5/5/2025 Volume 6.36

Greetings South Students, Parents, Staff, and Community Members,

Past issues of this newsletter are available at the following link: TWaS Archive. 

TWaS is also sent via Canvas Messenger and linked to my Canvas Module for all students and families to access, and shared on South’s FB page.

Part I: The News

Content Disclaimer: I am not omniscient. Don’t see your event or results in the newsletter below? I rely on parents, coaches, and others to send me information to include in the newsletter. Feel free to share positive news and results anytime via my email. 

This Week’s Activities: Track and Soccer are now outside! Schedule HERE.

School Store Help Needed: Please sign up here: https://bit.ly/4edAiBZ

Library Book Return: Please return all library books ASAP. Fine notices will be sent soon.

Senior Chromebook Return: Seniors, return your Chromebook and charger in the library before Friday and get a full sized candy bar or gum while supplies last.

Teacher and Staff Appreciation Week: The first week of May is Teacher Appreciation Week. The South PTSO provided breakfast this morning and will be providing lunch for teachers throughout the week. Please see the following link for details and a message from the PTSO board and membership.

Senior Information: We are maintaining an Information for Seniors page on our website dedicated to the Senior Timeline. That can be found here: https://www.asdk12.org/domain/6354. 

Senior Finals Schedule and Graduation Practice: We will have a normal bell schedule the week of May 5th. Seniors will take finals on the following dates/class periods:

• May 7 Period 5
• May 8 Periods 3, 4 & 6
• May 9 Periods 1 & 2 + Graduation Practice @ 10:45 am in the gym

All seniors should attend graduation practice. All Chromebooks and chargers must be turned in by Friday at graduation practice (full sized candy bar for early return in the library). Seniors will receive 7 tickets at graduation practice on Friday morning. Any extras can be shared freely at that point. 

Free Music Performances This Week: Monday May 5th is the Spring Choir Concert; Tuesday May 6th is the Spring Band Concert and Wednesday May 7th is the Spring Orchestra Concert.

All concerts are at 7pm in the Auditeria and are free. On Thursday at 6 pm in the Auditeria there will also be a solo and ensemble orchestra performance.

Shout Out to Senior Joy Saugier: Joy E Saugier is being offered the National Merit Texas A&M University Scholarship. Pursuant to an Agreement with National Merit Scholarship Corporation (NMSC), this college-sponsored Merit Scholarship award is funded by Texas A&M University.

Shout Out to Maren Lund and South German Students: Senior Maren Lund was recognized as South High School's outstanding German program student and recognized for receiving a National German Exam Post-Graduate Scholarship to use toward college costs. This award competition was open only to seniors in the USA who received a gold medal on the exam and had not yet spent time abroad in a German-speaking nation.  

2025 German National Exam Stand Outs:

Metal Detector/Pilot Security Program: The ASD Office of Emergency Management will be at South at lunch on Tuesday to pilot mobile metal detectors. This is a proactive effort to increase safety and is not in response to a current security concern. They will be tested in several schools across ASD. Metal detectors will not be a permanent feature at any school, but may be used for specific events at schools in the future. Additional information about this program and a feedback form are available at the following link: https://www.asdk12.org/metaldetection.

Spring Break 2026 to Japan: South is going to Japan for Spring Break 2026. We filled one bus,  but we can get a second one if 12 more people sign up (you will be placed on a wait list until we get the 12).  There will be an informational meeting tonight at 6:00 p.m. In the library.   Learn about the trip at: https://www.eftours.com/tour-website/2850504UJ. 

If you have any questions, please email Lydia Frankenburger at frankenburger_lydia@asdk12.org.

Summer School Information and Form: South High School will be offering on-site summer school. Please see the following form for information.  PLEASE NOTE: There will be no credit recovery classes at South next year. So, summer school is every student’s best option to stay on track to graduate. Summer school will run 9 days at South and allow students to recover necessary graduation credit.

Boys Soccer Results: Boys Varsity Soccer results: (4/29) - South defeated West 2-1 in a close, cross-town rival match. Goals came from Robert Marshall (1) and Dawitt Hoffman (assisted by Owen Brown). (4/30) - Senior Night game. South lost to Chugiak 2-0.  Boys JV Soccer results: (4/28) - South lost 4-0 to West. (5/1) - South lost to Chugiak, 2-1. Goal came from Chase Gleaton (1). 

South Baseball Continues Hot Streak: South picked up 3 more wins last week improving to 11-0 on the season. Carson Lake pitched a complete game against Eagle River in a 7-1 victory. Preston Nerland’s late game RBI secured the win for South over West 3-2. Landon Drumm came in to pitch in the 4th inning and held the Chugiak Mustangs scoreless to get the win in a 2-1 victory.

This week South plays Wasilla 5/5 @ Wasilla. Service 5/7 at 5:15 @ Mulcahy Stadium. Dimond 5/8 at 7:15 @ Mulcahy Stadium. Chugiak 5/10 at 11 am @ Mulcahy Stadium. 

All South Games stream live for free on the GameChanger app, search South Anchorage Varsity Wolverines

Part II: What I’ve Learned

How did Western civilization and culture dominate all others from 1500 through the early 2000s? Why does it seem like we are in decline?

Niall Ferguson, in his book Civilization: The West and The Rest, attempts to answer this question. He argues that six factors resulted in the West’s ascendency over all other cultures despite other cultures being much older and more advanced prior to 1500. A world traveler would have bet on China or the Ottomans, but that’s not what happened. England and the U.S. and others prevailed. 

Ferguson’s six factors--what he calls “killer apps”-- include: 

1. Competition - Economic competition between states and free trade. 
2. Science - Advances in military and other technology. 
3. Property Settlement - Early North American versus South American settlers. The rule of law. 
4. Modern Medicine - Vaccines; cures for malaria and other deadly diseases. 
5. Consumption (culture) - Blue jeans, the Beatles, and other cultural forces.
6. Work Ethic - The “Protestant work ethic.” Work hard, be humble, and save. 

(see p. 41 in link above for more) 

If you like history and macro-level analysis of the rise and fall of civilizations and world history and how it is still relevant to today, I highly recommend the book. But that is not my purpose in introducing Ferguson’s book this week. Instead, like Ferguson, I’m asking How did we get here? But I’m asking on a much shorter time scale and about education rather than civilization. 

In other words, what are the major factors, which have influenced education, schools, and learning? How can we better understand our challenges by taking a look back? 

In this pursuit, I’ve identified five of my own factors. I’ll discuss them each from the perspective of twenty-one years spent teaching and administering programs and curriculum in public high schools. That is, mostly from experience and firsthand knowledge.

Let’s get started. 

My factors include: the smartphone, communication/information technology, artificial intelligence, a pandemic, and economic/political instability. 

The discerning reader will notice that most of the list is related to technology.  I will say from the start, inappropriate use of these technologies will be at the center of this discussion, and frequent readers will know that issues related to technology and education are a normal subject in this newsletter. I’m not suggesting there are not appropriate uses, just that in most cases learning has declined as a result of their presence. And despite the irony of this arriving digitally, I tend toward the analog.

Smartphones - By 2012 smartphones made their way into schools. Jonathan Haidt wrote about this in The Anxious Generation, Richard Louv wrote about it indirectly in Last Child in the Woods, and Jean Twenge has written about its effect on youth in Generations and The Narcissism Epidemic. 

Between 2012 and 2022 there were no clear cell phone policies in most schools. This meant that each day students could carry the equivalent of a TV into a classroom without a clear guideline not to watch it while they were supposed to be engaged and learning. They also may have gazed at it all night instead of sleeping. Earbuds connected by bluetooth provided total insulation from the immediate environment.

Furthermore, students could create their own content, share it, and become the main character in their own drama. This led to a race to get the most likes, retweets, and reposts, which in turn lead to constant pocket vibrations. The meta world was born. Imagine trying to learn complex processes and subject matter when you are constantly being shocked or buzzed. Attention spans plummeted, anything that took sustained attention was less interesting, and gaining notoriety rather than credibility was the new social currency. 

Perceived rates of harassment and bullying also skyrocketed, and were not confined to in-person interaction like they had been before 2012. Apps that reward attention with dispersed dopamine hits kept eyes on screens for hours, and withdrawal was like attempting to kick a drug habit because the neural circuitry is similar. 

Phones are also used widely to track adolescents no matter where they go. Sometimes this is done by parents, and it is almost always done by apps, as long as location services are turned on. In this sense, they are never alone, never bored, and never lost in thought or without a diversion or someone to call before attempting to problem solve or be creative with their native resources.

Information/Communication Technology - Zangle/Q Parent and Student Connect made all grade, attendance, and other student information accessible 24 hours per day. In some cases, this disincentivized students to keep track of their own progress. In many instances, it also led to thousands of parent checks per month, and a dependence on “progress” marks rather than information that might better reflect mastery of content. This also fueled email exchanges taking place well outside of normal school hours. Many couldn’t help but write or respond as soon as the notion struck them. 

Furthermore, access to all the world’s information leads some to believe that paying attention in the present is unnecessary because it is all retrievable later. In a rich learning environment, where writing, speaking, listening, questioning, and reflecting are frequent, understanding information in context changes countless times in a small amount of time. 

As of yet, inert information cannot replace this social interaction. We construct knowledge based on our experience, interaction, prior knowledge, and schema. AI is getting better, but is still too flawed to replace human conversation and discourse.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) - The newest and most disruptive factor in learning is AI. While it can be used well for certain purposes, the temptation to use it as a replacement for the learning process, which depends on changes in brain physiology, is too strong. Teachers are now spending hours as forensic investigators when they see disparities in a student’s learning trends and the assignments that student submits. When it appears that human voice and personality, novelty, creative combinations of sources, and moderate errors are all gone, an algorithm probably completed the assignment. 

This is also an open-ended influence since language models used in current AI applications may be replaced with stronger models, and machine learning will accelerate faster. While it is certain that AI has made a negative impact when it is used to skip the learning process, our challenge will be to find how to teach appropriate use and self-control. (See: The final chapters of Harari’s book Nexus for more on this.) 

Pandemic - In the spring of 2020 we sent students home and replaced in-person learning with screen time. Incidentally, this also pushed kids to phone screens for social interaction. Students who were learning to read in the early elementary grades, and those who missed the latter part of their middle school years, are still notably behind in literacy, social intelligence/confidence, impulse control, and general work ethic. Those who were more privileged and had a structured routine throughout that period fared better, but still lost valuable learning time as part of a connected social group in a structured setting where they would have been given the opportunity to compromise and deal with others with whom they might disagree. This outcome illustrates the value of institutions to shape positive social and intellectual behavior. (See: Putnam, Bowling Alone or Klinenberg, Palaces for the People).

The rise of Canvas (online learning platform) occurred in this time period and was conflated with learning. Online content bereft of social interaction and context is not the same as in-person learning. Yet, it is still treated as such. Those who have the means tend to put their students in smaller social environments situated to a shared outcome. In this respect, what is old is new. Pen, paper, peers, space, time, and a teacher are still the vital ingredients for learning. They cannot be replaced with pixels. (See: Brown et al., Make it Stick, especially the introduction).

Economic/Political Instability - As this spring has illustrated, the plurality of voters in the state do not agree on the value of public institutions or to what degree they should be funded. Although this subject is broad, its most pronounced effect is the inability of schools to plan from year to year to ensure a stable environment for students. This leads to reactionary planning and speculation. Instability also has cascading effects on what classes can be offered, how big classes will be, what extracurricular activities will be offered, and how hard it will be to attract and retain educators from outside of Alaska who are vital to our schools’ success. If every spring a promising young educator has to guess if they will have a job or not, they tend to migrate to more secure places. 

Additionally, top-down mandates are rigid and do not serve communities well. It is far better to push decision-making to the periphery, incentivize small groups of educators to build responsive programs, and maintain a clear set of achievable outcomes aligned with those programs. 

What do we do now?

Many of these forces are beyond any one person or group’s control. That said, when it comes to learning, the above discussion leads me to key principles that might be followed to build better learning systems. 

1. Read more. Treat knowledge acquisition and learning as a lifelong pursuit.
2. Eliminate distractions. 
3. Invest in social interactions aligned with learning. 
4. Ask big questions and seek answers. 
5. Support claims with viable evidence. 
6. In person or analog is almost always better than online or electronic.
7. Get back to handwriting. Information is encoded in memory much faster.
8. In that spirit: make lists, write freely, and draw pictures to recall information and figure out where knowledge gaps exist. 
9. Until you are an expert in an academic field and can spot the errors AI makes, don’t use it. 
10. Take a walk. Practice being observant. Let your mind wander. Oftentimes solutions arrive right when you least expect them. 

All of the above are easier said than done. However, considering what got us here will help us move forward better. As William Faulkner noted, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”