Hello, everybody and welcome to another episode, a Halloween special, maybe episode of the Learning Curve podcast.

I'm one of your hosts, Albert Chang, and co-hosting with me this week is Helen Baxendale.

Helen, what's up?

Hello, Albert.

It's good to be back with you this Halloween weekend. Looking forward to

our Halloween-themed guest. Yeah, that's right. If you don't know, we're going to have Leo

Damrosh. I was going to talk about his new biography of Robert Lewis Stevenson. Now,

what's the connection to Halloween? Well, he is the author of the famous novel, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. So that's how we're going to get our spooky on, I guess. But it should be exciting show. We're going to talk more about Stevens, not just Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but Stevenson's life and some of his other works, which are classics as well. So looking forward to this show. Now, before we get to that interview, though, we should talk some news, Helen, as we always do on this show. What caught your eye this week? Well, thanks, Albert. Yes. The article I was interested in this week was published on the substack of Robert Pondissio, who is a well-known AI scholar, but in fact, it was a guest post by

Douglas Carnine, who is a long-time ed policy expert, actually I think now emeritus at the

University of Oregon. But he has been, I think, one of the most consistent and powerful voices

for the professionalization of teaching and the idea that

education needs to develop a set of standards around what qualifies as actual knowledge and

truth claims in education. And that, you know, the profession of teaching is sort of akin to where

medicine was at a time when it was still talking about myasmas and affixing

leeches, you know, in terms of its respect for evidence and how it deploys evidence in common

practice.

And so it's a fascinating article.

It's an article that should make us all who are in education pretty angry because it,

you know, sort of documents,

I think, all the ways that teaching isn't really a true profession, certainly not in the way

that medicine is in terms of having cohered around a clear body of evidence and best

practice and holding the profession to such standards. I mean, the most obvious instance of this

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