This article — Welcome to Stucktopia — is one I’d read with kids:

That’s something else we can learn from stucktopian TV: We aren’t just cogs in the machine because that’s our assigned role. We’re cogs because breaking out from our prescribed slots seems deeply difficult and uncomfortable.

We’re not stuck in our circumstance. We’re stuck in the ways of living that perpetuate it.

Further evidence that I’m the worst human ever…while this is a great, thoughtful piece, my primary takeaway was that I need to get Disney Plus as I’d not yet seen this show Andor, having watched and loved the other three (Silo, Severance, and Fallout.)

And another television review — The Bleak, Nihilistic Show Russians Can’t Stop Watching — had this line:

It’s easy enough to dunk on bad Russian TV, but “The Boy’s Word” has something truly rotten at its core: It is a warning about what happens when our ability for moral reasoning becomes so impoverished that the most straightforward response to any situation is to punch somebody in the face. In a withering online review, the critic Platon Besedin wrote, with classic Russian restraint, that the series “could only be demanded by a sick and miseducated society that walks in circles like a tired, sick pony.”

There have also been two articles in the past month (here and here) about folks (like me) who were colossal f–ups in high school. And both these stories are great reminders of the immense possibilities all humans hold within them, something you must believe if you’re a teacher. (And both rightfully point out that it’s different in 2024 then it was in the mid-1980s.)

The only thing I’d add, though, from a school perspective: life in schools is getting harder and harder, for students and teachers. When you’re being ground down by all sorts of things completely out of your control, it is difficult to keep your eyes on the promise all students possess. And while you do your best to produce positive bulletin board material — you believed in me — you don’t always succeed.