Erase and Try Again

About fifteen years ago a ninth grader presented a book talk on Animal Farm. He knew the plot. He knew the characters. He got to the conclusion — and described the wrong ending. Not Orwell's bleak, devastating final image of pigs indistinguishable from humans. The movie's ending. Napoleon overthrown. Hope restored.  Wrong book. Wrong ending. Wrong medium entirely. 

This episode is about something I used to do for fun — and what happened when I remembered it was also exactly right.  

ABOUT THIS EPISODE 

A learning walk took me into a middle school colleague's classroom where I watched something work. Mr. McCaffrey's hot seat. A student in a chair, peers asking questions. I filed it away. Didn't think about using it myself. 

A month later I was planning the Gatsby unit —this episode is about what happened next.

PEOPLE MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE 

Mr. Barch — Dean of Students, Ninth Grade Academy. Brought the learning walk practice to our district's administration.   

Mr. McCaffrey — Middle School ELA Teacher. His hot seat with The Diary of Anne Frank is why this episode exists. 

STUDENT SPOTLIGHT: PEYTON'S PRINTS 

One of my students — Peyton, a junior — just got her driver's license. Which feels like a footnote given that she's been flying planes for quite a while. She also takes college classes on top of her high school schedule and runs her own 3D printing business. 

Peyton's Prints: Where Your Ideas Take Flight. 

If you're looking for custom 3D printing, check her out: 

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@boots63 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/people/Peyton-Hall/pfbid02vwCfZKLefSozyRxeftYUGiBk9oTBB7m9x2y9t4v8xbrNEfw8G9ABZtSJo8SgN92yl/ 

Peyton — keep flying.  

MY HOT SEAT FORMAT 

STRUCTURE — Six major characters, one per hot seat session — Each character has a primary student and an understudy — Two hot seats per week over four weeks — One comfortable armchair at the front of the room 

THE QUESTIONS — Students ask questions organized by critical lens — Historical lens: questions about the era, context, social conditions — Feminist lens: questions about gender roles and power — Existentialist lens: questions about meaning, choice, identity — Postcolonial lens: questions about power, race, colonization — Psychoanalytical lens: questions about motivation, unconscious drives — Marxist lens: questions about class, wealth, economic power 

THE RULES — Questions are conversational, not technical — Peers ask first by lens group, teacher asks last — Open Q&A at the teacher's discretion — No advance knowledge of which questions are coming 

WHY IT WORKS AGAINST AI DRIFT The preparation AI can do is generic. The questions your students ask are specific, contextual, and human. ChatGPT can summarize the plot and explain the symbolism. It cannot prepare a student for sixteen peers who sat through the same lectures, read the same chapters, and are now asking questions from six different critical frameworks in real time with no warning about which lens comes next. 

Peer judgment is the thing AI cannot generate.  

THE FRIXION MARKERS  

Frixion fine-point erasable markers. Most useful device in my life. Because I change my mind. Because I make mistakes. Because what worked last year doesn't always work this year. Erase what doesn't work. Try again.  

ABOUT THROUGH THE UNDERTOW 

Through the Undertow is about what happens to thinking when it becomes optional. For teachers, parents, tutors, homeschoolers, and anyone who cares about what's happening to the next generation of thinkers. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:37

About fifteen years ago, I had a ninth grade class doing book talks. Each student selected a book from the library, prepared a presentation, and delivered it to the class. About 30 students and 30 books. I want to be upfront about one of them. I suspected this particular guy might cut corners. Past his prologue. Anyway, George Orwell's Animal Farm is the one he chose. It's short, it has a movie, both of which are true and both are relevant to my story. Anyway, I kept my suspicions to myself. I didn't want him going looking for the movie if he hadn't already found it. His presentation started well. He knew the setting, the major characters, the inciting incident, old major speech, the animals' revolt, the seven commandments, the power struggle between Snowball and Napoleon. I started rooting for him. Maybe I'd misjudged him this time. But then something felled off. He kept centering on the dog Jesse. Talking about Jessie the sheepdog, almost if she were the protagonist, as if the story were being told from her point of view. In the book, Jessie's a minor character. Her puppies become Napoleon's secret enforcers, his allegorical KGB. That's essentially it. But in the 1999 TNT movie starring Kelsey Grammer, Jessie's the main character. The whole story is told from her perspective. No mention of propaganda, no mention of the creeping totalitarianism. I could feel my face doing something, and students noticed. Then he got to the conclusion. And instead of Orwell's ending, the pigs walking on two legs, wearing human clothes, drinking whiskey and playing cards, with the neighboring farmers that they once despised, so indistinguishable from the humans that the other animals looking through the window can no longer tell which is which. He described the movie's ending. Napoleon overthrown, hope restored, new owners arriving with a better future. Wrong ending, wrong medium entirely. Engaging the drift. His presentation petered out in the room that had that specific silence a classroom gets when everyone knows something went wrong and nobody wants to be the one to say it. That was 15 years before Chat GPT. The technology was different, but the gap was identical. Movies then, AI now, same move, same crash, same silence. Welcome to Through the Undertow. I'm Denine Fry. This episode is about something I used to do for fun and what happened when I remembered it was also exactly right. About a month month before the Gatsby hot seat, I, along with my department, was on a learning walk. I should explain what that is because it's worth explaining. A learning walk is exactly what it sounds like. Teachers leave their classrooms and walk into somebody else's. You watch, you take notes, you steal ideas. Our district does them because of Mr. Barch, our ninth grade academy's dean of students, who brought the idea back from a University of Pittsburgh seminar and made the case for it. And here's the part worth noting. Administration listened. They didn't just nod and file it away, they funded it. Substitutes for a dozen teachers, not just English teachers, but other departments, coordination across buildings, a whole logistical apparatus. In a world where professional development usually means sitting in the mini theater watching a PowerPoint, someone decided that putting teachers in each other's classrooms was worth the investment. Credit where it's due to Mr. Barch for bringing it and to the administrators who said yes. Going back to the day of the learning walk, after gathering in the middle school library conference room, our department chair outfitted us with clipboards, each with our first name handwritten in cursive metallic sharpie, session handouts, one for each grade level, and then he handed us each a very nice special pen, ceremonial, official, uniform props for our mission. He's not exactly a whimsical guy, which made it all the more charming. But I put that special pen in my bag for a special occasion and used my usual friction fine point erasable marker. Besides my kitchen trash disposal, the erasable marker is my most useful device. Because I change my mind a lot and I make more mistakes than I care to admit. So going back to the learning walk, we did a pre-briefing in the library conference room in the middle school before we set out. Then three sessions: eighth grade, seventh grade, sixth grade, with a debrief after each one. After lunch, we gathered for a final debrief where we summarized our observations and remaining questions into one shared Google Doc. All positive, no negatives. That document went to the cooperating middle school teachers. At the time, I didn't realize how important Mr. McCaffrey's eighth grade hot seat would become. Consider this my formal addendum to that reporting document. Teacher reflection doesn't always happen at the moment of the event. Sometimes it comes days later, sometimes weeks. Sometimes you're planning a Gatsby unit a month after the learning walk and something surfaces that you didn't know that you'd file away. I don't think that that's a failure of reflection. I think it's just how it works. The meaning catches up to the moment on its own timeline. We used those same clipboards when we visited our ninth grade colleagues a couple weeks later. All that was learned with those exceptional colleagues requires another episode. Anyway, officials official. I have the clipboard in a place of honor where I can grab it at a moment's notice. So the day of the walk, five of us, a crew of high school English teachers, made our way into Mr. McCaffrey's middle school Diary of Van Frank lesson. Class was already in session. We apologized sheepishly with our body language as we found whatever space we could in the back, perched on counters, wedged in the student desks, our monogram clipboards in hand. His room is set up stadium style, desks pushed together horizontally with a wide aisle down the middle. A very professional image of the diary of Anne Frank characters projected on the board. In one chair in the front of the room with a student in it, answering questions from his peers. It was a hot seat. The student in the chair was portraying a character from the book. His peers asked questions, characterization plot motivation, and try to guess which character he was. A bit like a fun bingo. Basic questions, conversational questions, the kind that requires students to actually know the text. And they did phenomenally well, all of them. In our later debriefing, we all commented on how impressed we were. Not like we were surprised in a condescending way, we were genuinely impressed. Mr. McCaffrey had built something real in that room, and he wasn't the only one. Every teacher we observed on that day was doing something worth watching. The biggest eye-opener for me was the sixth-grade learning support ELA teacher who was doing things with her students that I recognized from my own practice with academic ninth graders. Skills that I thought were high school territory. Turns out those kids had learned them years earlier and knew them all along, my ninth graders included. They just pretended otherwise, but that's a whole other episode. So I filed away the hot seat. Enjoyed observing it, didn't think about using it myself. That came later. Can a student shortcut this with a chat button? Google Form quiz, yeah. Comprehension questions, yeah. Essay, absolutely yes. I kept hitting walls. And then I'm not entirely sure how. Mr. McCaffrey's classroom surfaced. I think it was the characterization angle. The hot seat works because you have to know a character from the inside out to inhabit them convincingly. And Frank, Jay Gatsby. Different texts, same demand. You cannot perform a character you haven't met. That was the link. And once I saw it, I couldn't unsee it. So when I introduced the Gatsby unit, I laid out all the moving parts up front to the students, including the hot seat. I announced the roles, each major character had a primary student and an understudy. The primary would sit in the chair, the understudy was there in case of absence, or if the two decided to tag team among the lenses. I distributed an instructional handout when we got to the first hot seat. Explained the format, the expectations, and the critical lens questions. Nobody groaned, nobody negotiated, there really wasn't much reaction at all, honestly. I think they didn't quite know what to expect. The bigger reaction came when I mentioned the culminating debate. That one they understood immediately. Most students prefer a debate to a cumulative exam. The first hot seat, Nick Caraway, the narrator, was a bit stiff. New format, new energy, everybody feeling their way through it. That's normal. That's the rehearsal. The second one, Gatsby himself, was different. The class had figured out how it worked, they relaxed into it, and it got fun. And then it got interesting. In each of the American lit classes, the Gatsby hot seats started fine. Each guy settled into the comfy chair in the front of the room with what I can only describe as confidence. This particular guy had a printout he generated for the assignment on his lap. He glanced at it after he sat down. The first questions came from the historical lens group. The Roaring Twenties, the Wealth, the American Dream. Passable, not great, but passable. Then the Marxist Lens group asked about Gatsby's money. And that's when it became obvious. From about eight feet away, I leaned in and quietly told him, Gatsby and Daisy are not married. Daisy's husband's Tom Buchanan, ludicrously wealthy, old money. She doesn't need Gatsby's money. That's rather the point. He nodded, and the questions continued, from the feminist lens, from the existentialist lens, from the postcolonial lens. Each group took their turn. Each question landed in roughly the same place, somewhere between uncertain and incorrect. The printout on his lap was not helping. The questions were coming too fast and from too many directions. You can't scan a page fast enough to answer a room full of peers who actually read the book. I watched the cockiness go quiet, shoulders drooping slightly, eyes finding the floor instead of the room, the body language of someone who very much wanted to be somewhere else. And the room. The room was doing that thing that rooms do, the quiet giggles, the knowing looks, some faces sympathetic, some amused, and a few, I'll be honest, with that particular expression that lands somewhere between triumphant and condescending. The expression of someone who did the reading and is watching someone who didn't. I did not open it up for general QA this time. Some mercy was called for. And I didn't pull him aside afterwards. The room had already said everything that needed to be said, and his peers, the ones who'd read the book, who prepared their lens questions, who watched him scan a printout for answers they already knew had done the work for me. That's the hot seat. You can't perform a character you haven't met. And when you try, the room knows. Before we close, I want to address the thing someone is definitely thinking. Just go back to paper and pencil, do everything in class, no devices, no AI, no problem. And I I understand the impulse. I I do. But here's the reality. You can't control a determined student. The phone is in their pocket, the output is already printed at home and tucked into a folder, the smartwatch is on their wrist, the AI glass is on their face. There is no classroom controlled enough to stop a student who has decided to find a workaround. And I'm not interested in running one where I'm the warden. That's not teaching. The gap doesn't close when you remove the technology. The gap closes when the work requires thinking that no technology can do for them. And here's what the hot seat told me about where that gap actually is. It's not about speed. It's not about format. It's about peer judgment. A teacher's disappointment can be managed, explained away, slept off, but a room full of your peers watching you not know your own character, watching you scan a printout for answers they already have in their heads, that lands differently. Teenagers care about peer approval in a way they don't always care about grades. And I cannot imagine a harder fail. And ChatGPT cannot prepare you for that room. It can give you facts about Gatsby, it can summarize the plot and explain the symbolism, it can generate lens-specific analysis. But it can't prepare you for 20 students who sat through the same lectures, read the same chapters, and are now asking questions from six different critical frameworks in real time with no warning about what might come next. The preparation AI can do is generic. The questions your student asks are specific, contextual, and human. And that's the gap. And the hot seat lives right inside of it. Which brings me back to something I used to do for fun. I still have that special pen in my bag, waiting for a special occasion. I still use my friction erasable marker every day, different colors for different classes. Blue and reds for American Lit, purple and aqua for AP Seminar, black was still available for the learning walks and uh the notes, which felt right for something new. Because I changed my mind, because I make mistakes. Because what worked last year doesn't always work this year. And what I filed away three years ago might be exactly right for this moment. And that's not nostalgia, that's not back in my day. That's just teaching in a world that keeps changing faster than the AI updates, the admin imperatives, and the definition of Riz. Uh Hot Seat isn't new. I used it before and forgot all about it. Mr. McCaffrey reminded me it existed. The ubiquity of AI gave me a new lens, a filter which through I can run every assessment. Does this actually require thinking? Or can a student shortcut it with a chatbot? The hot seat passed easily. The technology changed. The need for students to be present in their own thinking didn't. I didn't design something new. I remembered something old and I understood it differently this time. Something I used to do because it was fun before the crush of everything made me forget it was also exactly right. Erase what doesn't work. Try again. Stay in the water. Before I go, I want to take a moment to highlight one of my students. Peyton is a junior who just got her driver's license, which honestly feels like a footnote given that she's been flying planes for quite a while. She also takes college classes on top of her high school schedule and runs her own 3D printing business called Peyton's Prince, where your ideas take flight. She is exactly the kind of young adult this podcast exists to celebrate. Someone who is doing the thinking, doing the work, and building something real. So if you're looking for custom 3D printing, check her out. Her YouTube channel is Boots63. I'll put the link in the show notes. Peyton, keep flying. Through the undertow, new episodes every two weeks. Find us wherever you get your podcasts. And if this episode meant something to you, send it to one teacher who needs to hear it. That's how it spreads. Not the algorithm. Word of mouth. The old fashioned kind. See you in the water.