Common Core High School ELA Question of the Day

Open your favorite app and watch what it has learned to watch for you. The feed delivers what it thinks you will not swipe past, and your thumb—efficient, bored—trains it with fractions of a second. Curation once meant a person deciding what deserved a frame; now it means an engine smoothing the path of least resistance. I am not a catastrophist about algorithms. They sort abundance; they spare us from drowning. But the cost of so much ease is less visible: our taste, left unexercised, atrophies into preference. The difference matters. Taste is the muscle that lifts you toward difficulty, toward the unfamiliar sentence that won't love you back immediately. Preference is a mirror with better lighting. My purpose is not to indict technology; it is to recover friction as a teacher. Notice the sentences that slow you: short, then long, then a pause. That cadence is not cosmetic; it makes the point in your body. I want readers to feel the stumble and consider keeping it. You can keep the feed and still build a practice: one hour a week of deliberate misalignment—reading against your habits, subscribing to one newsletter that irritates and instructs, sitting with a work until it resists you less. Algorithms will continue to guess. The question is whether you will continue to choose.