James

Percival Everett

A retelling of Huck Finn from the perspective of Jim. The fist half of this book is pretty parallel to the Huck Finn adventures (at least according to my memory of having read that book decades ago). The second half is new material based on when Huck and Jim are separated. I listened to the audio version of this book and I think that is probably the way to go. One of the most striking ideas was the amount of langauge based code-switching that Jim/James does as he interacts with whites and slaves. Striking largely based on the massive confusion expressed by the white characters when Jim didn't speak "slave". The reader was able to communicate these language switches in a way that I am pretty sure would have been lost to me were I reading the text. Although this is fiction, it felt remarkably biographical, and reminded me frequently of the Harriet Jacobs/Linda Brent autobiography Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Highly recommend. 

4 stars (out of 4)

Brave New Words: How AI Will Revolutionize Education (and Why That's a Good Thing)

Sal Kahn

This is a review written by Kahn (of Kahn Academy) trying to 1) describe the current state of AI in education and 2) prognosticate about the future of AI in education. First and foremost, Kahn has a particular point of view - he is selling an AI product that has been developed by Kahn academy. The book has some useful nuggets and is pretty straight forward about how AI is affecting students right now. But even on reading it, I found it to be behind. The LLM world and educational culture is moving too fast. Or maybe more likely, the educational culture has been shifting since Covid, and we are only now, as educators, seeing the chasm between where we are and where students are (mostly I am talking about motivation and educational culture here, not student content acquisition). So Kahn's product is selling a particular point of view (highly regulated tools for motivated learners) that is simply not the reality of the current wild west of AI. 

2 stars (out of 4)