Surveys show students increasingly turning to AI as a tool for their school work. Teachers who want to limit AI usage during instructional time still have many options on table—but what should they do about homework and other assigned out-of-class essays and projects?

Given that the topic of homework already has been quite controversial before bringing AI into the conversation, this felt like a good time to exchange ideas about what it can and should mean to assign work outside of the classroom right now. Joining this conversation is Brett Vogelsinger, another high school English teacher who sees things around this topic quite a bit differently than Marcus—which hopefully is the makings of a meaningful discussion.

Brett is the author of two books, Poetry Pauses and Artful AI in Writing Instruction, and is also starting a new Substack newsletter: Declarative, Imperative, Interrogative, Explanatory. (If you follow The Broken Copier, this is definitely something you should consider subscribing to!)

Thanks, as always, to Alberto Lugo, one of Jim’s former students, for writing and recording original intro music; and Tom Csatari for allowing us to use his band’s recording of “Woodstock” from their 2020 album, Garden.

* Find Tom’s work at uncivilizedtom.com, and on Instagram @banduncivilized.

* Find Alberto’s work at djsynchro.weebly.com, and on Instagram @djsynchro.

You can email us here with feedback or any other questions as well: [email protected].

After a couple quieter months, we are back and rolling with The Broken Copier. Today’s Unjammed episode is built around a simple-if-implausible idea: what happens when teachers are given enough time to do their work.

It’s not just about having enough time to complete all the items off the to-do list, either. (Though that does matter!) More importantly, it’s about what it means for teachers to step into a classroom as their best selves—a win for teachers, yes, but more importantly a win for students.

Two writings directly referenced in today’s episode:

* Burning the Math Workbook by Ruth Poulsen

* This is Air by Adrian Neibauer

As always, thanks to: Alberto Lugo, one of Jim’s former students, for contributing their music to The Broken Copier podcast—and also Tom Csatari for allowing us to use his band’s recording of “Woodstock” from their 2020 album, Garden.

* Find Tom’s work at uncivilizedtom.com, and on Instagram @banduncivilized.

* Find Alberto’s work at djsynchro.weebly.com, and on Instagram @djsynchro.

* Email thoughts and feedback to [email protected], and if you want you can record your own thoughts at our Fanlist that might show up on a future episode! (Feel free to also just toss your response in the comments.)

Thanks for listening! Share or leave a review if you’re willing, and take care of yourselves as educators as we finish out the school year!

The conversation about reading across education has taken a front-and-center position in many places, so it felt like the right time to have a conversation about it—especially since Adrian Neibauer recently wrote a thoughtful reflection on the topic called “The Sanctity of Literacy.”

In this conversation, Marcus and Adrian talk about their experiences as teachers of reading in their respective classrooms; about the broader conversation over the Science of Reading and its current impact on education; and about how we can create space to help students foster a more-sustainable love of reading in our classrooms going forward.

Some resources mentioned at the beginning of the conversation:

* Adrian’s piece on “The SLIME Method”

* John Spencer’s website/resources

Thanks, as always, to Alberto Lugo, one of Jim’s former students, for writing and recording original intro music; and Tom Csatari for allowing us to use his band’s recording of “Woodstock” from their 2020 album, Garden.

* Find Tom’s work at uncivilizedtom.com, and on Instagram @banduncivilized.

* Find Alberto’s work at djsynchro.weebly.com, and on Instagram @djsynchro.

You can email us here with feedback or any other questions as well: [email protected].

Given that we are at the finish line of a very-busy 2025 with The Broken Copier, the goal of this short episode is first and foremost to express gratitude for what has been an incredible year of conversations and community-building—and also to share an update that over the next few months, we are going to slow down just a bit.

2025 was an incredible year with The Broken Copier, yet the pace we’ve been at in terms of written posts and recorded conversations sort of runs smack dab into the paradox of our goal: we deeply value an education conversation that centers the voices of classroom teachers, but prioritizing what it takes to be a full-time classroom teacher? As so many of you know from personal experience, it takes a lot.

Toss in being parents of little ones, and “a lot” can quickly become “too much”—especially in terms of making this a sustainable project going forward. So for the short term, we are going to be generous towards ourselves in adjusting the pace.

This is why you’ll see fewer posts and fewer conversations for these first few months of 2026. We aren’t going away! Instead, the goal is to prioritize sustainability and even more importantly authenticity—as we continue to believe in the importance of telling the good story of what the classroom is and can be.

And that’s exactly what we plan on doing going forward with The Broken Copier, even if that means taking a little time to learn and listen more in the short term to make that storytelling more meaningful in the long run.

One final note: thank you to all those who continue to listen, engage, and share these conversations—as it continues to be sincerely affirming to see the different ways The Broken Copier has resonated with teachers and educators. As we say: this is community work, it always has been, and—more than ever—it will continue to be.

As always, thanks to: Alberto Lugo, one of Jim’s former students, for contributing their music to The Broken Copier podcast—and also Tom Csatari for allowing us to use his band’s recording of “Woodstock” from their 2020 album, Garden.

* Find Tom’s work at uncivilizedtom.com, and on Instagram @banduncivilized.

* Find Alberto’s work at djsynchro.weebly.com, and on Instagram @djsynchro.

Thanks for listening! Share or leave a review if you’re willing, and take care of yourselves as educators as we enter into 2026!

It is a very easy word to say in education, right? Full-stop: everyone wants to be supported and everyone wants to be supportive.

However, making that support a reality that is experienced and sustainable in our classrooms and schools? For students and teachers alike? Much more complicated.

Today’s conversation with Nathan Parham is 100% about this. Nathan is in his first year as a special education administrator at a trauma-informed alternative school after a decade of his own classroom experience. Given his unique perspective in transitioning into a role where he is now responsible for supporting teachers along with students at his school, Nathan has a lot to share about what support can and should look like in this moment.

Thanks, as always, to Alberto Lugo, one of Jim’s former students, for writing and recording original intro music; and Tom Csatari for allowing us to use his band’s recording of “Woodstock” from their 2020 album, Garden.

* Find Tom’s work at uncivilizedtom.com, and on Instagram @banduncivilized.

* Find Alberto’s work at djsynchro.weebly.com, and on Instagram @djsynchro.

You can email us here with feedback or any other questions as well: [email protected].

The Broken Copier began a little over three years ago with a very simple idea: we wanted to uplift the type of conversations that happen so often between teachers in the margins of the school day: in the hallway between classes; in each other’s classrooms after the school day ends; in the faculty lounge while trying to collaboratively finagle a solution to far-too-frequently broken copiers.

This is exactly one of those conversations.

Lisa Gates is a retired high school English instructor with 34 years of teaching experience who just cannot just seem to quit teaching. Currently, she works as an Instructional Mentor supporting early-career classroom teachers in Virginia and also supervises teaching interns for the University of Mary Washington.

In other words, Lisa is literally a teacher’s teacher.

This conversation dives into the joys of what reading can be in the secondary classroom as well as the challenges, with Lisa sharing observations from her own career teaching as well as what she is noticing now that she is in many classrooms supporting teachers. This is a conversation that goes a lot of directions, but at its heart is driven by a love of reading and, more importantly, a deep belief in a student-centered classroom and the work it takes to make that possible.

Some points of reference from the conversation:

* The Whale Rider by Witi Ihimaera

* Critical Encounters in Secondary English by Deborah Appleman

* “Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Glass Doors” by Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop

* #SundayMacbethChat on Bluesky Homepage

Thanks, as always, to Alberto Lugo, one of Jim’s former students, for writing and recording original intro music; and Tom Csatari for allowing us to use his band’s recording of “Woodstock” from their 2020 album, Garden.

* Find Tom’s work at uncivilizedtom.com, and on Instagram @banduncivilized.

* Find Alberto’s work at djsynchro.weebly.com, and on Instagram @djsynchro.

You can email us here with feedback or any other questions as well: [email protected].

Over time, school years can fold into each other, in a way, with each eventually becoming indistinguishable from the next. This is why the goal of this episode, quite simply, is to pause before the month of November comes to a close and ask a simple question:

What has this school year taught us so far?

For this reflective conversation, we invited on one of our favorites: Adrian Neibauer, a 5th grade teacher who writes weekly about his own classroom with his Substack, Adrian’s Newsletter.

Along with listening to Adrian and Marcus share their own answers to this question at this point in the school year, we invite you to join in: what lesson have you learned so far?

Feel free to reply in the comments, send us a longer email reflection, or even record your own learning for a future episode! We would love to include more perspectives and voices around this question going forward. As we say often at The Broken Copier, teaching is community work.

What better way to live that out than by sharing our learnings with each other?

Links to follow-up with Adrian’s work:

* “Now Spinning” (mentioned at the beginning of the conversation)

* “The Redress of Teaching” (mentioned at the end of the conversation)

Thanks, as always, to:

Alberto Lugo, one of Jim’s former students, for writing and recording original intro music; Tom Csatari for allowing us to use his band’s recording of “Woodstock” from their 2020 album, Garden; and Courtney Milavec for graphic design.

Find Tom’s work at uncivilizedtom.com, and on Instagram @banduncivilized.

Find Alberto’s work at djsynchro.weebly.com, and on Instagram @djsynchro.

Email us here with feedback or any other questions as well: [email protected].

Thanks for listening (and tell your friends)!

“What happened to helping them interrogate what it means to be human?”

In his book Teaching without Teaching, Scott F. Parker makes a case for re-centering teaching around core human values—and away from what he calls “the whole charade” of the transactional system students and teachers alike are too often confined within.

In this conversation, Scott shares his observations and reflections from his own writing classroom at Montana State University while contemplating more broadly where we are at in education—and why there might be a better direction to reorient ourselves towards.

To get a copy of this book or follow more of Scott’s work:

* One Subject Press’s page for Teaching without Teaching

* Scott’s personal website: www.scottfparker.com

Thanks, as always, to:

Alberto Lugo, one of Jim’s former students, for writing and recording original intro music; Tom Csatari for allowing us to use his band’s recording of “Woodstock” from their 2020 album, Garden; and Courtney Milavec for graphic design.

Find Tom’s work at uncivilizedtom.com, and on Instagram @banduncivilized.

Find Alberto’s work at djsynchro.weebly.com, and on Instagram @djsynchro.

Email us here with feedback or any other questions as well: [email protected].

Thanks for listening (and tell your friends)!

There is a lot of conversation happening in education around the topic of AI—but is it the right conversation? Recently Stephen Fitzpatrick wrote a piece around this, arguing that instead of two different AI conversations in education that seem to be talking past each other, what we need “is a third conversation grounded in intellectual humility.”

Today’s conversation attempts to be just that. A full-time classroom teacher, Stephen brings over three decades of experience into this conversation alongside his own extensive research and experimentation with AI as a practitioner in recent years—which he has documented thoughtfully and generously with his newsletter, Teaching in the Age of AI.

In this conversation, Stephen shares his own journey towards researching as much as he could about AI and its potential intersection with his work as a teacher, his experiences and learnings along the way, and his current perspective on where we are at with AI in education.

To follow more of Stephen’s work or potentially connect with him:

* A link to his recent post about a better conversation (quoted above): AI Whiplash: Every Breakthrough Comes With a Disaster

* His post on The Important Work: Reading With a Custom GPT

* His newsletter: fitzyhistory.substack.com

* His email: [email protected]

* His LinkedIn to connect on that platform, too

Thanks, as always, to:

Alberto Lugo, one of Jim’s former students, for writing and recording original intro music; Tom Csatari for allowing us to use his band’s recording of “Woodstock” from their 2020 album, Garden; and Courtney Milavec for graphic design.

Find Tom’s work at uncivilizedtom.com, and on Instagram @banduncivilized.

Find Alberto’s work at djsynchro.weebly.com, and on Instagram @djsynchro.

Email us here with feedback or any other questions as well: [email protected].

Thanks for listening (and tell your friends)!

This is the third episode of our new Unjammed series, with a topic that a lot of teachers still are struggling with in their classrooms: chronic student absences and the consequent empty desks in the classroom.

In this episode, he shares how difficult it can be as a teacher to encounter so many of these “empty desks”—and in particular how much it takes as a teacher to build and maintain a classroom that is motivating and purposeful for those there and taking care of business while also being a welcoming, affirming space for students who have been absent, sometimes quite regularly.

Straddling this daily as a teacher? It is really difficult—and it felt like it deserved space for reflection in this episode.

Also: have your own potential Unjammed reflection you’d be willing to share or have a conversation about?

* Email [email protected] and let us know what it’s about! We would love to bring different teacher experiences and perspectives into this space.

* You can also share your reflection directly at this Fanlist link—and you never know, it could show up on a future episode! (Note: we would reach out first to let you know and get permission.)

As always, thanks to: Alberto Lugo, one of Jim’s former students, for contributing their music to The Broken Copier podcast—and also Tom Csatari for allowing us to use his band’s recording of “Woodstock” from their 2020 album, Garden.

* Find Tom’s work at uncivilizedtom.com, and on Instagram @banduncivilized.

* Find Alberto’s work at djsynchro.weebly.com, and on Instagram @djsynchro.

Thanks for listening! Share or leave a review if you’re willing, and take care of yourselves as educators as we finish out the school year!