iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Annie Bilancini @abilancini.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

"Teacher lady, I need an extension on the assignment because MY ESSAY WILL KILL US ALL."

Annie Bilancini @abilancini.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

It was honestly a joy to watch. I love when teenagers get lost in their own little worlds for a bit. They deserve more time there.

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Annie Bilancini @abilancini.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

So I guess what I'm saying is, give students tomatoes and books and time to write. Those are my recommended conditions for learning (You hear that THE Ohio State University?).

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Annie Bilancini @abilancini.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

He looked completely mesmerized for about five minutes just sniffing and admiring, and I sort of let it happen because he seemed so serene. Then, for the remainder of the hour (and 10 minutes into lunch), he sat at his seat and worked quietly and intently on his essay about Braiding Sweetgrass.

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Annie Bilancini @abilancini.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

My school has a farmstead on campus that provides an urban agriculture program for students. Today, I watched a freshman boy with a bag of tomatoes from his urban ag class lose total track of what was happening around him in the room because he was pulling each tomato out the bag to sniff it.

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Annie Bilancini @abilancini.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

On a beginning-of-year "how can I help you thrive?" questionnaire, one my new students wrote, "Please give me lots of honest feedback on my writing because I really want to get better. Sometimes teachers don't tell me how to get better." I could have cried. A lot of them want to learn!

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Annie Bilancini @abilancini.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

I'm glad and grateful you turned out to be a rare TFA longevity success story!

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Annie Bilancini @abilancini.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

This reminds me of a moment in my initial contact with TFA when the recruiter said one of the best things about TFA is all the career contacts I could make. He was really stressing how many alums went on to be high-paid doctors, lawyers, and CEOs. No one else I know from TFA stayed in education.

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Annie Bilancini @abilancini.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

Sadly, no. It's been happening since I was a kid. One time I passed out at a book reading! Luckily, I made it out of my row and into the lobby. I cannot handle body horror, and I've had to come to terms with the fact that most of the A24 catalog just isn't for me, ha.

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Annie Bilancini @abilancini.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

My vasovagal syncope really hated that cyclops scream. I knew I was in trouble at that point. Sadly, it's not the first time I've passed out in public due to sensory overload. I'm a delicate creature! 🫠 🙃

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Annie Bilancini @abilancini.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

Ha! Yes. I think I've seen it all the way through once. My dignified and completely scholarly take is that it's a total shitshow that does best when viewed in the Mystery Science Theater tradition.

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Annie Bilancini @abilancini.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

Fun(ish) aside: the movie-going experience was also marred by the fact that the Circe scene's body horror (coupled with the IMAX of it all and the aforementioned relentlessness) made me pass out in my reclining seat, which was deeply unpleasant. I woke up to Circe's joke about her sister-crow.

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Annie Bilancini @abilancini.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

I wanted a version of the epic that was basically cinematically unadaptable (unless Studio Ghibli felt like taking a crack at it). And Nolan made a Nolan movie, a beautifully shot meditation on a man's moral arc, however it might bend.

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Annie Bilancini @abilancini.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

in and of itself. I think it's hard for me to untangle the way that sharing this text with freshmen makes the tale feel more youthful, silly, and stuffed with the will of the gods. Ultimately, there was a mismatch of expectations...

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Annie Bilancini @abilancini.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

I've taught the epic for years now (including Wilson's translation most recently) and I think the element of the text that always comes across (and that was missing from Nolan's adaptation) was weirdness and even humor at times. Nolan's take was relentlessly sullen, and that's not a bad thing...

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Annie Bilancini @abilancini.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

Firstly, this was a great read (and worth sharing with your students as an example of criticism as it functions in a larger discourse!). I think for me, I really had to treat the film as its own thing and separate it from my expectations of the source material.

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Annie Bilancini @abilancini.bsky.social · 19/07/2026

I saw it Friday in IMAX and was so overwhelmed by that feral Circe scene, I literally passed out in my reclining seat and came to on the way to Hades. My vasovagal syncope could not handle the body horror (and all the SOUNDS!).

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Annie Bilancini @abilancini.bsky.social · 18/07/2026

A veteran teacher I know called it the "MBA-ification" of K-12 education.

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Annie Bilancini @abilancini.bsky.social · 18/07/2026

This tracks with what I've noticed. I've taught at a handful of schools now in the last 15 years, and at pretty much every one of those schools, the number of administrative positions has ballooned (and in two cases, this was after consulting groups were brought in to assess "mission leadership").

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Annie Bilancini @abilancini.bsky.social · 12/07/2026

A shot in the dark (with a very intended pun): I'm looking for books about the concept of darkness in the literal sense (the history of darkness, night, unlit spaces, etc... and how it has been conceived of and depicted over time). Any recs?

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Annie Bilancini @abilancini.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

This is just plain cheating, but it's a three-way tie for me between Ragtime, Our Town, and, well, all of Toni Morrison's novels.

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Annie Bilancini @abilancini.bsky.social · 27/05/2026

I still think about your story about horses from way back when (the shorty short-short black stallion one) on a near-annual basis. A short story collection from you is an utter gift to the world (but most of all TO ME).

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Annie Bilancini @abilancini.bsky.social · 16/04/2026

So who's next? Stitch Fix? They stop selling clothes and just pivot to supply-chain AI claptrap?

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Annie Bilancini @abilancini.bsky.social · 15/02/2026

People saying that LLMs "know" anything bothers me so much. It's like saying a room full of (stolen) books with all the pages ripped out and stacked in piles "knows" more than someone. It's an exquisitely sophisticated paper stacker. And that's cool, if you're into that, but it's not knowing.

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Annie Bilancini @abilancini.bsky.social · 09/02/2026

Portuguese is the "official" language of Brazil. Portuguese is not the same as Spanish. This is not closely-guarded knowledge. Is this some kind of multi-layered dunk on his part, or is he just that poorly informed about facts that 7th graders have to memorize? How does he have this job?

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Annie Bilancini @abilancini.bsky.social · 05/02/2026

Well, this is... jarring. I almost took a job at the early college in Cleveland years ago (I even did some PD there). I didn't take the job for a host of reasons, but now I'm, um, feeling extra okay about that decision.

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Annie Bilancini @abilancini.bsky.social · 01/02/2026

I've just never found a peer review method that works well for developing writers that isn't completely prescriptive or a formulaic checklist. And the writing they do in their What-How-So work just crackles, even for my students who really, really, really struggle with writing at the sentence level.

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Annie Bilancini @abilancini.bsky.social · 01/02/2026

I've been incorporating What-How-So responses with my freshmen to surprising success, and now I'm contemplating trying a modified version as a peer review method. What's going well in their writing? How're they achieving? Etc. Or maybe it's just a "What-How?" And the "So" is the actual revision...

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Annie Bilancini @abilancini.bsky.social · 25/01/2026

Current IB trainings have mostly seemed like an uncritical embrace of LLMs (the word "enhance" gets thrown around a lot, as does "career readiness"). All of these programs seem ripe for corporate capture.

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Annie Bilancini @abilancini.bsky.social · 24/01/2026

Bitter, bitter Teach for America, Class of 2009 graduate, here. Nice to see Wendy Kopp is still out here making things worse in education after all these years. She's serving a different Kool-aid now, though, I see. These people do not care about teachers (or students).

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Annie Bilancini @abilancini.bsky.social · 24/01/2026

A friend of mine is at the game tonight, and he said he realized Ramaswamy was there when a guy near him was loudly booing someone sitting courtside with Cleveland Cliffs people. It was Vivek and a gaggle of bodyguards.

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Annie Bilancini @abilancini.bsky.social · 10/01/2026

One of my favorite things is when students turn a work of literature into a communal experience. While teaching Much Ado last year, one of the sweetest groups of freshmen I've ever taught basically created their own private language out of lines and in-jokes from the play. It was magical.

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Annie Bilancini @abilancini.bsky.social · 06/01/2026

My mishearing of his intro to "Say My Name" by Destiny's Child as a kid (I was 12 when the song came out) is so ingrained in me that to this day when feeding my dog, I will say out loud "Dog chow, now now" instead of "Darkchild '99." My dog knows exactly what is about to happen when he hears it.

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Annie Bilancini @abilancini.bsky.social · 18/12/2025

A student emailed me today to tell me I should listen to OK Computer by Radiohead because it reminded him of our class discussions about Fahrenheit 451. He said it felt like the album was made to be listened to after reading the book, and when I will say I will ride this high for a year, I mean it.

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Annie Bilancini @abilancini.bsky.social · 15/11/2025

It would be nice, too, if such a thing existed outside of the "marketplace." I'm all for teachers making money off their work (à la TPT and the like), but that feels a bit like NIL, but for teachers: a small win for the individual that ignores a larger exploitation.

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Annie Bilancini @abilancini.bsky.social · 10/11/2025

I'm teaching F451 right now to high school sophomores, and it's landing really, really weirdly. We talked about the AI bubble and speculative narratives on Friday. One kid said, "Okay, miss, I'm going to read this now, I promise. It's getting good."

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Annie Bilancini @abilancini.bsky.social · 02/11/2025

Reminds me of that Haraway quote, "It matters what matters we use to think other matters with... It matters what knots knot knots."

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Annie Bilancini @abilancini.bsky.social · 02/11/2025

Atomized learning for all the good little slop-fed children.

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Annie Bilancini @abilancini.bsky.social · 02/11/2025

It's all built in to their freshmen orientation course. They also said many of their profs have banned using GenAI for any of the work in their class. One is spiraling about whether to stay in STEM because the institutional messaging she's receiving devalues the field (sounds familiar...).

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Annie Bilancini @abilancini.bsky.social · 02/11/2025

My co-worker, a computer science teacher (I'm a high school English teacher in Ohio), has kept in regular contact with two of our recent grads, both wonderful, bright students in STEM programs at OSU. So far, they've reported that the "AI" instruction has felt compulsory and half-baked...

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Annie Bilancini @abilancini.bsky.social · 30/10/2025

"If we can give children the knowledge they need to use these AI tools, that's going to be a huge thing. It's helping people understand that AI doesn't just mean cheating; it means growing capabilities." Why will that be a huge thing? And what capabilities will they grow? And for whom?

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Annie Bilancini @abilancini.bsky.social · 21/07/2025

What's so interesting about admitting to offloading some cognitive work to GenAI? What's so interesting about openly and shamelessly using a technology with so many environmental and ethical issues attached to it? I just can't get past the open disdain for human labor. I like people and thinking!

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Annie Bilancini @abilancini.bsky.social · 18/07/2025

This is a really good question. I do think there are still a lot of students who confer a great deal of cultural capital to having read "the classics." And I think the aestheticizing of bookishness is nothing so new. Rory Gilmore informed more of my tastes in the early aughts than I care to admit.

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