The Canaries are Dead and No One Wants to Go into the Mine

Coming out of grad school, I considered various options for where to begin my teaching career. I ended up working in my hometown of Tacoma, remaining there for thirteen years before moving overseas. But somewhere in the multiverse, there are alternate Nates that followed other paths. 

I completed my masters in 2006. The seminal news event of my two years in grad school was the failed government response to Hurricane Katrina (just nudging out our failures in Iraq). Millions of us watched as the citizens of New Orleans were abandoned by every level of government and left to fend for themselves in agony. The hurricane was a form of ethnic cleansing, wiping out entire mostly Black neighborhoods, replaced largely by real estate speculators and their AirBnBs. In some ways, it feels like we’ve collectively memory-holed the largely preventable deaths of nearly 2000 people. We must “never forget” 9-11, but it seems we never remember Katrina. 

The hurricane did more than destroy much of New Orleans. It reshaped  neighboring urban centers as people were forced to resettle: 84,000 evacuees to Atlanta; 50,000 to Baton Rouge; and a staggering 150,000 to Houston. In late 2005, enrollment in Houston area schools swelled as families resettled from NOLA. I have family in the area and Houston ISD flung a wide net trying to hire teachers to meet the soaring need. I was offered a job but ended up not taking it. I’ve always kept an eye on news and events in Houston ISD. It’s February 2023 and they currently have 282 unfilled positions.  

Another option I considered was moving to Nevada. Vegas’ population has soared in my lifetime, from 438,000 in 1980 to 2.8 million people today. The footprint of the area has grown to match (see video below). Vegas’ schools have struggled to keep pace but in 2006, before the housing collapse, they, like Houston, were casting a wide net.

Clark County was more of a possibility for me than anything. As with Houston, I’ve kept tabs. They have a MAGA/Sarah Palin school board member, ​​Katie Williams. She ridicules teachers, is hostile toward immigrant families, and is a Covid denier. It’s February 2023 and there are currently 1,079  teacher, counselor, and nurse openings in Vegas. 

Because schools are run by each state, as each state sees fit, data reporting on the number of unfilled positions nationwide vary. But at least forty states and territories are reporting teacher shortages this year (left) and the numbers are far more grave when you look at STEM, world languages, ELL, and teachers serving students with special needs (right). But it is more complicated than that. The shortages have local twists and permutations. States and districts with lower pay and states with so-called “right-to-work laws,” offering fewer job protections, unshockingly have it worse. More affluent communities (and states that permit unionization) are seeing fewer shortages, meaning low-income students and students in flyover country are more likely to have a revolving door of subs, combined classes, or severely limited course offerings

Left - an image from ABC news showing states, in red, facing a teacher shortage (spoiler: most of the map is red). Right - An image from Yahoo!: Data on school staffing shortages by position and the reasons for the shortage (Again, lots of red here indicating a lack of applicants).

There are no reinforcements in the pipeline - Enrollment in teacher prep programs dropped by ⅓ between 2010 and 2018. I promise you the pandemic made this situation worse, not better. During the period when the country shifted to online schooling, much of the country showed teachers their behinds, and people rightfully left the profession in droves. Worsening all of this, teaching is more complicated than it was in the past. I am not a “history teacher.” I teach a college-level US government course, another college-level course comparing the systems of government in the UK, Iran, Mexico, China, Nigeria, and Russia, and a blended ninth grade course: a mish-mash of macro econ, international studies, world geography, and post-WWII world history standards. My job description isn’t atypical. Unless we deeply narrow course options or swell already crowded classes, there will not be enough capable people willing to be subjected to the vicissitudes of teaching in many US schools.  

Over the last decade there’s been a push to get more students into STEM classes and higher-level classes in the Humanities. That’s cool and all but what happens when no one shows up to teach because they have far better options? It feels like we’re about to find out.   

No, Michael—Your Book Actually Didn’t Need THAT Scene

I have rarely been more frustrated by a book as much as I was by Michael Mann’s Heat 2. Mann’s 1995 classic, Heat, is in my movie Pantheon. For folks of my vintage—who like three hour heist films—it is the holy grail. There is no The Town, Den of Thieves, Triple 9, without Heat. Even the opening bank robbery in the Dark Knight is derived from Mann’s stylized downtown LA robbery scene (below). 

The film stars Robert De Niro, in his acting prime, as Neil McCauley, the leader of a gang of highly-disciplined bank robbers in Los Angeles. Heat came out one month after Scorsese’s Casino, giving De Niro among the best back-to-backs in cinema history. Mann’s cast is full of actors who later fell on hard times or are now too old or broken to reprise their roles: Val Kilmer before his throat cancer; Danny Trejo before he was Machete; Tom Sizemore before he lost his career to substance, prostitutes, cocaine, and sex abuse allegations; and Jon Voight before he went MAGA. In the film, McCauley’s gang is pursued by an out of control LAPD lieutenant named Vincent Hannah, played by an extremely over-the-top (to the point of parody) Al Pacino. Watch the clip below and tell me I’m wrong. 

Heat was the first time Pacino and De Diro appeared on screen together. For 90s movie heads it was like Messi and Mbappe lining up together for Paris Saint Germain. Their scenes were electric—Pacino a trigger happy lunatic with a crumbling life and marriage and De Niro his ever precise, cautious, and calculating prey. In our age of sequel culture a Heat sequel was inevitable. But in doing so, Mann was faced with a choice: recasting the iconic (and some disgraced) actors or using de-aging technology, like Scorsese had done with the Irishman. He opted for neither and decided to make the sequel a 470 page tome. When I heard that Mann was going to make a sequel, albeit a novel, I was ecstatic. The book functions as a prequel, looking at the lives of characters from the film and a sequel, telling the story of Val Kilmer’s character, Chris Shiherlis, who survived the climatic heist in the film but is gravely wounded in the firefight. 

As I have discussed in prior editions of the newsletter, as of late I am consuming copious of southern noir novels. If you’re unfamiliar with the genre, think about Timothy Oliphant's show Justified,  most Cormac McCarthy novels, or any number of the classics by Elmore Leonard. Obviously, Heat isn't Southern noir. It's set in LA but it follows all the tropes of the genre. Here’s the thing, maybe the book was amazing. I don’t know because I stopped reading it after a deeply unnecessary violent sexual assault. In the book, during a home invasion the “Big Bad” assaults an underaged girl. The assault was discussed in passing as it happened but then for God knows why, recounted in technicolor detail later in the text. It was gross. It was gratuitous. It ruined the book for me. 

There are better ways of building up a villainous character. I am deeply weary of seeing violence against women as a plot device to show that a guy who is clearly a scumbag is indeed a scumbag. Sexual assault isn’t a plot device. Stop treating violence against women as the new mustache twirling when you want to prove your “Big Bad” is bad. 

It’s gross and I’m over it. If authors and filmmakers can’t tell a story without a woman being victimized they can count me out.  

Exactly zero books and films have been improved by the inclusion of graphic depictions of sexual assault. It was lazy from Mann and ruined the entire book for me.

As an aside, I think it’s worth mentioning that I feel the exact same way about white characters casually using the n-word without consequence. This is a major reason I think Pulp Fiction, and most Tarantino films are unwatchable but that’s for another day.

Another Take on that Silly Chat Bot (or Death to the High School Essay)

I hold heterodox views on teaching writing. In brief, the way we teach writing in K-12 largely prepares students for further academia and not actual life. For example, I don’t use MLA (or APA) citations in my everyday life; you likely don’t either. I haven’t used them since grad school. When I want to cite a source, I use a hyperlink, occasionally a footnote.

When it comes to writing tasks, many teachers are obsessed with page and word counts. I try me best to avoid them. When I assign a task to a student, I tell them how many ideas or arguments they need to present, not how much to write. If a student can make a coherent argument for the abolition of the filibuster in the Senate, using two arguments, some evidence, and a counterclaim in 800 words, great! Oh, you need 1800 words? Fine. In the end, I care more about the ideas my students are interrogating than about the volume of writing they produce.

Writing instruction should ideally center on real-life use cases. They need opportunities to play with complex ideas rather than writing fewer, longer high-stakes pieces. I’ve been paid to write. Definitionally, I am a professional writer (don’t laugh). In all the occasions I have been paid to write something, it’s never been much more than 1000 words. If that’s good enough for Slate, it should be good enough for an IB/AP/A-Level comp class.

Now before you start erecting guillotines… Yes, students need to write and revise more often. Yes, they need to be taught to write for specific purposes and contexts (a wedding toast, a resume, a cover letter). But if a high school student can craft a coherent, thoughtful 1000 word essay, they’re in good shape. More isn’t better, it’s just more.

Lastly, almost all the writing my students do in class is hand-written, on-demand. I give them a prompt and some stimulus (a map, a data set, a passage from a primary source) and they go to town for the period. But in each class I teach, there’s usually also one longer, more formal essay each year where students are required to demonstrate more traditional essay skills. I really don’t enjoy reading or grading them, but I understand the exercise has some value.

The preceding was my philosophy on writing until last week when that silly chat bot rolled into room 157.

Real talk, I am never assigning another out of class essay as long as I live. Ain’t no way in hell I’m gonna throw away my evenings and Sunday afternoons trying to figure out if the essay I am reading is Charlie’s or a chatbot. Nope, nein, nada—that is for suckers. I ain’t no sucka.

But it’s bigger than that. The emergence of AI created content onto the mainstream of our society with essentially no public debate or government regulation is incredibly problematic. Even worse, Open AI, the creator of ChatGPT (this is the only time I will use the name of the bot in question because every time you mention them you’re advertising for them), was co-founded by the problematic richest man on the planet, Elon Musk. Even worse squared, another co-founder, Sam Altman, was behind a massive crypto scam, Worldcoin. It promised to provide a form of UBI by collecting iris scans from half a million people in developing states in exchange for a crypto token that now trades at $0.02221. I am not making this up—this is possibly the worst idea ever, carried out by the worst people possible.

To be clear:

I want nothing to do with it.

Burn it with fire.

Let it fall forever in the Mines of Moria with the Balrog that killed Gandalf.

If you think I am being extreme here, that’s okay. Most people I talk to about this topic say the same. I got called a luddite for this take on my own podcast Friday night.

Here’s the thing. Philosophically, when I am presented with a moral question, I assume the “most likely, worst case scenario” and work backwards in crafting my personal response and preferred public policy outcome. For example, should we arm teachers? Well, do you want a racist Karen teacher that “fears for her life” shooting a Black middle schooler? No? Me either. So that’s a rubbish idea. Next, do we want the coverage of the upcoming election to be a torrent of partisan AI crafted propaganda and foreign-funded AI disinformation? If your answer is no (and unless you’re a psycho or a libertarian tecno-triumphalist, the answer should be no), we have to ask ourselves how do we prevent this dystopian hellscape scenario from taking place?

That’s where my conversations about mainstreaming AI start. Some of these pieces coming out from teachers about how they plan to integrate the bots in their practice are the most naive non-sense I’ve read in my whole life. Obviously, AI and machine learning are coming and have a place in our future. But do we have to let some of the worst people on the planet implement it with literally no regulatory checks, foresight, and the absence of an inclusive societal discourse? That’s just silly but not as silly as assigning the same tired essay prompts in 2023.