My students always scratch their head at that when I show them Restrepo.

Jeremy Wayne Tate on X: "I taught for ten years, and my favorite memory comes from an evening high school class filled with students who had failed the first time around, they would often show up high. I opened the textbook and found a scattered mix of excerpts from “global perspectives”, multicultural" / X I taught for ten years, and my favorite memory comes from an evening high school class filled with students who had failed the first time around, they would often show up high. I opened the textbook and found a scattered mix of excerpts from “global perspectives”, multicultural

Speaking of you might find this tweet by Jeremey Wayne Tate as darkly funny as I did. What do you mean an individual teacher should able to select high quality work that exists outside the bounds of all accountability for the good of their students to simply discuss it????

x.com/JeremyTate41...

It's interesting to me, that the TEA has not decided to implement this ahead of schedule in the districts it currently runs. If this will solve all of the ills of the RLA classroom, why isn't Mike Miles doing this in HISD?

Yeesh. I missed this part. Your restraint is admirable.

Thanks for always fighting for literature. Your substack post made it easy to post on social media myself. I appreciate the kick in the pants so to speak.

I just wanted to take a second to say thank you for beating this drum. Gave me the courage to try to rally my department/community about it a little bit. The best part is seeing former students get pissed off about it.

They will roll over to the text du jour just like they do the standard du jour.

That's fair. I'm cynical. We—myself included—need to start communicating before it's too late. However, I'm not going to count on my district leadership who can't think beyond lexile levels and common formative assessment to do anything useful.

We know we can't stop it. If they want to do it, they'll do it. It hasn't taken too long to go from districts banning The Glass Castle from classrooms to this.

And of course they'll read, F451, but for what? Obviously, not to understand that books matter. Only that the books the state decides do.

More depressingly, there's no effective way to push back on this

As far as I know, TCTELA, our professional organization in this state, doesn't even have a position statement out on this. It's the death knell of our profession, and...no one even cares all that much.

From a practical standpoint alone, nothing can be assigned for homework, so Great Expectations would need to be read aloud in class. That's 25+ days of class listening to the audiobook.

These lists are meant to strangle what little reading/thinking/writing they currently do.