A few weeks back I was scrolling through photos, and I stumbled upon a photo I’d long forgotten. It was from a class trip late in 2019, and in it my entire advisory class is piled together on a small merry-go-round—an action that, while normal at the time, would have been inconceivable by the socially-distanced middle of the next semester.

As I looked at the photo, I thought about my class and the tectonic changes the students would face in a few short months, but I also found myself thinking about the late 2019 version of me behind the camera and how much he didn’t have to think about compared with the 2025 version sitting at this keyboard. At that point, pandemics, artificial intelligence, and deep fakes were concepts from movies, and I wasn’t even required to have a class website, let alone the full learning management system I must maintain today. 

I will admit that from my perch now, turning back the clock to November 2019 feels a bit like a pleasant dream, but it is worth noting that teaching in 2025 isn’t all thorny problems and obstacles. Thanks in large part to the problems and obstacles of the last five years, I know so much more now than I did at the end of the last decade about how teaching and learning work and how to build a classroom community that is strong and joyful. 

It is set against this backdrop of large-scale change, upheaval, and shifts in understanding—not to mention the huge questions, workloads, and challenges that confront us in 2025—that I launch what is somehow, amazingly, the 10th year of this newsletter. Fittingly, a 10th anniversary is supposedly the tin anniversary because if you make it to ten years, it means one is able to weather storms. And so for this school year I thought I would lean into the storms we face right now and focus the newsletter on a different obstacle, problem, question, or big new idea each month.  

Specifically, I’ll offer 2–3 practical tools or actionable insights each month along with one deeper dive post that shares the key takeaways from literature and research on the topic. I also plan to offer something I teased last spring and have wanted to do for a long time: on-the-ground, ready-to-save-you-time materials and mini-units directly from my classroom.

The first topic—with the first post coming tomorrow—has to be Generative AI. As I talked to teachers across the country this summer, Gen AI was the main thing that most writing teachers wanted to discuss. Gen AI may have started as a small tremor around the edges of our classes, but over the last year, it has turned into a magnitude 9 or 10 disruption for so many classes (mine included). Of course, I’m aware that the educational world is already flooded with a whole lot of Gen AI thought-pieces, so my approach will be less about my hot takes and more focused on a thoughtful curation of the approaches, resources, and lesson ideas that will be guiding my approach to Gen AI this year. 

Look that first post of this tin-plated year tomorrow, and thank you, as always, for reading!

Yours in Teaching,

Matt

P.S. If there are any particularly stormy challenges, obstacles, questions, concerns, or ideas that you would like the newsletter to explore, I’d love to hear from you about what you’d like me to explore.