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- 🐴 Print books beat screens for memory
🐴 Print books beat screens for memory
What the NASA blooper reel says about real learning. PLUS: Why paper beats pixels, and Orwell's writing secret.
Charlie Deist
June 23, 2025
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IN THIS EDITION
🍎 NASA astronauts face-planting on the moon
🍎 Paper > pixels for learning—170,000 people prove it
🍎 The AI tutor that shows its work
💡 1 THOUGHT
THE MOON LANDING BLOOPER REEL
We show kids the "one small step" but hide the face-plants that came first.
The outtakes of NASA astronauts trying to walk on the moon are amazing.
— Sahil Bloom (@SahilBloom)
6:18 PM • Sep 7, 2022
This is what learning looks like—not the polished Neil Armstrong moment we remember.
Every master was once a disaster. Show your kids the disasters.
📊 2 TRENDS
1. PAPER BEATS PIXELS FOR MEMORY - A meta-study of 54 studies and 170,000+ people found that reading physical books leads to better information retention than digital formats, especially when it comes to complex material. The advantage of paper holds across all age groups and has actually grown stronger over time.
2. THE "CAGED ANIMAL" APPROACH TO AI IN EDUCATION - PCMag's Will Greenwald calls AI a "caged animal" that should be "carefully watched and fed, only trusted when handled by professionals, and kept away from kids"—yet he found one exception worth praising. Rebind.ai eliminates AI hallucination by constraining responses to actual recorded interviews with scholars. Its “X-Ray” feature shows exactly which words come from the human expert (green) versus AI interpretation (blue).
🔨 3 TOOLS
1. George Orwell's Writing Cure - Many schools teach kids to write like Victorian novelists when they should teach them to write like Hemingway. Orwell's 1946 essay "Politics and the English Language" cuts through 12 years of bad English instruction with six simple rules. The punchline: "If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out."(h/t: Austin Scholar)
2. How Writing Should Be Taught in School - Ellen Fishbein tells Hannah Frankman we’ve been teaching writing backwards. Kids who speak brilliantly write like robots because we make them outline before they think. Their solution? Let them write messy first, clean up later.
3. Rebind AI-Enhanced Classics - $30 per book gets you Roxane Gay explaining Wharton or Margaret Atwood unpacking Dickens. No app needed. Works on any device. Founded by a philosopher and a plumbing heir who couldn't get through Heidegger alone. Now 100+ classics available with expert guides baked in.
That’s all for today!
– Charlie (the OpenEd newsletter guy)
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