I was recently accepted into a graduate program in English education, and this significant life change has been a long time in the making. I had originally planned to return to school in 2004, but life happened. I’ve done a lot of living and growing during that time, and if I got my calculations right, maybe it’s never too late after all. 

As a parent with three kids who I have supported through the public education system and having kept informed about the changes within the field, I think I’m adequately prepared to begin this next chapter. That said, 1998 feels like a lifetime ago when I completed my student teaching for my undergraduate degree.  At that time, the high school students I worked with were only a few years younger than I was—Generation X. We probably listened to a lot of the same music, used and understood the same social cues, email was still dial-up. I’m not sure if my Gen Z (digital native) kids would even know what the term dial-up means, and I doubt they could’ve endured the inherent frustrations of 56 Kbps. 

While I feel I’m entering this next chapter with clear eyes, there will certainly be much that I can’t predict, which is especially true of technology and the use of AI in education. You might’ve been shocked, or at least disappointed, to learn that our federal government has endorsed the use of AI humanoids in education. The First Lady recently trotted out with Figure AI’s robotic humanoid at an AI education summit. Mrs. Trump touted the robot to be used to teach children literature, science, art, history, mathematics and philosophy, even conjecturing that an AI educator would be “always patient.” It did not take long for the critics to pushback against the White House’s latest promotion, and you can even find a well-played satirical dystopian piece in The Atlantic that imagines a disastrous day in the life with a humanoid educator that is impaired by program glitches and insufficient subscription services. Could this be the “golden age” for American education?

 Even  if you might find a humanoid as an acceptable substitute to teach your child under some conditions, say a one-off algebra lesson or informational lecture on The Battle of the Bulge, could you trust it to lead discussions on global citizenship, to facilitate the spontaneity of a Socratic seminar, to create community, to inspire curiosity through real world experience, to ask student-centered inquiry-based questions, to identify and mitigate biases, to look at your child and know they need something more than instruction in that moment? A robot cannot role model nor can it nurture, but according to a lawsuit, it might be capable of cracking a human skull. 

As I look forward to this next chapter, I know I will be forced to confront the use of AI. I believe there might be an acceptable and ethical use of AI in the classroom, but I don’t think we’re anywhere close to agreeing on what those terms should be . In the meantime, I’m hearing that what’s old is new again with many teachers requiring students to write their summative assignments freehand in class and by also breaking formative assignments into chunks to make AI cheating tougher. Of course, as a last resort, there’s always good old emotional manipulation—the risk of a guilty conscience always kept me honest.

HERE’S SOME OF THE STUFF I’M CURRENTLY LISTENING TO: