The BookPulse Blog

Side Notes

From a former ELA teacher. Mostly about reading, classrooms, and the AI moment.

We Asked Students to Annotate. They Made the Bed.

I taught The Giver in 2011 with a book, a pen, and an annotation rubric. Students filled the pages for points. The book is about people sleepwalking through their own society. The irony took me years to see.

May 11, 2026Chris Baarstad

More from Side Notes

April 30, 2026

The Yawning Chasm: 16 Years in the Classroom and a Reddit Post That Said It Better Than I Ever Could Have

I taught ELA for 16 years. A custodian on Reddit just said the most clear-eyed thing I've ever read about why the curriculum doesn't fit the kids. She's right.

5 min readChris Baarstad

March 25, 2026

The AI Panic Is the Calculator Panic. We Already Lost This Argument Once.

We've been here before. Twice. An unpopular take on AI in ELA classrooms from someone who taught through both prior tech panics.

6 min readChris Baarstad