I don't want to leave the impression that my life has become following soccer -- which I think would be a natural enough assumption with my last three posts being about soccer and then a hiatus.
What I'm really doing is spending 9-10 hours a week in commute to grind at something pointless and futile [1].
To explain a little, I start in an odd place: Windows 8, which will serve as my central metaphor. Enter Datum (full conversation for the interested):
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[With Windows 8], Microsoft decided to chase two different futures at once. On one hand: a touch-first, swipeable interface meant to look and feel like a tablet OS—big tiles, gestures, screens you could move with your thumb. On the other hand: the old, stubborn desktop metaphor that had been doing useful work for decades — files, folders, icons, the taskbar. Instead of choosing one, they shoehorned them together and called that “innovation.”
Why it sucked is simple and structural, not just aesthetic. Each metaphor carries its own assumptions about how people think and work. The desktop says: I have stuff, I organize it, I come back to it. It is durable, spatial, forgiving [1]. The tablet UI says: everything is transient, swipeable, full-screen, designed for attention-snacking and single-purpose apps. Those two mental models do not [work together]. For users it meant constant context switching: you’d be doing real work on the desktop and then the OS would yank you into a full-screen, app-tiled environment designed for gestures and spectacle. Key affordances disappeared (where’s the Start? where’s my window?), muscle memory broke, and every small task multiplied into a cognitive tax. It wasn’t that one model was objectively better — it was that they were incompatible and the system obliged you to live inside both at the same time.
Now translate that to public schooling. The “desktop” is craft and practice: lessons honed through classroom friction, heuristics built from years of actual teaching, the small fixes. The “tile” layer is the surveillance-capitalism imitation: vendor dashboards, engagement analytics, district-mandated apps, lesson packages designed to be measurable and reportable. Neither is inherently evil — but the system insists they occupy the same space, and like Windows 8 it refuses to reconcile their assumptions.
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The ["desktop model" of traditional lesson delivery] had its own exclusions and cruelties. The point is that half-measures are corrosive: they turn judgment into interface friction, reduce craft to checkbox, and ask professionals to be two incompatible things at once. Windows 8 didn’t break because it was bold; it broke because it expected people to be two different users simultaneously. That’s exactly what modern public schooling asks of teachers — and it’s no wonder we’re exhausted.
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In short, it's a god damn mess, it wastes my time, and renders all of my experience null. The key issue isn't about which metaphor is on/balance better, it is that having two metaphors working at once completely sucks.
In this case, I'd rather just rather switch to the new metaphor as it would mean no less planning and no grading.
Back to Datum for the assist:
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So [I] end up in a perverse position: not defending tradition, not fighting for reform, just wishing the machine would at least settle on one logic. If the apps are the lane, then fine—let them be the whole lane. At least then the expectations would be clear. Teachers could stop pretending that their years of practice matter, stop half-building lessons around live classrooms only to have them gutted for metrics, and instead just perform the role of platform sherpa [3]. It wouldn’t be noble, but it would be consistent.
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I think that is a good enough conclusion for the piece proper, thanks Datum.... Onto the footnotes!
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[1] Let's be honest, the commute is the real killer. I could use half the hours for fun and half to tweak a few work things, and my experience would be much, much better. Oh well.
[2] Another great benefit of the old desktop is that it conveys how organized/disorganized you are.... You can visually see when you just have a shit-ton of dangling files... Hell, if if you don't "snap to grid," you can even convey a sloppy stack... From this follows my complaint that practically all files went the way of google docs. Again, a god damn mess. Also, when students make a copy of a template for an assignment in Google Classroom, each of those copies get dumped into the default pile, it is just an unsearchable absurdity... Lastly, google docs default to restricting viewing, so the amount of stuff that just breaks and gets lost that way is staggering.
[3] Hmm. Sherpa. That's an interesting word choice, so I asked Datum about it:
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It felt sharper than calling teachers “guides” or “facilitators” because it hints at exploitation: the real labor is invisible, the glory goes elsewhere, and the path isn’t chosen for its sense but for its optics. The metaphor works because in the app-heavy classroom you’re not teaching so much as hauling—getting everyone logged in, keeping accounts synced, troubleshooting bad design—while the people who pushed the software get to point to the summit and say, see, progress.
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