Dear Commons Community,.

On Friday night, I saw the movie Conclave which is based on Robert Harris’s best seller of the same name.  I was not disappointed.  The plot and story line are intriguing and keeps the viewer wanting to know what is going to happen next.  There is also a completely unpredictable plot twist that I never saw coming.  Perhaps the best part of the movie is the acting of Ralph Fines, Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow, Isabella Rossellini, and Sergio Castellitto, who is wonderful as a cardinal who yearns for the days of Latin Masses.  Some Catholics may have a problem with the political and financial machinations of the College of Cardinals  but I found it most interesting and intriguing. 

I highly recommend it!

Below is an excerpt of a review published in The New York Times on October 24^th and written by Manohla Dargis.

Tony

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Conclave based on Robert Harris’s 2016 Vatican intrigue of the same title, centers on a British cardinal, Lawrence (a sensational Ralph Fiennes). A cleric of uncertain faith if unwavering convictions about everything else, Lawrence has droopingly sad eyes and refined sensitivities, and serves as the dean of the College of Cardinals, the group charged with selecting the pope, who’s just died. Lawrence is on the move when the story opens, hurrying through dark streets and into a brisk drama filled with whispering, scurrying men, one of whom who will be anointed as the new earthly head of the Catholic Church. There are women, too, though mostly there’s Isabella Rossellini, giving great side-eye as Sister Agnes.

The cardinals keep whispering and scurrying as the story quickly revs up. Lawrence has been enduring a personal crisis — Harris calls it “some kind of spiritual insomnia” — and had asked the pope (Bruno Novelli) if he could leave Rome for a religious retreat. The pope denied him, telling Lawrence that while some are chosen to be shepherds, others need to manage the farm. With the pope dead, the reluctant Lawrence steps up and begins managing, a duty that involves herding scores of cardinals through the intricacies of the conclave, Latin for a room that can be locked. First, everyone needs to be sequestered until the announcement of “Habemus papam” (“We have a pope”), but until then, it’s every cardinal for himself.

The story coalesces around the lead candidates, a nicely balanced group of sincere, stealthy and smooth operators who soon circle Lawrence, their silver tongues wagging and hands wringing as they make their moves. The director Edward Berger and his team (the casting directors very much included) have stuffed the movie with a Daumier-esque collection of smooth and bearded, guarded and open faces. The juicy main cast includes Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow, Lucian Msamati and a wonderful Sergio Castellitto, who plays a wolfish smiler who fulminates about the church’s liberal faction and yearns for the days of Latin Masses. The story could have used more of him and much more of his ominous rage.

Several of Harris’s novels have been turned into movies (“The Ghost”), and he’s well-served here both by Berger and by the screenwriter Peter Straughan, who cowrote the superb 2011 version of le Carré’s “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.” There’s a great deal of talking in “Conclave,” not just dark-corner murmuring, yet the dialogue remains largely naturalistic throughout. Even when the characters are righteously thumping their red chests or squaring off, the dialogue rarely edges into exposition. That said, at one point, a character delivers the kind of sanctimonious sermon that’s required in mainstream movies that criticize institutions, if not too much, so that they can finally uphold those very same institutions.

Berger, as he exhaustively demonstrated in his last movie, “All Quiet on the Western Front,” likes to keep things — characters, cameras — moving. Here, he finds a more harmonious balance between stasis and action. When the cardinals are tidily assembled in the Sistine Chapel for the conclave, facing one another at long tables that flank the room, you can feel the momentum in the men’s ricocheting glances and rigid stillness. Although he doesn’t overdo it, Berger also likes to place the characters, though particularly Lawrence, right in the middle of the frame, which may be a sly nod at Renaissance perspective but also dovetails both with the ceremonial orderliness of this world and with the lugubrious rituals of the conclave.

Lawrence’s crisis of faith continues, waxing and waning even as the voting comes down to the wire. Fiennes, an actor of extraordinary expressive nuance, makes the character’s struggle palpable; you can see his sorrow, and not just for the dead pope, weighing and almost tugging him down like a millstone. At one point, while seated among the other cardinals in the Sistine Chapel, he looks up at Michelangelo’s monumental “The Last Judgment” and fixes on the figure of a damned man, a hunched, visibly distraught soul who’s being dragged to hell by devils. It’s a moment that suggests Lawrence’s spiritual turmoil, a struggle that, in turn, expresses the larger, deeper questions — theological, organizational — facing the church.

A number of such questions emerge in different plot threads. One involves old-school election rigging; another concerns an abuse of power. In the main, partly because the performances pleasurably dominate the movie, these crises register as fairly scattershot and more like personal matters rather than institutional failings. That remains true even as the outside world starts to violently press in on the cloistered clerics and bombs, literal and metaphoric, start going off. One is meant to put all those questions and plot turns into perspective, but because the biggest bombshell arrives so late, so inelegantly and unbelievably, it only blows a yawning hole in the movie. The wreckage is substantial, but its depths are shallowly rendered.

Dear Commons Community,

One of the most famous visages in Egyptian archaeological history, that of King Tutankhamun, might not actually be the young king at all.

After a re-examination of the original 1920s discovery, experts now believe even more strongly that King Tut’s golden burial mask wasn’t originally intended for him at all and was likely designed for a high-status female. It all comes down to the earring holes. As reported by Express and other media.

“This mask was not made for an adult male pharaoh,” said Joann Fletcher, Egyptologist and honorary visiting professor in the Department of Archaeology at the University of York, according to a History Hit documentary reported by Express. “When the gold was compared, [they found] the face is made of completely different gold to the rest.

“Evidence of soldering is clearly visible on the mask,” she said. “It now seems as if Tutankhamun’s own face was effectively grafted onto the mask of the previous ruler. They may have had pierced ears, they may have been a woman, it may well have been [Queen] Nefertiti.”

King Tut’s iconic mask is 21 inches tall, inlaid with precious stones, and features a 5.5-pound golden beard as part of the larger 22.5-pound gold mask. That beard may have been an afterthought when the young ruler died unexpectedly at roughly 19 years of age in 1323.

Originally discovered in 1922 by Howard Carter, the records of Carter’s discovery have been kept at the University of Oxford’s Griffith Institute. Fletcher said that not only is there different gold used on the face of the mask than the remainder, but the perforated ears designed around earrings would only have been done for a high-status female or a child, since children often wore earrings in that culture.

Known as the boy king, King Tut the throne in 1332 BC around the age of 9, an appropriate age to wear earrings, but as he grew older during his reign, he would have stopped wearing them well before he died around the age of 19, experts believe.

As theories continue to mount over who the gold mask was really intended for, the latest earring episode only leads further credence to the claim that his stepmother, Queen Nefertiti, whose burial location has never been found (though there are theories), was the original user of the mask.

Tutankhamun reigned until 1323. Scientists believe he died from malaria and had a broken leg, possibly from a chariot crash. His cleft palate, curved spine, and club foot showed he likely struggled with health his entire short life. Those ailments could have resulted from inbreeding, as experts believe his father may have married his own sister, based on DNA from mummified bones.

A somewhat sudden death could have left officials scrambling to get King Tut’s burial chamber in order. A power struggle could have also hurried the process. Additional details show that experts believe the paint in the tomb was still wet when it was sealed. If those in charge of burying the young man needed a mask in a hurry, they may have grabbed one already used, potentially borrowing from one of the most famous queens in all of Egypt.

I saw King Tut’s Tomb in 2009 in the Valley of the Kings, one of the most impressive places I have ever visited!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

New York Governor Kathy Hochul sent out a letter yesterday announcing the Empire State Freedom Initiative that establishes:

“A task force focused on key areas where New York State and New Yorkers are most likely to face threats from a Trump Administration, including reproductive rights, civil rights, immigration, gun safety, labor rights, LGBTQ+ rights, and the environment.”

She concluded:

“New York is the birthplace of the women’s rights movement, the environmental justice movement, the LGBTQ+ rights movement, and the American labor movement. I’ll work with those who want to be a partner in achieving these goals, but I will not accept an agenda from Washington that rips New Yorkers’ rights away. 

New York saw another significant victory in the long fight for freedom on Tuesday, when New Yorkers overwhelmingly voted in favor of Proposition One. With the passage of that Proposition, fundamental rights, including the right to an abortion, are now enshrined in our state’s constitution.”

Below is her entire letter.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Teachers’ unions are now putting their own spin on an often-criticized component: teacher preparation.

The Washington Education Association is in its first year of overseeing a teacher residency program, in which aspiring teachers receive on-the-job training (and a paycheck) while they earn their teaching license. It’s the first—and so far, only—preparation program in which a union is taking the lead role in credentialing teachers, although other state unions are interested in following suit. As reported in Education Week .

Teacher residencies have become increasingly popular at colleges and universities, school districts, and nonprofits, and have been supported by federal grants. Some of those efforts have partnered with teachers’ unions, but the unions had not taken a lead role until now.

But the conditions are ripe for more to follow in WEA’s footsteps: Teacher shortages in certain fields are continuing to plague schools; new sources of federal funding are available; and teachers’ unions are looking for ways to bolster their own membership.

“Unions have been trying to find ways to engage members, and to innovate, and I think this is a natural avenue to pursue,” said Bradley Marianno, an associate professor of educational policy and leadership at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He expects to see more state teachers’ unions adapt the residency model, either by themselves or with a university partner.

After all, this can double as an organizing strategy at a time when teachers’ unions have been hit with legal and legislative challenges to how they recruit and retain members, he said.

“They are in front of these new teachers and can pitch the benefits of the union,” Marianno said.

In the WEA’s residency program, the residents are union members and are covered by a collective bargaining agreement as they earn their teaching certificates.

“Being able to bargain for them, being able to make sure they get all of that bargaining power as a member when they are a resident, I think, is significant,” said Annie Lamberto, the special populations coordinator for WEA who supervises the program.

Also significant: A union-led residency program is designed for and by teachers, she said.

“Everyone that is involved in our program are current members of WEA, and they’re in the classroom,” Lamberto said. “It doesn’t have that disconnect that you can sometimes find in other teacher-prep programs. … Every single thing we do in our coursework has a direct thread to classroom activities—we don’t make them do anything in our [coursework] that they don’t actually have to perform.”

How Washington’s union-led residency got started

A couple years ago, Washington state schools began relying on record-breaking numbers of emergency substitutes, who aren’t required to have a background in education or a bachelor’s degree.

That pattern was “one of the health indicators that our system is struggling in terms of educator shortages,” said Jim Meadows, the dean of educator career pathways at the WEA.

Chris Reykdal, the state superintendent of public instruction, asked WEA to develop training and support for the emergency substitutes—and create a pathway for teacher certification, Meadows said.

Trade unions in other fields have long run programs to train future workers and supply a pipeline of dues-paying members. And teachers’ unions have long offered professional development, including the clock hours teachers need to maintain their licenses.

“As an organization, we had a strong track record for providing high-quality, relevant, practitioner-led professional learning,” Meadows said.

The WEA received $10.7 million in federal pandemic-relief money from the state, with $6.6 million of it allocated for the union to build and launch a teacher residency program. The first cohort of residents started last year and will graduate in August with their teaching certificate with a special education endorsement.

There are 16 residents in the first cohort who are working in three school districts. The WEA expects to grow to about 30 residents and nine school districts for its second cohort, which will start in June.

The residents are primarily former paraeducators and substitute teachers. They already have bachelor’s degrees, which gives WEA more flexibility: “We do not see our space as being degree-conferring,” Meadows said.

While designing the program, the WEA participated in the National Center for Teacher Residencies’ Residency Design Academy, a consulting service that included a facilitated site visit to another residency to see the work in action.

It was the first time the NCTR worked closely with a union-led teacher residency, said Kathlene Holmes Campbell, the center’s chief executive officer. There’s a lot of opportunity in this space, she said, adding that teachers’ unions are “well positioned” to run such programs, given their experience offering professional learning opportunities to their members.

But in general, it might be beneficial if unions work with an institution of higher education to offer participants a chance to earn a bachelor’s or master’s degree, Campbell said. Creating a pathway to a degree can help attract more diverse candidates.

This sounds like a good idea!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Chronicle of Higher Education has two articles this morning on AI.  One, written by Matthew Kirschenbaum, distinguished university professor of English at the University of Maryland at College Park, is entitled, AI May Ruin the University as We Know It: The existential threat of the newest wave of ed-tech.  The second, written by Marc Watkins, assistant director of academic innovation at the University of Mississippi, is entitled, Make AI Part of the Assignment:  Learning requires friction. Here’s how to get students to disclose and evaluate their own usage of tools like ChatGPT.  The two articles could not be more different in their approach to the use of AI in the academy. Here are two excerpts.

Matthew Kirschenbaum: 

“The vision of the future of education is either dystopian or utopian, depending on one’s sympathies for the idea that the classroom must necessarily once again be disrupted to better serve students, and depending too on the stake one has in the industries that are going to profit from the enterprise. In addition to the obvious red flags — shouldn’t the plan encouraging students to record their professors and classmates be run by the legal department? — such breezy promotions of the next big thing in the AI-powered ed-tech domain point to a significant shift in the higher-education landscape, one that is different in both degree and kind from the previous hype cycles that brought us iClickers, MOOCs, courseware, and Second Life. All of these tools were discrete, online, on separate platforms. But today, AI feature sets are integrated in all of the core educational enterprise systems — Google, Canvas, Zoom, and Office to name a few — and the tools are not only ready to hand, but always on, perhaps even requiring admin privileges to disable. Not surprising, then, is the deluge of higher-education summits, white papers, ad hoc committees and task forces, along with the many new research centers, curricular initiatives, and cluster hires — all suggesting that institutions are rushing to demonstrate that they too are embracing the new way to “do school…

“..In essence, the university itself has become a service. The idea of the University as a Service extends the model of Software as a Service to education. Software as a Service refers to the practice of businesses licensing software and paying to renew the license rather than owning and maintaining the software for themselves. For the University as a Service, traditional academic institutions provide the lecturers, content, and degrees (for now). In return, the technological infrastructure, instructional delivery, and support services are all outsourced to third-party vendors and digital platforms.

Marc Watkins:

“Giving students the opportunity to think critically and openly about their AI usage lays bare some uncomfortable truths for both students and teachers. It can lead both parties to question their assumptions and be surprised by what they find. Faculty members may discover that students actually learned something using AI; conversely, students might realize that their use of these tools meant they didn’t learn much of anything at all. At the very least, asking students to disclose how they used AI on an assignment means you, as their instructor, will spend less time staring into tea leaves trying to discern if they did.

But, you may be wondering, won’t some students just use ChatGPT to write this assessment, too? Sure. But in my experience, most undergraduates are eager for mechanisms to show how they used AI tools. They want to incorporate AI into their assignments yet make it clear they still used their own thoughts. As faculty members, our best bet is to teach ethical usage and set baseline expectations without adopting intrusive and often unreliable surveillance.”

The debate on the use of AI and other related technologies will dominate our discussions in higher education for years to come. And keep in mind that we are only at the beginning of AI development.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Eugene Vindman, a Democrat and the brother of a key figure in the first impeachment of former President Donald Trump in 2019, is projected to win his race for a congressional seat in Virginia against Republican Derrick Anderson.

The contest had been closely watched, as the district extends from south of Washington almost to Richmond, and is currently represented by moderate Democrat Abigail Spanberger, who is running for governor in 2025.

Both Vindman and Anderson played up their respective military records as part of their campaigns. Anderson, a former Army Green Beret, was deployed as part of the “surge” of soldiers to stabilize Iraq under President George W. Bush. He also served in Afghanistan, Bahrain, Jordan, Israel and Lebanon as a special forces officer.

Vindman was a paratrooper, infantry officer and eventually a lawyer for the judge advocate general’s office while in the Army. He later moved to the National Security Council, where, as a senior ethics official, he was informed by his brother Alexander of the phone call that resulted in Trump getting impeached in the House for allegedly attempting to extort Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Trump, who won his presidential race Wednesday, was acquitted by the Senate.

But both campaigns also saw their emphases on their respective candidates’ biographies come back to haunt them. As reported by The Huffington Post.

Anderson claimed that Vindman had embellished the military rank at which he retired. Vindman did not respond directly to the charge in a television interview, but said he is “entitled to be called ‘colonel.’”

“My opponent is lying about my record, just like he lied about his fake family,” Vindman said in that interview. The remark was a reference to pictures and video that Anderson had taken of himself with a female supporter and her children, in poses typical of candidates with their own families.

The material was not used in any ads from Anderson’s campaign, according to The New York Times, but did appear on the campaign’s YouTube page and on the site of the House Republicans’ political arm that serves as a clearinghouse for candidate material that can be used by outside political groups. On his campaign website, Anderson said he lives with a Dalmatian dog and is engaged to be married.

The incident spurred one of the more curious spats between campaigns in 2024, as a political action committee supporting Vindman sponsored TV ads using the images of the supporter and her family to call attention to Anderson’s “fake family.”

Anderson’s campaign retaliated by sending cease-and-desist letters to television stations, warning them against running the pro-Vindman ads featuring the supporter and her kids, even though the pictures and video were created to tout Anderson in the first place.

Congratulations to Mr. Vindman!

Tony

Jeopardy Contestant Heather Ryan

Dear Commons Community,

My wife, Elaine, and I are loyal watchers of the game show, Jeopardy.  About a week ago, we were a bit surprised at a clue that appeared sexist.

Heather Ryan, who competed on the Oct. 28 episode of the quiz  show, spoke to Binghamton University’s student-run newspaper Pipe Dreamon Nov. 6 to address the sexist clue that drew attention to the show.

After reading the hint, “Men seldom make passes at…,” to which the answer was, “Girls who wear glasses,” host Ken Jennings realized Ryan was wearing glasses and apologized.

“It is definitely an odd choice,” Ryan told the paper. “I think it made everybody in the audience and on stage, and Ken Jennings too, a little uncomfortable. It was like, ‘Oh, that was unexpected.’”

Ryan’s suggestion? “Maybe we choose better rhyming phrases in 2024,” she said.

“Unfortunately, there are still girls who are [in] middle school and they don’t want to wear their glasses and they’re losing out on their education,” she continued. “So, I think it’s much better to be able to see than anything else.”

As for the rest of her experience participating in the show, Ryan, who lost by just $1,  said “it was very fun” to be a part of.

“I had a great time,” she said. “Everybody there was very welcoming. It’s such a part of American culture that I definitely wanted to go on when I got the call for it.”

“It’s just a very special thing to play a small role in this big part,” she added. “It’s been running for 40 years, and so I got to play my part in it.”

On the episode, Jennings admitted that the line was “a little problematic,” and said, “Sorry, Heather” immediately after reading it. Contestant Will Wallace, who gave the answer, emphasized that was “very” problematic.

My wife, Elaine, wears glasses.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Our Lady of the Lake, a private Catholic university in Texas, may be on the hook for millions of dollars because of a class-action lawsuit over a 2022 data breach that compromised personal information of tens of thousands of students and staff.

Hacked information included names, addresses, dates of birth, Social Security numbers, driver’s license numbers, passport numbers, credit and debit card information and medical costs.   As reported by the San Antonio Express-News.

Under terms of the deal, class members’ ordinary out-of pocket expenses — including unreimbursed bank fees or losses due to identity theft — are capped at $400 each. Those expenses include up to three hours of lost time at $25 an hour.

Extraordinary out-of-pocket expenses are capped at $2,500 for each person. Class members, though, must provide documentation showing they made reasonable efforts to avoid, or sought reimbursement for, those losses — including exhaustion of all available credit monitoring insurance and identity theft insurance.

Class members also can submit a claim to accept two years of credit monitoring services and identity theft restoration services.
The private Catholic university also agreed to pay all settlement administration costs and attorneys’ fees and costs of about $216,000.

The deal represents a “significant benefit” for the 41,825 class members who are eligible to make a claim, lawyers for the plaintiffs said in a court filing. None of the members objected to the settlement, details of which are posted at OLLUsettlement.com.

A hearing on final approval and certification of the class is set for Nov. 15. State District Court Judge Marialyn Barnard granted preliminary approval in July.

Attorneys for the university and the plaintiffs didn’t respond to requests for comment Monday.

The university first acknowledged the data breach with a public notice on March 31, 2023 — a week after the San Antonio Express-News first reported on it.

Ana Vasquez, a Texas resident who applied for admission to the university in 2019 but never enrolled, sued the university over the hack in April 2023. She filed on behalf of current and former students, employees and those who had applied to the school. Jose Gonzalez filed a similar complaint less than two months later. The suits were later combined.

The two named plaintiffs stand to receive service awards of $5,000 each.

Vasquez alleged the university on San Antonio’s West Side failed to protect individuals’ personally identifiable information and “failed to even encrypt or redact this highly sensitive information.”

The data was compromised because of Our Lady of the Lake’s “negligent and/or careless acts and omissions and its utter failure to protect students’ sensitive data,” the complaint added.

Vasquez said she suffered injury, including $295 in fraudulent charges to her credit card, invasion of privacy and loss of time mitigating the risk of identity theft.

The Express-News, citing Boerne-based IT consulting firm BetterCyber Consulting Group LLC and Breachsense, an Ohio-based data breach monitoring platform, reported that the ransomware group AvosLocker claimed it hacked into the university’s network.

AvosLocker has been linked to online attacks at other colleges.

In October 2023, the FBI and the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency issued an advisory on AvosLocker.

“AvosLocker affiliates compromise organizations’ networks by using legitimate software and open-source remote system administration tools,” the agencies said. “AvosLocker affiliates then use exfiltration-based data extortion tactics with threats of leaking and/or publishing stolen data.”

Our Lady of the Lake University said its investigation of the data breach found that a “limited amount of personal information was removed” from its network.

This case is a warning for other colleges and universities which might have insufficient data security systems in place.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Many of us are thankful that the 2024 election is over — even if some states and races remain uncalled. As of this writing, Donald Trump is  positioned to reclaim the White House after his late-night victory in Pennsylvania. Below are five major takeaways from how America voted courtesy of Yahoo News and other media.

Tony

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Trump is stronger than four years ago

Trump didn’t lose reelection in 2020 by much. If a few thousand votes in a few key swing states had broken the other way, he would have been president instead of Joe Biden.

So any shift toward Trump in 2024, even a minor one, had the potential to be decisive.

The big takeaway from Tuesday is that America did shift toward Trump in 2024 — and the shift wasn’t minor. In Florida, he defeated Harris by 13 percentage points, roughly quadrupling his 2020 margin. He lost in Virginia — but by 5 points this time instead of 10. In the deep blue states of New York and New Jersey, he performed better (on the presidential level) than any Republican in decades. The list goes on.

Much of this movement — winning red states by more than expected; losing blue states by less — didn’t scramble the electoral math. But it reflected larger demographic and geographic trends that could propel Trump to victory in the all-important battlegrounds once all the votes there are counted.

Trump did especially well in rural areas

Late Tuesday night, the Associated Press called the two Southern swing states, Georgia and North Carolina, for Trump. In both, the former president improved on his 2020 performance in nearly every small, red, rural county — a couple hundred votes here, a few thousand there. Harris did slightly better than Biden in some places, too — including several key suburban and exurban counties around Atlanta and Charlotte. But ultimately, it wasn’t enough to overcome Trump’s relentless rural firewall.

According to the preliminary exit polls (which may change as more of the vote comes in), Trump won 63% of the rural vote nationally — up from 57% four years ago. Meanwhile, Harris didn’t do any better than Biden among urban voters (60%) — and narrowly lost suburban voters, a group Biden won.

Trump also overperformed with Latino voters

Early exit poll data can be a bit fuzzy — but if the initial numbers end up being roughly accurate, Trump may have just secured a bigger share of the Latino vote than any Republican since George W. Bush.

Four years ago, the exit polls showed Trump winning 32% of Latinos. Right now, they show him winning 45%. In Michigan, they show him winning 60% of Latinos. If true, that would be a net shift in Trump’s direction of more than 35 percentage points.

Nationally, Latino men seem to be mostly driving this movement. In 2020, they voted for Biden (59%) over Trump (36%). This year, they voted for Trump (54%) over Harris (44%).

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Again, exit polls can change — and they’ve struggled to precisely quantify the Latino vote in the past. But assuming the basic direction of this year’s Latino numbers are correct, it could represent a major sea change in U.S. politics.

Democrats struggled in down-ballot races

In the current Senate, Democrats have a working majority — 51 to 49.

But 2024 was always going to be an uphill battle. For one thing, they had almost no room for error. (Losing even one seat could mean losing control of the entire chamber.) And for another, they were defending lots of vulnerable seats; Republicans were barely defending any.

On Tuesday, some Senate Democrats and Democratic candidates — Ohio’s Sherrod Brown, Texas’s Colin Allred — ran ahead of Harris in their states. But it wasn’t enough, and they lost anyway.

In West Virginia, Democrats had effectively ceded the seat held by outgoing Sen. Joe Manchin long before Election Day. In Nebraska, independent challenger Dan Osborn failed to unseat GOP Sen. Deb Fischer.

Once Gov. Jim Justice won in West Virginia and businessman Bernie Moreno won in Ohio, that was it — two seats flipped, and the Senate flipped with them.

The polls weren’t wrong

Votes are still being counted, but it looks like “the polls” had a pretty decent night.

This was not a foregone conclusion. In both 2016 and 2020, the polls significantly underestimated Trump’s support in key battleground states. Many political observers wondered if the same thing would happen again in 2024 — or if, by trying not to underestimate Trump a third time, pollsters would tweak their methodologies too much and underestimate Harris instead.

This time around, however, the best nonpartisan polling averages seem to have been fairly accurate.

Again, it’s too early to say what the final margins will be in every battleground, let alone nationally. But the pre-election polls estimated that none of the swing states would be decided by more than a point or two, or three at most. And currently, all of them remain within that range.

In the end, Trump could win most — or even all — of the swing states and earn a comfortable Electoral College victory. But even a swing-state sweep falls well within the possibilities implied by the deadlocked pre-election polling — as long as none of those victories are outside the usual margin of error.

Dear Commons Community,

The article below appeared in Education Week yesterday.  It describes Sarah Said, an English teacher at an alternative high school, who is advocating for using generative AI with English learners.  In a study of graduate teacher education students published earlier this year, I too receive feedback from professional educators indicating that generative AI would be an effective tool for teaching English language learners.

Below is the entire Education Week article.

Tony

———————————————————————————

Education Week

A Teacher Makes the Case for Using AI With English Learners

By Ileana Najarro

October 30, 2024

Sarah Said, an English teacher working with English learners at an alternative high school near Chicago, has seen translation apps evolve over time.

Enough input from users and linguists have made Google Translate a much more useful tool than it might have been a few years back.

Lately, her English learners at Dream Academy in Elgin, Ill., have demonstrated a knack for using and finding a variety of generative artificial intelligence tools and translation apps, prompting Said to learn more about this technology and guide her students in responsible and ethical uses.

With more than 20 years of experience working with English learners, Said encourages other teachers to familiarize themselves with new AI tools. She presented on this topic virtually at the annual WIDA conference in mid-October and spoke with Education Week about how teachers working with English learners should approach AI tools in class.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Why should teachers working with English learners not shy away from AI tools?

They’re already using it.

I’ve noticed you will get things that don’t look like your students’ writing, and they have tried to use AI, but they haven’t done it responsibly. It’s really then taking what they’ve done and working with them on saying, “Hey, this is a starting point. Let’s work on expanding the idea that AI gave you so that now it becomes your own idea to where your own feelings and your own emotion is in there.”

I do have students who regularly will use translation apps in class and outside of class. I’m noticing, where is this coming from? Students will tell you, “I used ChatGPT to help translate.” I’m like, “Well, OK, but now we have to grow what you did.”

That’s where it becomes a one-on-one conversation. How can we change the sentence to bring your voice into the sentence rather than AI’s voice into the sentence? Almost like using a calculator in math class, right? You may struggle with certain operations, but you still have to do the algebra, you still have to do the proofs in geometry. AI is your starting point to build on better ideas in learning and understanding language.

I didn’t totally know what was out there. [Students] were showing me things. You do have to teach them that there’s a line that they have to walk with AI, and it’s definitely not going away. My students, when they’re looking for jobs and they’re writing things—applications and resumes—they have to make sure that they are using certain words. Unfortunately, there are employers out there that are using AI to help them sift through resumes because they have thousands of resumes to sift through.

English learners might be the first ones to actually be in the know because they’ve had to adapt to using so many tools in the classroom.

In my building, I feel that way, because they had to learn language for survival. Years ago in another district, I was actually a coordinator, and I worked with moms from Yemen, and it was very interesting. This is when Google Voice first came out. And these moms would just use Google Voice with their phones. I’m like, “Wow, that’s so innovative.”

I think that sometimes our language learners are the most innovative because they’ve had to work to navigate certain situations, that they might be on the cusp of more than some of the gen. ed. students.

What should teachers keep in mind when exploring AI tools?

A teacher has to understand what the tools are and what the language of AI is, because it’s another world. So before even beginning to embark on AI in a classroom, the teacher has to understand it. I know that this is a work in progress with states and districts right now, but districts have to have parameters on how schools and districts can use it.

First, the teacher has to become knowledgeable about what tools are out there. Then, as they’re becoming knowledgeable about the tools, that’s where they become knowledgeable about the parameters, they become knowledgeable about policy. We have to regulate it in a sense, too. You don’t want kids putting their data out there, so you have to regulate that and understand that. If a student is using a tool, you have to show them how to use it responsibly.

I think AI enhances language learning. It’s up to the teacher on how they model the usage of it. The kids need to see an appropriate model in order to develop those skills.

What have been some of the strategic ways AI has helped your instruction?

I’ve used it as a model. I’ll break down a sentence for students, and I’ll show them how the AI helps to find meaning within the sentence. I will use AI in front of them to show them, “Hey, when you ask this question, this is what’s going to come up, and this is what they’re going to tell you. It’s not just the question you ask. It’s how you ask the question.”

Then it teaches this idea of, how do we command language? Because a computer takes everything literally. It’s kind of like Amelia Bedelia, right? And what is the difference, then, between that literal and figurative language?

When you send an email to a person, the person cannot tell what you are like on the other end. If you send an email and you sound mad but you didn’t mean to sound mad, the person on the other end doesn’t see that. So how do we command language when we are not in front of people?

Even designing on Canva [an online graphic design tool], you could use their AI tools to design something.