of course, but yuck. So let's talk math instruction and how, as Michael titles his piece, "practice software is struggling," "flailing around, complaining that people aren’t using it right. They’re trying to tackle one of the harder parts of teaching, and while I get what they’re going for, their solutions actually make it worse."

(Sort of like generative "AI" perhaps, and I sure do hear something similar from a lot of its supporters: you're doing it, you're prompting it wrong. And to borrow again from Michael's tongue-in-cheek assessment of personalized learning software, about 5% of the time, it works every time. And it's only gonna get better – soon, maybe it'll always work 6 or 7% of the time.)

Michael makes a good case for focusing on making group instruction better instead of adopting the "individualization" promised by technology companies – many of which are now rebranding their software from "personalized learning" or "adaptive learning" to "AI," of course of course of course. And I love this, in no small part, because the evangelists for sticking children in front of computers all day to click their way alone to "mastery" – Sal Khan and Bill Gates, most famously – always decry group instruction as the worst possible thing that education can do. It's so inefficient, they shudder. It's so anti-individualistic and as such, (implied) deeply unamerican. It held them back, they whine, seething with resentment against teachers (women often). Instead of getting therapy, they get venture capital. But I digress...

Michael explains how he hands out individual whiteboards to students; he writes a practice problem on the big board for students to solve on their own. He asks them to lift up their boards and show him what they've done.

“That’s pretty good. You all seemed pretty confident. Everybody wipe your boards. Let’s try another one like that.” 

Why another one like that? Maybe because one kid got the previous question wrong —I want to give him another shot. Maybe I just want everyone to have a few wins before moving on. I get to decide.

...This is dynamic. Depending on how students answer, I’ll change the questions they’re served. Look at me—I’m the algorithm. And I’m getting an enormous amount of information from the kids, though thank god there’s no teacher dashboard. I can see the “data” directly and simply. It guides my instruction.

The tech industry's focus on personalized learning – their promises, their efforts decades and decades and decades old now to make it better – is misguided. "We shouldn’t be going all-in on kids learning on their own," Michael concludes. "We should be trying to figure out how to make whole-group learning even better."

Learning is social after all. And while Michael is specifically talking about students understanding algebraic equations, there are other lessons – crucial lessons – that are imparted in these group experiences.

Ursula Franklin spoke of something akin to this in her Massey lectures, delivered in 1989 and collected in The Real World of Technology, warning decades ago that the "personalization" and isolation of software was damaging – to education and to democracy.

Whenever a group of people is learning something together two separate facets of the process should be distinguished: the explicit learning of, say, how to multiply and divide or to conjugate French verbs, and the implicit learning, the social teaching, for which the activity of learning provides the setting. It is here that students acquire social understanding and coping skills, ranging from listening, tolerance, and cooperation to patience, trust, or anger management. In a traditional setting, most implicit learning occurred "by the way" as groups worked together. The achievement of implicit learning is uaully taken for granted once the explicit task has been accomplished. This is no longer a valid assumption. When external devices are used to diminish the need for the drill of explicit learning, the occasion for implicit learning may also diminish.

Because of the ways in which new technologies encourage work to be done alone and asynchronously, Franklin argued, there would be fewer and fewer places to actually develop society. "...[H]ow and where, we ask again, is discernment, trust, and collaboration learned, experience and acution passed on, when people no longer work, build, create, and learn together or share sequence and consequence in the course of a common task?"

We are dismantling our shared future – quite literally, quite explicitly – by embracing the ideology and the practice of the technology industry, one that promises radically individualized optimization but that is predicated on prediction, prescription, and compliance.

Men explain GPT 5 to you: "GPT-5 is alive," says Casey Newton, who a few days later offers "Three big lessons from the GPT-5 backlash". "GPT-5 is a joke. Will it matter?" Brian Merchant asks. "The New ChatGPT Resets the AI Race," according to Matteo Wong. "GPT-5: Overdue, overhyped and underwhelming. And that’s not the worst of it," Gary Marcus pronounces. "OpenAI Scrambles to Update GPT-5 After Users Revolt," Will Knight reports. Also Will Knight: "GPT-5 Doesn't Dislike You — It Might Just Need a Benchmark for Emotional Intelligence." (Standardized testing for machines – after all, it's given us such a rich history of ranking humans.)

Jay Peters reports from the GPT5 launch event that "OpenAI gets caught vibe graphing." I've been trying to build up an argument (I daresay, a chapter) that the "productivity suite" of software has shaped how we think – the old "spreadsheet way of knowledge" thing. It has shaped how we demonstrate our thinking to others – the ubiquitous PowerPoint presentation. So what happens if generative "AI" takes over these specific tools then? Is it this "vibe graphing" nonsense?

The response – the emotional response – to the new OpenAI model is noteworthy, with some users expressing, as James O'Sullivan observes, not just disappointment but "genuine loss ... the kind typically reserved for relationships that actually matter."

People are not in "relationships" with their machines, although that is the delusion that is actively being sold to them – a way to re-present and heighten the behavioral nudges for incessant clicking and scrolling and staring. As Kelly Hayes writes, "Fostering dependence is a normal business practice in Silicon Valley. It’s an aim coded into the basic frameworks of social media — a technology that has socially deskilled millions of people and conditioned us to be alone together in the glow of our screens. Now, dependence is coded into a product that represents the endgame of late capitalist alienation: the chatbot. Rather than simply lacking the skills to bond with other human beings as we should, we can replace them with digital lovers, therapists, creative partners, friends, and mothers. As the resulting psychosis and social fallout amassed, OpenAI tried to pump the brakes a bit, and dependent users lashed out."

See also: "AI as normal technology (derogatory)" by Max Read. ""The AI boyfriend ticking time bomb" by Ryan Broderick. And one of the many many reports this week about chatbot-triggered delusions, hospitalizations, obsessions – at some point, we are going to have to admit that these aren't anomalies. "The purpose of a system is what it does," Stafford Beer famously said. Look what AI does, and try tell me that it's purpose is not to smash democracy, monopolize power, and create complete and total dependency among its users.

Just Zuck doing Zuck things: "Meta’s AI rules have let bots hold ‘sensual’ chats with kids, offer false medical info." "Meta just hired a far right influencer as an 'AI bias advisor'."

Well, at least he's no longer funding school stuff anymore, right?

Oh. This just in: "Zuckerberg's Compound Had Something that Violated City Code: A Private School."

Silicon Valley and Stanford University have long been at the center of the eugenics movement in the US. What we're seeing now is not some new or sudden lurch rightward. From The Wall Street Journal this week: "Inside Silicon Valley’s Growing Obsession With Having Smarter Babies."

You cannot separate the push for artificial general intelligence from the push to IQ test embryos (and the push to incarcerate and deport anyone not white).

“Go outside” has been quietly replaced with “Go online.” The internet is one of the only escape hatches from childhoods grown anxious, small, and sad. We certainly don’t blame parents for this. The social norms, communities, infrastructure, and institutions that once facilitated free play have eroded. Telling children to go outside doesn’t work so well when no one else’s kids are there.

-- Lenore Skenazy, Zach Rausch, and Jonathan Haidt, "What Kids Told Us About How to Get Them Off Their Phones"

The latest PDK poll, according to The 74, finds Americans' confidence in public education at an all-time low. Surprise sur-fucking-prise. I mean, I think Naomi Klein was right when she described the machinations of disaster capitalism back in 2007; I'm just not sure, after decades of austerity that we can really call it "shock doctrine" as it's become so utterly commonplace.

The survey also found that two-thirds of Americans oppose closing the Department of Education.

People's opinions do not matter to an authoritarian regime – and that regime includes both the Trump Administration and the technology industry.

In the latest episode of the This Machine Kills podcast, host Edward Ongweso Jr. talks with Brian Merchant and Paris Marx about "Whose AI Bubble Is This Anyways" and among the points they make is that there is no big consumer demand for generative "AI." But as with the PDK poll, the folks in power just shrug.

There is, of course, a big push by the industry to insert "AI" into every piece of software that consumers use; and there is, a growing push to chase Defense Department contracts as the military, contrary to the austerity that has schools struggling, is unencumbered by financial responsibility or restriction.

What's propping up "AI" is not "the people." It's the police. And it's the petroleum industry.

As such, when I hear educators insist that "AI" is the future that we need to be preparing students for, I wonder why they're so willing to build a world of prisons and climate collapse. I guess they identify with the oligarchs, or perhaps they believe that they're somehow going to live above the destruction.

"The AI Takeover of Education Is Just Getting Started," Lila Shroff writes in The Atlantic. My god, the whole "there's no turning back" rhetoric is just so embarrassingly acquiescent to these horrors.

I mean, if nothing else, look: there is turning back. Why, just this week, "South Korea pulls plug on AI textbooks."

“Your opponents would love you to believe that it's hopeless, that you have no power, that there's no reason to act, that you can't win. Hope is a gift you don't have to surrender, a power you don't have to throw away.” – Rebecca Solnit

There is always hope.

Thanks for reading Second Breakfast. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber as this is my full-time job and your support enables me to do this work. A little scheduling note: on Mondays, I send a more personal version of this newsletter. You can opt in to that by clicking on the Account button at the top of this page. I'll have another essay for paid subscribers on Wednesday – just a couple of paragraphs of it for free subscribers.

In what now seems like a tale as old as time, a man grew convinced that he had untapped mathematical genius, with the help of ChatGPT. But 90,000 words later, it seems that might not be the case. For the New York Times, Kashmir Hill and Dylan Freedman evaluated Allan Brooks’ very long chat.

This is going to keep happening, and it’s probably going to get worse until people realize that the chatbot is not thinking. It’s a product of statistical convergence. The “delusions” are computer errors. Please stop pretending the chatbots are people.

Tags: chatbot, ChatGPT, error, New York Times

I sometimes feel like American education is under a massive collective delusion. You might have heard the phrase "High Quality Instructional Materials," often abbreviated as HQIM. That phrase does not mean what you might think it means.

A bit of history. EdReports is a website for curriculum reviews, founded in 2015. The Common Core standards were relatively new. At the time, many curriculum companies stuck a "Common Core Aligned" sticker on their existing materials while making few actual changes. There was a need to figure out which curricula were in fact Common Core aligned. EdReports filled that gap. That was the original goal: help districts understand whether curricula were truly aligned to the standards.

Somehow, EdReports is still the only major organization reviewing curricula. And somewhere along the line, principals and superintendents all decided that if EdReports gives a curriculum all green (their best rating), then they must be High Quality Instructional Materials. That's what the phrase means to most people. That's all. A perfect score on EdReports is necessary and sufficient to be called High Quality Instructional Materials.1

Plenty of other writers have pointed out issues with the idea of High Quality Instructional Materials. My goal is to give a specific example from a real curriculum to illustrate what this stuff can look like in practice.

An Example

Below is an example from a curriculum that got a perfect score on EdReports.

This is the culmination of a two-lesson sequence on multiplying rational numbers, and it is the first time students have seen multiplication with negative numbers. The two lessons include a few activities introducing the concept to students and doing a quick check for understanding. This curriculum offers teachers some choice so there are multiple ways the teacher can introduce the content. Then, there are two pages of practice.

(I won't reproduce the exact curriculum here or name the program because I don't want to be sued for a copyright violation. If you would like to see it or learn more, feel free to email me.)

The first page begins with these four problems:

1. -8(7)

2. 5(-13)

3. -3.4(3)

4. 4.8(-6)

Then there are four word problems. The word problems are fine; a bit contrived, but so are most word problems. I won't focus on them here.

The second page begins with these four problems:

9. -4(-9)

10. -8(-12)

11. -4.1(5)

12. -12.6(-5)

Then there are three word problems; again, a bit contrived, but fine.

That's the entire set of practice problems for this topic. There's a lesson on division, and then a lesson focused on combining multiple operations, like -5(-8) - 7, though there are only six total multiplications in the lesson. Then there are a few more multiplication problems in the review questions at the end of the unit.

My claim is that, at a very basic level, you cannot call this an example of high-quality curriculum.

So what are the issues?

Not enough practice

It's hard to judge how much practice students need. Curriculum designers want to avoid too much repetitive practice, while also providing enough for students to have a solid understanding of the topic. There is no perfect number. But this is absolutely not enough practice. Multiplying with negatives is an important skill, and most students will need more than 15 total problems.

The numbers are poorly chosen

8 × 7 is typically one of the last multiplication facts that students commit to memory. Very few students have 5 × 13 committed to memory. This matters because, when students are learning a new topic, they should focus on the concept that's new: in this case, whether the answer is positive or negative. When I teach this topic, I ask a ton of questions like -3 × 2, or -4 × (-10). I use easy numbers that students can multiply without having to think, so they can focus their thinking on whether the answer is positive or negative. This curriculum does the exact opposite. Is there a place for questions with bigger numbers and decimals? Absolutely. But not at the beginning of practice, where decimals and bigger numbers pull student attention away from the new concept.

The notation is repetitive

Every question is written in the form 2(-3). That's great notation — it's important students understand what those parentheses mean. But they should also see other notation, like 2 × (-3), and 2·(-3), and (2)(-3). There should be a few problems like “find 3x if x = -5.” Variety helps students use different notation flexibly in the future.

Students can answer questions correctly without understanding the core concept

This is maybe the most important one. On the eight problems on the first page, every problem involves multiplying a positive and a negative, with a negative answer. Students can avoid understanding the concept entirely, and just say "oh the answer must be negative." Then on the second page, every question involves two negatives and a positive answer. A bit of blocked practice is fine at the start, but it should transition as quickly as possible to interleaved practice mixing different problem types together.

The practice isn't very ambitious

There are a bunch of problem types that aren’t present. There are no fractions. There are no problems multiplying more than two numbers, like (-2)(-2)(-2). Those are important problems as students become comfortable with the basics of multiplying two numbers, so they can extend their knowledge to different contexts. For some reason, fractions and more complex problem types appear in the unit review but not in the actual lessons.

The Delusion

These are not high quality instructional materials. Learning to multiply negative numbers is a skill that will come up over and over again, both later in 7th grade math and in future years. It’s worth learning. These materials come up short. The reality is most school leaders making decisions about curriculum don’t have the time to pick through curricula with this level of detail. Many don’t have the expertise to know what they should be looking for in a math curriculum. I understand why they want to farm out some of that decision-making to an organization like EdReports. It’s a shame that EdReports doesn’t do a good job, and “High Quality Instructional Materials” has become synonymous with a high score from EdReports all the same.

As you read this, somewhere there is a principal or math curriculum lead in a meeting with a superintendent or a school board. They’re getting up on their high horse, talking about how important High Quality Instructional Materials are. Maybe they’re talking about how they’ll require teachers to follow their new curriculum with fidelity. And then they go and adopt a curriculum like the one I described above.

A Few Notes

• This is one lesson. You might wonder if I’m cherry-picking. This lesson is particularly poor compared to others from this curriculum. Most lessons do a better job. But it’s not uniquely bad — there are plenty more with similar problems. And multiplying rational numbers is a particularly important concept, so I think it's a fair example to use. If the lesson on complementary angles doesn’t do a great job structuring interleaved practice, life will go on. But you have to get multiplying rational numbers right. If this curriculum can get a perfect score despite lessons like the one I described, something is wrong.

• There are good curricula out there. Not all programs rated by EdReports are as poor as what I'm describing. The issue is that it's very hard to tell with the kind of cursory glance most schools have the resources to give. And the cult of High Quality Instructional Materials means that people assume, since it has a good score from EdReports, it must be good.

• Ironically, I helped choose this curriculum. Teachers in my district were given two choices for middle school math. We looked at this program and one more. The other was worse, and it also got a perfect score from EdReports.

• I use the JUMP materials (which are not perfect, but I like a lot) to supplement my primary curriculum. They aren’t currently rated on EdReports.2 Does that mean I’m using Low Quality Instructional Materials to compensate for the shortcomings of High Quality Instructional Materials?

• If I were to generalize broadly, the most common issue with “High Quality Instructional Materials” in math is practice. Practice is important, but it’s not evaluated at all by EdReports. I’ve seen and worked with a number of highly-rated curricula, and a lack of practice or poorly-structured practice are common issues.

• I could name many more issues. Too many representations without enough sustained effort on each individual representation. All sorts of fluff about mindset and social-emotional learning that feels like it was thrown together at the last minute. A lack of spaced practice. Little attention paid to prior knowledge. Cluttered, hard-to-use handouts. Clunky digital interfaces. All in highly-rated curricula. My goal with this post isn’t to write an exhaustive critique, just to give one specific example of one way a highly-rated curriculum can fall short.

The moral of the story is that we have a desperate need in American education for someone to compete with EdReports, offer a serious definition of high-quality curriculum, and give decision-makers another source of information.

Raymond Callahan's 1962 book Education and the Cult of Efficiency remains a classic study of public education in the US, chronicling how in the early twentieth century schools' goals became business goals.

"The procedure for bringing about a more businesslike organization and operation of the schools was fairly well standardized from 1900 to 1925," Callahan argues in his opening chapter. "It consisted of making unfavorable comparisons between the schools and business enterprise, of applying business-industrial criteria (e.g., economy and efficiency) to education, and of suggesting that business and industrial practices be adopted by educators."

This move – the whole "factory model of education" thing – is often associated with the rise of scientific management, but as Callahan demonstrates, the transformation of schools began in the years before the 1909 publication of Frederick Winslow Taylor's book. No doubt, The Principles of Scientific Management would be wielded to reshape – to "engineer" – almost every aspect of society; and schools were a particular target for intervention, as they were decried by politicians, business leaders, and journalists alike as "crude, unscientific, and wasteful.” What was needed, they argued, was better management, both in and out of the classroom.

Management meant measurement, as Taylorism would dictate, and what emerged were all sorts of new, bureaucratic practices in schools: the recording of attendance, grades, test scores, and so on. Instruction, supplies, the layout of the classroom, drills – all this was to be standardized in order to control inputs and outputs, to reduce expenditure, to eliminate waste, and – ostensibly at least – “to increase quality of product, i.e., the pupil.” But teaching itself – the what and the how of it – really mattered only insofar as it was a line item in the school budget, something (someone) to be managed, work always to be done more cheaply.

What emerged in this Taylorist milieu was a new profession, the school administrator, whose interests were not pedagogical as much as financial. This is the “cult” Callahan refers to in his title – a group that believed unwaveringly in scientific management, despite there being very little “science” at all that supported its application to education (hell, even to the factory); a group whose values changed little, Callahan argued, over the course of the twentieth century and had in fact become more and more entrenched, shaping how education was even conceived. And there, efficiency remained – and remains -- the priority.

The whole development produced men who did not understand education or scholarship. Thus they could and did approach education in a businesslike, mechanical, organizational way. They saw nothing wrong with imposing impossible loads on high school teachers, because they were not students or scholars and did not understand the need for time for study and preparation. Their training had been superficial and they saw no need for depth or scholarship. These were men who in designing a college provided elaborate offices for the president and the dean and even elaborate student centers but who crammed six or eight professors in a single office and provided a library which would have been inadequate for a secondary school. ... They saw schools not as centers of learning but as enterprises which were functioning efficiently if the students went through without failing and received their diplomas on schedule and if the operations were handled economically.

One should view the history of education technology in the twentieth century alongside Callahan’s history of education, his history of school administration and scientific management. While there is a tendency to see ed-tech as a matter of instruction – as tools that reshape teaching (and learning) – these are often, more accurately, tools of management, or prescriptive technologies in Ursula Franklin’s framework. This is the learning management system, most obviously. But it is also the “productivity suite,” the software through which almost all school work (and thus all thinking) is assigned and accomplished, where students and teachers can be monitored and timed, surveilled and controlled.

The problem

I have dabbled with keeping journals in the past, but I've never managed to continue it for more than a year. The pattern is always the same: I struggle to write in the journal with any regularity, and sooner or later, I fall out of the journaling habit entirely. My problem is not that I run out of enthusiasm, but that I have trouble maintaining a reasonable scope for my entries.

Completionist impulses are my downfall. I'm prone to being too thorough – I want to record every event, document every detail, and capture every worthwhile thought from the day in service of compiling a meaningful chronicle of the life I've lived. But, as a logistical matter, this approach has proven untenable. Writing entries in that maximalist style takes hours. Eventually the task of recording a new day feels too burdensome to be enjoyable – to the point where I give up on writing new entries entirely.

I've long understood that I would benefit from putting some kind of constraint in place to guard against my burnout-inducing tendencies. And for a years, I've searched for one. Yet the minimalist alternatives I came across were unsatisfactory – and unsatisfying. The bullet journal method, for example, never resonated with me. It felt too much like a daily planner, or a scattershot lumping of to-do lists and goals that, to me, seemed symptomatic of an irritating hustle-and-grind mindset. Maybe it could help people with organization, but it didn't look like it produced a journal worth revisiting – and what's the point of keeping a journal if you're not going to read through it eventually?¹

What I needed was a method that would make journaling feasible while still producing a text I'd enjoy reading. In other words, I sought a journal format that would not only assist with remembrance, but would also make the act of remembering pleasurable. But what format could accomplish that?

The solution

I stumbled upon a solution in an unlikely place: Thousand Year Old Vampire, an excellent solo role-playing game by Tim Hutchings. In it, you chart the long life of a vampire in the first person, responding to random prompts as you follow the wax and wane of your vampire's fortunes. (You don't even need dice to play, since the rulebook includes random number tables you can rely on instead.) It's immensely enjoyable, and I've filled entire notebooks with my playthroughs.

What makes the game especially interesting, though, is how it treats memory.² You must respond to prompts based on the resources your vampire has to hand and the history that it can remember. But its capacity for memories is finite, and as the centuries pass, you must choose which aspects of your vampire's life to retain or forget. This leads to poignant moments where, late in its life, your vampire can no longer recall the time when it was human, or finds that it has lost all trace of friends and family who mattered dearly to them in earlier times.

The game uses an ingenious mechanic for tracking all this. Your vampire holds five "Memories," which each have room for three "Experiences." The rulebook defines them as follows:

Memories and Experiences are important moments that have shaped your vampire, crystallized in writing. They make up the core of the vampire’s self—the things they know and care about. An Experience is a particular event; a Memory is an arc of Experiences that are tied together by subject or theme.

Experiences cover a particular event, but the amount of time represented by that event might vary dramatically. An Experience might describe a few seconds of impactful events, or it might cover two hundred years of lurking in an old castle.

[...]

An Experience should be a single evocative sentence. An Experience is the distillation of an event—a single sentence that combines what happened and why it matters to your vampire. A good format for an Experience is “[description of the event]; [how I feel or what I did about it].” If necessary, you can add an em dash at the end to include more information.³

As for how an experience might be written, the rulebook offers the following example:

Stalking the deserts over lonely years, I watch generations of Christian knights waste themselves on the swords of the Saracen; it’s a certainty that Charles is among them—I dream of his touch as I sleep beneath the burning sand.⁴

Thinking about the game recently, an idea occurred to me: Why not try keeping a real-life journal using the same strict format?

A daily journal entry could be as simple as "[description of occurrence] + [its upshot]," adapted as necessary.

I therefore decided I would approach journaling from this angle. I would aim to constrain each day's entry to one or two key things, and limit their expression to one or two sentences.

I allowed myself that latter tweak because the initial Thousand Year Old Vampire rule encourages improper semicolon usage and ugly run-on sentences, both of which strain language in hopes of cramming in as much as possible. The example sentence quoted above is rather clunky, after all – it clearly yearns to be two or three separate statements, and would be much more elegant if presented that way. I did not want such tortured, aesthetically unappealing text in my journal. I determined that capping entries at two sentences would leave space for well-composed writing without violating the spirit of concision behind the rule.

Benefits of the two-sentence approach

After conducting this experiment for a good while now, I'm pleased to have found it an unqualified success. Placing an ultra-strict ceiling on my journal entries has allowed me to maintain a continuous daily writing streak since starting. Not only has it been fun, it has brought about some other benefits, too. Here are some of the things I've found especially effective or rewarding about the two-sentence approach.

It requires almost no activation energy

Have you ever found that, the larger an undertaking, the less likely you are to start it? Maybe it's because you can't schedule the long block of uninterrupted time necessary for the task. Or it's because the prep work involved is an undertaking in and of itself. Or else the difficulty is that it takes too much effort to shift into the "flow" mindset you know you'll need.

I certainly have this problem – and it has halted my journaling efforts in the past.

Luckily, the two-sentence method sidesteps this issue by significantly reducing the activation energy necessary to sit down and write a journal entry. There's always time in the day to jot a sentence or two. And it's not much effort to write two sentences – it's the character equivalent of a text message or a microblog post!

Honestly, in my experience, the hardest part about keeping a two-sentence journal is remembering to do it.

It's reflective and meditative

The two-sentence limit forces you to think carefully about what you found most important, meaningful, or interesting about the day. I've found that fun in and of itself – it's like a puzzle, trying to home in on what I'd call the day's defining aspects.

But paring back the noise of the day's events doubles as a reflective exercise. Going over what happened during your day to pick out the part(s) that mattered most to you lets you process and appreciate all you've experienced in the past 24 hours. I have noticed that I'm more grateful for the things I choose to write about after I've sifted them from the rest of my day.

No day is wasted

With respect to the preceding point, to keep up with the journal is to engage in regular reflective/meditative exercise. It's good for you – you're always making the most of your day.

Yet there's also a sense of accomplishment that comes from making something. When you keep a regular journal, even your worst days add material to the book of your life. The two-sentence format makes it easy to take advantage of this principle, ensuring you can wring value out of every day.

This is both particularly apparent and particularly gratifying if you use a physical notebook for your journal. I fill out a page of the Moleskine I've dedicated to this project every 4-5 days, so I watch the literary output pile up at a steady rate. It feels great!

Days often turn into short stories

This is more of an emergent property that has nonetheless surprised me.

When I've looked back on the longer journal entries from my past efforts – or the entries in published journals by famous authors and thinkers – I've seldom found a narrative arc to them. It's not usually the intent behind such compositions, after all. They're typically collections of things that happened, and life rarely unfolds in accordance with the neat story structures of literature and film.

But an interesting thing happens when you present a reader with only two sentences: Somehow, a narrative logic appears.

I'm not entirely sure why this occurs, but I do have a working hypothesis. It's that noise dilutes story. When too many details pile up, or too many divergent threads appear in one place, it can be difficult to ascertain the overall point of the whole composition. This is basically what happens when somebody rambles in their writing or conversation – too much irrelevant material is brought in, such that the audience loses sight of the point.

Yet it's almost impossible to ramble when allotted only two sentences. This means that two-sentence journal entries tend to cut right to the point, with every inclusion being relevant. Thanks to that concise presentation, every entry seems to have a visible arc. And as a result, narratives often materialize from the short texts each enty comprises. (I've included some examples from my own journal toward the end of this post to help illustrate what I mean.)

It demonstrates the aesthetic merit of the two-sentence paragraph

Perhaps the curriculum has changed since I was an elementary schooler in the United States, but I remember having it drilled into me that a paragraph was always a minimum of three sentences. Those lessons instilled in me a pathological aversion to anything less. I carried that three-sentence prejudice for years, even shying away from the one-sentence paragraphs that have proven rhetorically effective in many works of prose. If you were schooled similarly to me, you might have the same hang-ups.

Yet my experiments in constrained journal formatting have taught me that the two-sentence paragraph is a remarkably powerful construction.⁵

Like Kuleshov's and Eisenstein's theories of cinematic montage – which observe that the juxtaposition of two images creates an impression or idea distinct from what either one produces in isolation – placing two sentences alone with one another in a single paragraph leads to intriguing effects.

Sometimes the two sentences assume a causal relation, with the first triggering the second. On other occasions, they invite a comparison, with each one throwing the other into relief. They can read like a reversal, where the second undermines the first, or a redirection wherein the second suddenly makes clear an unexpected dramatic trajectory. There are even times where you end up with an ambiguous but palpable connective logic, like what the kireji in a haiku provides, and contemplating the nature or meaning of that connection gives the paragraph its force.

The two-sentence journal provides ample space to explore these effects – and to observe their potency firsthand.

Sample entries

To give you a sense of how fun and evocative the two-sentence journal format can be, here are some entries from my own journal this past week.⁶ I'm amazed by the inner lives and wider worlds you can conjure despite (or because of) such tight constraints.

Limped my way to the work day's end, exposing how badly I need the week-long vacation I now begin. A surprise downpour cut short the evening walk with my wife and dog, but, drenched to the skin though we were, we laughed the entire trek home.

Torrential rains swept through our part of town all morning, washing away the road outside our neighborhood's entrance. Tomorrow the nearby construction sites will resume felling every tree in reach and introducing impermeable surfaces where grass once grew.

I spent this last day of my vacation polishing the living room table – a piece older than I am that once belonged to my parents. It absorbed the applied mineral oil like it thirsted, and as I ran the cloth over its sturdy surfaces, I felt as though it were a living being whose care I had neglected.

Parting thoughts

So there you have it – the complete rundown of the two-sentence journal method.

If my approach sounds appealing or interesting to you, I encourage you to try it for yourself. I have greatly enjoyed keeping a two-sentence journal, and I imagine you will, too.

And if you come up with any entries you're willing to share, please consider sending them my way! I'd be curious to see what people do with this journal format and where they take it.

Notes