Links and Commentary 7/25/25

Juxtaposition, Chromebook Hell, Robolox Hell, Focused Poetry Heaven?, Ed Research Cuts

Author

James Shanahan
July 25, 2025

Welcome to Scholastic Alchemy! I’m James and I write mostly about education. I find it fascinating and at the same time maddening. Scholastic Alchemy is my attempt to make sense of and explain the perpetual oddities around education, as well as to share my thoughts on related topics. On Wednesdays I post a long-ish dive into a topic of my choosing. On Fridays I post some links I’ve encountered that week and some commentary about what I’m sharing. Scholastic Alchemy will remain free for the foreseeable future but if you like my work and want to support me, please consider a paid subscription. If you have objections to Substack as a platform, I maintain a parallel version using BeeHiiv and you can subscribe there.

Juxtaposition

Sometimes the coincidental algorithmic arrangement of posts in a feed tells you a lot about the world of education.

Now, I don’t know who any of these people are and I don’t follow them or read their Substacks. What I want to point out here is that we have three very different views of what education is for and all of these perspectives are present in debates over school policy, curriculum, funding, etc. The guy who wants kids to learn how to program databases in elementary school is part of the same polity as the guy who wants kids to learn to grow food and raise animals. And they’re both influencing a system that, as the third post notes, includes lots of poor, unhoused, and needy kids who succeed despite the challenges and often because even meagre support gets them across the stage at the end of school.

A lot of times we want to dismiss the conflicts that arise from trying to navigate these perspectives and simply focus on one. What we should be learning from the last twenty to thirty years is that ideas about education never go away. There will always be enough people who want schools to provide functional, grounded, and often kinda pastoral education and there will always be people who want to push schools to adapt to the frontiers of technology. It’s one reason we see pendulum swings, fads, and repeating reforms despite their record of failure. It’s why I think Alchemy is a good metaphor for what we expect of schools and why we never manage to produce the gold we intend to produce.

Chromebook Hell

EdTech is a frequent topic in the links and for good reason! Here, a dad visits his kid’s middle school classes to see why his child describes school at too chaotic to learn.

It turns out, one-to-one digital devices in the classroom are a source of distraction and chaos! Who’d have thought? What I found just as interesting, though, were some of the comments about how teachers can better manage and monitor kids Chromebook use. My takeaway from those is that teachers are devoting more time to managing student devices and students’ behavior on those devices than they are teaching. It’s worth keeping that in mind as schools continue to adopt the newest technologies and throw students head-first into the next big innovation.

Sure, kids need to learn to use the technologies that power 21st century living. But computer literacy has a place: in the computer lab. COVID changed the student/device ratio to 1:1 – putting Chromebooks in every backpack, and in most schools they’re now used to teach every subject, read every lesson, do every assignment, take every quiz, and even dominate teacher-student communication. That hasty and unceremonious flushing of every time-tested analog learning model was arrogantly myopic — exactly what we’ve come to expect from the salivating tech vampire cultists of Silicon Valley, who would gleefully solder modem antennae to first trimester fetuses if we let them.

I fear we are not going to learn our lessons because we, too, are just as distracted and preoccupied as the kids.

Roblox Hell

On a related note, this post from Bennette Sippel and Zach Raush urges parents to be incredibly wary of Robolox and the new revenue model they’ve deployed that has some rather nasty results.

Being a gamer in 2025 isn’t just about playing video games. It means being enmeshed in a web of social platforms, influencers, private chats, and high-engagement content. This is the chaotic, exciting, and sometimes degrading world we were trying to convey in our opening story.

I will generally defend gaming from most criticisms but, as the authors point out, what I think of as gaming is contextualized by coming of age as a gamer in the late 90s and early 2000s. It’s a totally different world now.

Sippel and Raush outline several harms from this modern form of gaming engagement and offer some possible solutions for parents. In the end, much like with classroom tech and AI, much will depend on individual families and how they develop solutions for themselves. It doesn’t seem likely that an entire international industry generating hundreds of billions of dollars will reform itself.

And, these issues are not separate from schools. Beyond just the obvious note that those Chromebooks in the previous post were probably engaged in some of the problematic behaviors outlined here, we also have to consider what this does to kids’ ability to learn and focus in any kind of sustained way.

Focused Poetry Heaven?

The Broken Copier is a podcast about teaching and community — catnip for someone like me, to be sure. Until recently I had not checked out the Substack of the same name. Back on July 1, there was an excellent post about how much benefit one of the hosts derived from teaching poetry.

This led me to think about something else I’d read recently by another teacher, Brian Tolentino.

His post includes links to free resources, too. There’s an important connection to these posts as well as the above links about Chromebooks and Roblox. Tolentino has discovered that sustained silent reading is actually quite useful under the right circumstances.

Last year, I implemented 20 minutes of Focused Silence in every class.

No talking.
No bathroom breaks.
No wandering eyes.

Just silence—and focus.

The result? My students showed the highest growth in I-Ready scores in the school. Their state test scores also improved significantly.

But boosting test scores wasn’t the real goal.
The real goal was to teach students the value of deep work.

It is through focused silence that we learn how to resist distractions and cheap dopamine.

It is through focused silence that we learn how to hold ideas in context and think broadly.

It is through focused silence that we learn how to be patient and calm.

Focused silence is not only important for learning, but an antidote to the anxieties of modern living. Our society is distracted, unfocused, and in a hurry. Focused silence forces students to sit, think, and discover their thinking.

Whether it’s analysis of poetry or sustained silent reading (I’m not knocking Tolentino here, if anything it’s a good indicator that teachers can independently develop practices that are evidence based) kids need a chance to be distraction free and work on a single task. And it requires regular practice! What I also want to connect with the poetry piece is that, just as the teacher needs to experience poetry as a student, teachers need to engage in the same kind of deep focus as their students. We need to feel what they feel, the pull to check your phone or email or connect to something digital somewhere. We need to practice wrestling with those urges so we can better help them wrestle with theirs.

Ed Research Cuts

The specter of research cuts in education continues to loom large. Now that the administration has the go-ahead to fire DOE staff, many programs are in danger. The 74 covers how education research may be set back years. One comment near the end really stuck out though. Education research, like many other fields right now, will suffer from brain drain.

Chin described the PhD students as the “lifeblood” of his program, lamenting the potential damage to the future of the field.

“They support our research projects, they’re coming up with new ideas, they’re presenting their own work,” he said. “Right now, we have some junior scholars in our department who don’t have PhD advisees yet.”

Among current professionals, the outlook is no brighter. The job market is now glutted with laid off researchers from both the public and private sectors, and with little near-term optimism for more funding, many potential employers are leaning more toward cutting existing overhead rather than picking talent up off the sidelines.

Northwestern’s Tipton said she was aware of multiple professional contacts who had already left the field for better-paying jobs in other industries where their technical skills are highly valued. Each one, she added, should be seen as a voided investment representing tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in past doctoral scholarships and research grants.

“You see someone get a job, and you’re happy that they’re no longer in this terrible situation,” she said. “But now they’re getting jobs in insurance, tech, or random other fields. And you realize that they’re going to get paid more, and they’re never coming back.”

We’re seeing the long-term demolition of our ability to build a better system through careful research and policy. Even if the nation doesn’t implode under Trump’s remaining three and a half years, we’ve done permanent damage to our ability to grow and progress as a society. We will be poorer, dumber, and sicker because of it.