The most resonant moment, for me, in the *Equity by Design* chapter was its mention of Zaretta Hammond’s warning about inadvertently creating “dependent learners”: students who are continually paralyzed by novelty, show no sign of progression from task to task, no retention from lesson to lesson, and have been trained into a state of “learned helplessness” that leaves them reliant on teachers or other authority figures (13). If I could boil down the problems I’ve encountered over ten years of teaching (and, honestly, even beyond that in other jobs and roles), most of them would fall under the rubric of passivity. As it stands right now, institutionalized education produces passive subjects, and it’s extremely difficult to push back against entrenched tendencies from within the system. This was always a problem, but the pandemic has exacerbated it: teachers are expected to do more and more, students less and less. It’s impossible to blame the latter; rather than being taught, they were “managed,” and they quite reasonably expect to be processed through college in the same way. This chapter opens with a Paolo Freire quote; I recall another observation of his (the source escapes me at the moment) that likens education to laying out a string for the student to follow. It’s a great image both because of the etymological significance (education suggests a leading forth or drawing out, in the same way that we might call a metal ductile or say that a docent guides one around a museum), and because it attributes agency to the *student*. Someone has still got to follow that string–in their own way, to be sure, but under their own steam. I see my role, as grandiose as this sounds, as encouraging students to seize at least a modicum of control over their own lives, to help them become better defenders of their own minds in a world conspiring to keep them weak and passive. And the dangers of passivity, or the risks of a “learned helplessness,” are all the more consequential for students who are already marginalized in some way, whether by identity, economics, neuroatypicality, or the myriad other points of individuation to which we’re rightly becoming more attentive.

I have more to say on this subject, but one of the questions I think we might take up is the imperative to *evaluate* students. I’ve voiced my dislike of grading before, and I’m curious to hear about how other instructors have negotiated the need for (at least an appearance of) “fair grading,” ranking, and competition (in the context of UDL or otherwise). As an adjunct, I feel very constrained and under pressure to keep reproducing a system I don’t believe in, but I imagine that even tenured faculty can only push back so far.