AI

One of the assumptions those who say this is the end of high school English make about students is that if students can find an end around doing the actual work of school, they will definitely take it.

What does it say about what we ask students to do in school that we assume they will do whatever they can to avoid it?

Many are wailing that this technology spells “the end of high school English,” meaning those classes where you read some books and then write some pro forma essays that show you sort of read the books, or at least the Spark Notes, or at least took the time to go to Chegg or Course Hero and grab someone else’s essay, where you changed a few words to... See more

Deep down, this is a question about what we value, in what we read, what we write, and unfortunately, we have attached a set of values to student writing that are disconnected from anything we actually value about what we read, and what we write.

Along with many others, I’ve been shouting about these problems for years, often into what felt like a... See more

You can no longer make students do the reading or the writing. So what’s left? Only this: give them work they want to do. And help them want to do it. What, again, is education? The non-coercive rearranging of desire.

Within five years, it will make little sense for scholars of history to keep producing monographs in the traditional mold—nobody will... See more

The best, and perhaps the only, way out of AI’s college takeover would be to embark on a redesign of classroom practice. But with so many other things to worry about, who has the time? In this way, professors face the same challenge as their students in the year ahead: A college education will be what they make of it too. At some point, everyone on... See more

“I would think to myself, What the hell am I doing, sitting watching this professor give the same lecture that he has given every year for the last 30 years? ” But he knew the answer even then: He was there to subsidize that professor’s research.