Category: Uncategorized

The Aha! Moment (Revisited)

EUREKA!
—attributed to Archimedes

Recently, I wrote about how it seems impossible to go any length of time these days without hearing some story about AI, and the most recent past is no exception.  Indeed, the morning I started writing this, NPR carried a story about Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI’s Sam Altman, and when I googled the topic out of idle curiosity, my screen exploded with other stories.  All of which is preamble to say that yet another reason has come to my attention to proceed extremely cautiously with AI’s employment in the classroom.  That we must do some deliberate training about it is now as inevitable as dealing with the ubiquity of smartphone technology in students’ daily lives.  However, the latest findings about AI’s impact in the workforce—what is being called “AI Brain Fry”—should probably inform that training with more skepticism than some in education are presently embracing.

Why? Because what is coming abundantly clear as AI has been embraced in a variety of work environments is that using it to enhance or augment employee productivity has actually backfired by generating a need for multi-tasking on steroids.  As technology columnist, John Herman, of New York Magazine describes it:

You have a programming tool that can kind of run in the background and starts adding features to software really quickly, you have another tool that’s constructing a report from you, it’s searching the web and pulling together a market research document. You have another tool in the background that you’re in a constant chat with trying to refine some idea for a talk you have to give…you’re just kind of getting first pulled in all these different directions, and then you’re kind of spamming yourself [as] you’re just producing all of this product. And it’s harder, as you use more and more tools to keep track of whether this output is actually relevant to your job, whether you’re doing anything that you need to be doing or whether you’re kind of creating new work for yourself…. (Luse, et al)

You get the point: it is exhausting simply reading about everything AI is now asking people in the workplace to manage and keep track of, let alone actually doing it.  Again, it is multi-tasking on steroids, and since the brain research on that concept is 100% clear—multi-tasking is neurologically impossible—the whole point of employing AI to improve output and efficiency would appear self-defeating.  It’s as if “AI is a poorly trained intern that you have to check the work of all the time, turning workers into bosses or at least simulated bosses” (Luse, et al) who now have two jobs: their original one and their now supervisory one.  Talk about a recipe for exhaustion, burnout, and counter-productivity!

Therefore, as we approach the reality of AI in the classroom specifically and AI in education in general, we might want to listen to this early cautionary tale from the frontiers of AI in the workplace.  If we do, I think it will lead us to recognize the need for two things. First, what boundaries do we need to place on already common uses of AI such as brainstorming and outline drafting for students or grading and lesson planning for teachers, and second, what counts as true augmentation versus one-more-tab-open-on-the-screen? The brain research on the answer to the first question is so overwhelming—with the new multi-tasking demands from the workplace simply piling on the confirmation—that I’ll simply state that if you do happen to be a first time reader who wants the details, here’s the link. 

As for the second question, that’s where some of the more recent brain research gets interesting; so let’s dive in.

We need to start by asking what would we potentially be augmenting with AI, and I would argue that the most logical choice is problem solving.  However, we have recently discovered that the human brain has two distinct circuits it uses for problem solving:  insight (the “aha! moment”) and logic (“analytical reasoning”), and we have found that each of these circuits has its own unique starting location during resting brainwave activity (insight=left temporal lobe; logic=right frontal lobe).  Furthermore, each of us apparently has a hard-wired tendency for which circuit we default to when solving problems (though everyone, importantly, can do both), and in fact, “a few minutes of EEG [readings on a test subject] predicted, up to seven weeks in advance, whether a person would solve puzzles mostly insightfully or analytically.  Our predominant thinking style is stable over time” (Kounios & Kounios, p. 24).

Because it is stable, though, the answer to whether a specific variant of AI might augment our problem-solving capacity or interfere with it has big implications for how we have people use AI in their learning.  Those who employ logic as their default might benefit from a tool that can look at billions of data points simultaneously to identify the most pertinent ones to employ analytically (e.g. determining all possible gas efficient routes to deliver a collection of packages might free someone up to look at these routes through the lens of that specific day’s traffic).  But for those who employ insight as their default, the digital pollution already clogging so many of our inner lives already inhibits the brain’s insight circuits, and any AI augmentation is simply going to overload those same circuits further.  AI, with its “unrelenting demand for productivity and speed, denies insight the time and opportunity to work wonders at its own pace” (Kounios & Kounios, p. 27). Hence, put simply, AI usage can only interfere with a person’s capacity for insight, never augment it.

However, that is highly problematic because it turns out that regardless of whether insight is your default problem-solving mode or a process requiring your deliberate employment, the amount of it you use predicts “how well [you] discriminate between real news stories and fake ones, as well as between meaningful statements and ‘pseudo-profound bullshit’ statements” (Kounios & Kousnios, p. 25).  Insight, thus, is a cognitive superpower against all the misinformation, disinformation, and blatant falsehoods flooding our daily lives—including the classroom! —and anything that inhibits its effective usage risks our very capacity to discern what is true.  Therefore, we need both insightful people as well as the more deliberate practice of insight in every element of society—again, including the classroom—if we are to find authentic solutions to the problems, both great and small, that confront us in our daily lives.

And one such problem confronting us today is a decline in people’s tolerance for healthy, beneficial risk.  The research now shows that there is a direct correlation between an individual’s quantities of “aha! moments” and their degree of comfort with risk-taking, and the evidence is clear that people observed displaying greater insightfulness also display less psychological concern for potential fallibility.  Indeed, the more insight these individuals employ, the more he, she, or they appear willing to engage in trial-and-error to solve problems.  Thus, these individuals seem almost immune to the emotional consequences of failure, and since that is practically the definition of the growth mindset universally espoused by nearly every educator on the planet, the value of insight as a tool for learning becomes undeniable.  Not that one cannot employ logic in a similar fashion.  But it would seem that providing more opportunities to employ insight may help everyone approach the process of learning more effectively,[i] and that is even more reason not to employ any augmentative AI in schools that might inhibit insightful thinking.  AI and “aha!” are fundamentally incompatible.

Which is why, once again, I find myself at the “end” of the perpetual news cycle still antagonistic to nearly all things AI (and associated).  As an educator, I have known the value of the “aha! moments” since my very beginning in the classroom, and as an experienced educator, I know how to generate the conditions to make them happen.  Indeed, as I write in the introduction to this entire project, the whole purpose behind my concept of “authentic engagement” is to enable and empower all educators everywhere to produce the insights that are the foundation of all genuine learning. 

Yet, I am too much the skeptic not to wonder if the pejorative “Oh, Boomer!” may not actually apply to this aging educator and his quasi-neo-luddite sympathies.  I am not going to halt the future use of AI in schools or the workplace, and I am not individually even likely to slow them down much.  In fact, while I might serve as a bulwark against how my own institution employs it—maybe even influence a few others through my writing—my very finitude will eventually silence my voice regardless.  What’s more, I have too much empirical data in front of me demonstrating that there is the very real possibility that none of it will matter, that there will be no one with enough IQ, CQ, and EQ to worry about my concerns in the first place.

But the latest idiotic hysteria surrounding the Hantavirus reminds me of how dangerously ignorant most of the population in this country is, and when you couple that with the current contemptuous rejection of expertise, then that danger only explodes exponentially.  While I truly get why the generations I wrote about last time are questioning whether to have children—I resist the urge myself sometimes not to scream at the stories coming out of my NPR station on the radio in the morning—the reality is that some of them are having babies, and those babies are going to need a viable world in which to live.  Hence, I have to remind myself that the darkness only wins if I stop shining—my own “aha! moment” I must renew each and every day.

References

Kounios, J. & Kounios, Y (March 2025) The Brain Science of Elusive “Aha! Moments.” Scientific American.  Pp. 21-27.

Luse, B.; McBain, L.; & Pathak, N. (April 13, 2026) You Might Be Suffering From AI Brain Fry.  It’s Been a Minute.  https://www.npr.org/2026/04/13/nx-s1-5780867/you-might-be-suffering-from-ai-brain-fry.

[i] As well as potentially explain why certain individuals cling harder to a fixed mindset than others: logic may be their default mode.

Updates 2.0

As my regular readers know, I write from time to time more to inform about recent news and/or trends in the world of education than to editorialize or comment about them.  Some have come in the form of simple updates; others as more formal declarations about the current state of education.  But my express purpose with all these brief reports has been to collate what I have been learning lately into emerging patterns that can help my readers better understand the current climate impacting teaching in this country (though of course, what one chooses to discuss is, by definition, a type of commentary).

Well, it turns out that this past month has been a busy one in the world of schools, and while I was crafting my most recent graduation letter, a lot of interesting news was piling up on my digital desk.  Thus, for those interested (and not already “in-the-know”), here’s what’s been happening recently in the K-16 world.

Obviously, at the top of the list is AI.  Indeed, a month cannot pass these days (and probably a week!) without the topic of education’s frenemy producing multiple headlines, and April 2026 was no exception.  Most interesting to this educator, though, was the nature of the stories AI was causing (but hopefully not actually writing) to be published.  The mounting backlash against all things digital—the verdict in California against Meta and Google was huge!—has apparently started to reach the world of schools as parents across the United States are demanding a wholesale reduction of screens in the classroom—with those in New York City (the largest school district in the country) insisting that ChatGPT be removed entirely. 

Furthermore, recent surveys of 14-29 year-olds (Gen Z) show growing distrust and anger when it comes to the ubiquity of AI in their daily lives.  An increasing number of them are recognizing and openly acknowledging the negative impacts AI has already had on their mental capacities, and they are not happy about it.  Put bluntly, their brains are still functional enough to grasp how poorly their brains now function, and they are pissed off! Perhaps there is hope for the future of the world’s IQs, CQs, and EQs after all.

Of course, not every AI headline was a positive one for teaching and learning, and I cannot lie (nor fail to editorialize at least a little bit) that I found it disheartening—and even more so because anyone who has worked with adolescent boys cannot find this news entirely unexpected—that more and more teenage males are choosing AI companions for their “girlfriends” instead of their actual fellow teenage females.  As the headline for the story reports, they are doing so for “maximum control” of the relationship, with “zero [chance of] rejection” and total compliance on the part of their chosen “significant other”—i.e. the perfect narcissist fairytale of “boy meets girl; boy never risks losing girl; boy never has to get girl back.”

Yet, the potential societal cost of this so-called “fairytale” relates to another common theme in many of the stories about education this past month: employability.  Without the soft skills honed by the realities of actual human relationship—negotiating resistance, healing emotional damage, developing patience and empathy—these Gen Z and Gen Alpha males will be unable to find success in the workplace of the future, where human-to-human interaction will be at a premium.  Just ask the current graduating computer scientists coming out of today’s colleges and universities who cannot find jobs because AIs can already write code more cheaply and efficiently than their human counterparts.  Tomorrow’s jobs—what we can know about them—are going to require skill sets that no AI can ever accomplish, namely the continual adaptability demanded by the eternal complexities of human relationship.

Interestingly enough, though, some of the other headlines related to education and employability suggest that we may be actively walking away from the very ability of schools to generate this kind of robust relational adaptability in the first place.  As seen in the chart below, more than 25% of small liberal arts colleges in this country are in danger of closing within the decade, and even places as robust in their enrollment as Syracuse University have made the decision to close 93 of their 460 academic programs—with humanities and the fine arts representing the bulk of the majors going away. 

Of course, similar changes are occurring at schools throughout the U.S. as college-age students look for degrees they think will result in higher pay, and college administrators are simply following the market to try to attract the dwindling pool of higher education candidates.  Eliminating under-enrolled academic offerings in the humanities saves money and keeps the proverbial doors open and the lights turned on in the face of changing demographics and demands on the part of the consumer.

However, for both higher education and its population, this trend may be self-defeating because what today’s economists are saying to today’s students is:

major in a subject that offers enduring, transferable skills. Believe it or not, that could be the liberal arts. [Harvard economist, David] Deming’s research shows that male history and social-science majors end up out-earning their engineering and comp-sci counterparts in the long term, as they develop the soft skills that employers consistently seek out. “It’s actually quite risky to go to school to learn a trade or a particular skill, because you don’t know what the future holds,” Deming [says]. “You need to try to think about acquiring a skill set that’s going to be future-proof and last you for 45 years of working life.”

Which is why I was excited to read that in spite of the current contraction happening in the humanities and the fine arts at the college and university level, there is a bit of a revolution happening in high schools for the skills these fields have traditionally promoted and developed.  The 74 reports that emerging organizations such as Skills For The Future and Pathsmith are looking at the employability needs of the Gen Z and Gen Alpha populations, and they are creating actual curricula and assessments to meet these needs in today’s 9-12 classrooms and beyond.  Indeed:

several companies and non-profits are taking these [“soft” or “durable”] skills that have been fuzzy concepts and working on giving them shape and definition. They’re gathering teachers, developers of tests, business leaders and other experts to break down these skills into smaller skills and then into even smaller subskills and nuances that can serve as steps toward mastery. Communications, for instance, could include negotiating and public speaking as subskills, [and] the resulting outlines of skills and subskills are like a tree branching out from its trunk into smaller and smaller limbs, all with an eye to making them as teachable and testable as math or English.

In other words, the three “Cs” (communication, collaboration, and cognition) may be coming soon to an SAT test near you!

And part of how this may actually get accomplished involves the last piece of recent news I want to report about, an article exploring an intriguing potential solution to the teacher shortage in this country.  Written by former acting Governor of Massachusetts, Jane Swift, and former US Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, these two members from opposite poles of the political spectrum propose that two challenges currently facing our society may, in fact, be one another’s solutions.  They write:

Schools across the country are struggling to find enough teachers, with at least 411,000 teaching positions currently open nationwide. At the same time, more than 40% of recent graduates are underemployed. That means millions of young people have earned college degrees only to find themselves stuck in jobs that offer low pay, little security, and no clear path forward.  These are not separate challenges, and taken together, they point to a solution hiding in plain sight. Teaching can be the entry point into the workforce that Gen Z graduates need.

Now, I will be forthright.  My initial reaction upon reading this was a mixture of growl, teeth-grinding, and grimace: not this old trope again! “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach”…“glorified babysitters; how hard can it be?”…“cushy job; only work 9 months a year and get summers off!” The list of misperceptions about my chosen profession that I have heard over the decades still leaves me with a smoldering sense of frustration and even anger.  After all, this is the profession documented to be second only to that of ER surgeons for the number of critical decisions that have to be made every minute, and since more than half the people who enter it burnout and leave after just 3 years, I’m not sure that “cushy” is a term I would use to describe it. 

However, as I continued reading Swift’s and Duncan’s argument, I realized they were not saying that simply anyone can do this job.  Instead, they were arguing something more subtle:

Teacher shortages are already impacting classrooms nationwide. And schools in rural districts and lower-income communities are particularly struggling to fill vacancies. Research shows that persistent vacancies and reliance on substitute teachers undermine student learning and achievement. For students who overcome these challenges and make it to college, another problem awaits. Just half of all college graduates secure roles that require a degree. For those college graduates struggling to secure a college-level job, teaching can help them climb the career ladder as well.

Hence, what I am understanding Swift and Duncan to be reasoning is that in a world where AI is becoming the equivalent of the mechanical robots that took over much of the manufacturing sector, teaching offers a pathway for some of today’s college graduates to find stable, meaningful—potentially long-term—employment that perfects the “soft” skills they will need for the future while filling a need for caring, consistent, and well trained adults in the lives of children who would otherwise be left academically adrift.  They are not saying that just anyone can successfully teach but that encouraging those who have the potential to enter the profession by making the path for doing so more straightforward and attractive (e.g. making the “student teaching” requirements of most licensing programs paid internships) could possibly solve two challenges we currently face in our society at the same time.

Like I said, I find their ideas intriguing—if for no other reason than A) teaching is likely to remain pretty AI proof for the foreseeable future since it is rooted by its very nature in the messiness of human relationship; B) those adolescent boys with their chatbot girlfriends would learn how to navigate the complexity of person-to-person interaction real fast in a roomful of 10-year-olds; and C) I’m going to retire someday and somebody’s got to take my place.

Time will tell, and I encourage anyone interested in any of these updates from the world of education to explore the references below.

Coda

As I was finishing writing this, two articles arrived in my in-box reminding me that formal education systems in this country face a far greater crisis in the relatively near term than AI, cancelled academic departments, and under-employed Gen Z-ers combined.  The fertility level in the economically developed world is well below replacement value at this point—and continuing to drop—and it is estimated that in the New York City public schools alone, there will be 153,000 fewer students enrolled over the course of the next decade.  Tough decisions about school closures are coming not just for the small liberal arts colleges of this land, and those currently entering the teaching profession could actually find themselves in a very competitive job market (Swift’s and Duncan’s 411,000 positions may simply evaporate by attenuation).

But what makes me write this “afterword” is the far greater issue than simply a probable near-term crisis for schools in the U.S. caused by decreasing fertility levels. Anyone who knows me knows that I think hope is a verb, and the ultimate act of hope is the deliberate choice to bring a child into the world.  Yet as Anna Louie Sussman presents so brilliantly in her recent essay for the NYT, many in our two youngest generations who are in their reproductive years are not having children right now because of the chaotic uncertainty that there will even be a livable future for those hypothetical children to inhabit.  Millennials and Gen Zs are finding themselves without hope in that most significant way that one can, and that shouldn’t just concern those of us in education.  That should give us all pause.

Because the steadily more dystopian world we have chosen to create doesn’t have to remain the dysfunctional way it currently is. We have the power to change it. What haunts me is whether we have the will. Again, as I concluded with my graduating seniors, “maybe.”

References

Horowitch, R. (June 2025) The Computer-Science Bubble is Bursting.  The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/economy/archive/2025/06/computer-science-bubble-ai/683242/.

Marcus, J. (April 13, 2026) More Than a Quarter of Private Colleges Are at Risk of Closing, New Projection Shows.  The Hechinger Report.  https://hechingerreport.org/more-than-a-quarter-of-private-colleges-are-at-risk-of-closing-new-projection-shows/.

Mervosh, S.; Paris, F.; & Cain Miller, C. (May 8, 2026) U.S. Schools Face a Crisis as the Number of Children Drops.  The New York Times.  https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/08/upshot/public-schools-enrollment-crisis.html.

Napolitano, J. (April 9, 2026) Gen Z Increasingly Skeptical of–And Angry About–Artificial Intelligence.  The 74.  https://www.the74million.org/article/gen-z-increasingly-skeptical-of-and-angry-about-artificial-intelligence/.

O’Donnell, P. (April 21, 2026) Creating Communicators and Critical Thinkers: Soon There Will Be a Test for That.  The 74.  https://www.the74million.org/article/creating-communicators-and-critical-thinkers-soon-there-will-be-a-test-for-that/.

Otterman, S. (April 3, 2026) Syracuse Drops 84 Majors Including Classics, Ceramic and Italian.  The New York Times.  https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/01/nyregion/syracuse-university-degrees-eliminated.html?unlocked_article_code=1.X1A.CZh8.XEtP0OnmSuDJ&smid=url-share.

Royle, O.R. (April 17, 2026) Teen Boys Are Choosing AI Girlfriends Over Real Ones for “Maximum Control, Zero Rejection”–Experts Say It Could Make Them Unemployable.  Fortune.  https://fortune.com/2026/04/17/teen-boys-dating-ai-chatbot-girlfriend-experts-warn-kill-social-skills-gen-alpha-network-promotions/.

Singer, N. (May 6, 2026) In Backlash Against Tech in Schools, Parents Are Winning Rollbacks. The New York Times.  https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/29/technology/parents-school-tech-backlash.html?unlocked_article_code=1.elA.Fg2u.0ouroYo_g8zF&smid=nytcore-ios-share.

Sussman, A. L. (May 7, 2026) Why So Few Babies? We Might Have Overlooked the Biggest Reason of All.  The New York Times.  https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/07/opinion/birthrate-kids-parents-demographics-future.html.

Swift, J. and Duncan, A. (April 7, 2026) The Case for More Gen Z Teachers.  TIME.  https://time.com/article/2026/04/07/the-case-for-more-gen-z-teachers/.

A Letter to the Class of 2026

I won’t be concluding here by revealing the meaning of life.
But I do have thoughts.
—Oliver Burkeman

It happens to me with increasing frequency, these days,
that writing takes the form of prayer.
—Lydia Millet

Brock Advisory 2022-2026

Dear Members of the Class of 2026,

Ever since I first had seniors to graduate, I have always had parting words.  Sometimes it has been a collection of favorite quotes.  At others, a hard-earned personal insight.  Occasionally, I have spoken the traditional commencement clichés (as well as the usual words of farewell), and on more than one occasion, I have even sent some of you out into the world with a Zen koan.  But then a pandemic hit, sending all of us scurrying to the isolation of our homes, denying me my usual venue for sharing these final (admittedly unsought) thoughts, and thus, the ritual of this annual letter was born.

Of course, I write to you for the same reason the institutions who have nurtured you will hold ceremonies and the families who love you will hold parties:  to honor this pivotal moment in your journey.  These reflective rites of passage are critical to a social species such as ours because they hold up to our collective attention the common values we share, and whether joyful (think weddings) or sad (think funerals), they remind us to take this unearned gift called life more seriously and to recall the fundamental qualities that make us human.  Hence, on the road to full adulthood, remember to honor moments such as these and to be patient with your elders when they get all weepy and fawning over you in the coming months; it will be you doing the weeping and fawning one day.

Remember, too, to immerse yourself fully in your own celebrations, to participate actively in your own life.  Too often, we can find ourselves so focused on the planning and execution of an event—or worse, trying to capture it—that we fail to notice our place in the moment itself.  This can be especially true in today’s world of social media (where I once watched a group of my students work so hard to video a stadium-like wave they wanted to generate that they never actually made the wave itself happen).  Therefore, I urge you make deliberate time to notice this important transition in which you find yourself.  Try sitting still.  Watch a sunrise.  Journal on a page.  Hike a trail.  Do whatever you can to make the necessary intentional pauses required to embrace with full awareness what is happening to you “now.” 

Of course, residing mindfully in the moment is an important lesson to remember your entire life, not just for times of ritual.  Millennia of wisdom literature has been clear that “you can have a hundred tea ceremonies; you could even have all of them with the same people.  But you can only have that ceremony, that cup of tea once.  Then that stretch of time evaporates forever” (Burkeman, p. 141; original emphasis).  Thus, we need to inhabit any given space and time we find ourselves in as if it could be our last because the harsh reality is that it could.  Granted, this charge to live in the “now” is an ideal, never quite fully realized or truly attained.  But the alternative is to walk through life reacting blindly—or at best, blurrily—(and frequently passively so) to every random or premeditated change that buffets you.  Only to the degree that you can center and focus yourself fully can you proactively steer yourself successfully—and with confidence—through the inevitable challenges and roadblocks simply being alive will throw at you.

What’s more, one such difficulty already confronts you before you even step into your next chapter.  The unrestrained explosion of artificial intelligence (AI) has some comparing its potential social disruption to that of the Industrial Revolution (from which one can argue we are still recovering), and you are going to spend your entire adult lives amidst this fallout.  Technologists got so busy trying to see what they could do that they never bothered to ask “should they?” and now Claude, Anthropic’s most recent AI release, is capable of writing and running its own self-generated code without its original authors having full knowledge of—and therefore final say over—what Claude is actually doing with itself.  The result? An AI tool that could allow any person on the planet with access to the web to hack any digital infrastructure.  As Thomas Friedman puts it, “I’m really not being hyperbolic when I say that kids could deploy this by accident:  ‘Honey, what did you do after school today?’ ‘Well, Mom, my friends and I took down the power grid. What’s for dinner?’ ”

I know, I know.  Way too dark a turn for what is supposed to be a pseudo-commencement speech.  Those are meant to be cheery and uplifting, full of friendly advice and quirky bits of parental type wisdom.  But ugly truths are no less real for being ugly, and one of the hardest ones I find myself confronting each year when I author this epistle is the seemingly ever-growing reality of just how f-ed up a world my fellow elders and I are leaving to you.  Billy Joel may have been correct when he wrote about not starting the fire, but that does not excuse the many individuals who have deliberately poured gasoline on it (both literal and metaphorical).  If it is true that we borrow the present from the future, then I regret to say that we will be returning damaged goods to your generation with negative interest on the loan.

However, lest you think it inevitable to succumb to the flames, allow an experienced firefighter to offer some tools for combating life’s flare-ups even if they don’t always smother them completely.  First and foremost, maintain perspective.  And by that, I do not mean simply be empathetic or have multiple ways of looking at a situation or try to understand the context of a what you are dealing with (all of which are good things to do).  No, I mean PERSPECTIVE such as the kind told of Rabbi Simcha Bunim, who is said to have had two slips of paper in his pockets at all times, one of which contained the Hebrew phrase, “Bishvili nivra ha’olam” (“for my sake the world was created”) and the other, “V’anokhi afar v’aefer” (“I am but dust and ashes”).  He navigated life allegedly removing one or the other as needed, and I have seldom encountered a higher wisdom. Your life is finite, and therefore knowing how to identify when something demands your all-in investment of everything you have to offer and when something is like a dropped scoop of your favorite ice cream lying melting on the pavement is perhaps the greatest skill you will ever acquire. 

Related is the ability embodied by the famous story from the Buddhist tradition about the farmer whose horse ran away one day.  For those unfamiliar with it, what happens in this tale is that a series of events follow this seeming misfortune, and with each event, the farmer’s neighbors either cry out “What terrible fortune!” or exclaim “How wonderful” depending on whether sympathy or celebration seem the appropriate response to what has happened next in the story.  Yet the farmer, every single time something happens, always replies, “Maybe.”  Maybe it’s terrible; maybe it’s wonderful. He alone in the story understands that we cannot know any situation’s ultimate outcome—including those where you’ve gone “all-in” and those where you’ve cut your loses—and that, thererfore, all we can ever do in life is to experience what happens (even when we are the author) and then choose how we respond.  Like I said, Perspective!

The next tool I have to offer for fighting life’s fires may sound odd, but the science behind it is strong:  be bored.  Yes, intentional boredom is a secret superpower against the world’s conflagrations, and here’s why.  For starters, it promotes your capacity for delayed gratification, which Mischel’s famous Marshmallow Test has demonstrated promotes a whole host of life-long benefits, including better health, better educational outcomes, better work satisfaction…the list is extensive! Including the fact that people with better gratification-delay have more resilience and more grit.

However, what makes boredom even more significant than these “quality of life” factors is what it does for your brain’s ability to think.  In our digital age of 24/7 universally immediate appeasement of our neural reward circuits—where a dopamine rush is always only a mere click of your device away—the ability to think in a focused, conscious, deliberative fashion is rapidly joining the physical atrophy of today’s couch potatoes.  Furthermore, just as we know that the body requires regular exercise and proper diet to maintain its structural and physical health (medical knowledge we only actually first recognized in the mid-1950s), so too does the brain need regular thinking about complex ideas to maintain its health as well.  Hence, just as a diet of twinkies and extensive lounging are bad for the body, so is a diet of Tik Toks and AI bad for the brain. Boredom is the antidote because it forces the brain to find something interesting to think about, strengthening its mental muscles.

What’s more, all that additional thinking in the absence of all that dopamine—remember, you’re bored—creates the conditions for improving one of the most important of our three primary intelligences, creativity.  We need brains with strong capacities for making previously unseen connections between purportedly unrelated ideas if we are to find solutions to our most intractable problems. And making Tik Tok videos mimicking other Tik Tok videos or asking ChatGPT to draft an essay is not going to build those kinds of brains.  That’s like going to the gym and having robots lift the weights for you.  Worse, it’s like going to the gym, filming the equipment and calling that a workout.[i]  Only true boredom will engender an increase in creativity, and in the absence of boredom, any decrease in creativity can have very practical consequences.  For example, entrepreneurship in this country (i.e. economic creativity) has been on the decline for the last four decades (dipping the most in the past 15 years),[ii] and most recently, the draconian efforts of Trump’s DOGE have guaranteed that scientific progress in the U.S. (i.e. cognitive creativity) will be lowered for decades to come.  Therefore, want to save the world? Increase your boredom; both your brain and your future children will thank you for it.

However, if you do decide to save the world, be absolutely certain to keep that perspective I spoke of earlier.  Firefighting is never easy work, and after your idealism has been scorched a few times, it can be all too easy to become cynical or—worse—apathetic.  The simple truth is that it just isn’t possible to confront the reality of our limited lifespans and not ask, how much can any one person truly do? Indeed, this recognition of our finitude can engender simultaneous feelings of both excess responsibility and utter inadequacy, and since—to paraphrase the philosopher Hegel—the nature of being finite is to have the seed of your passing as your essential nature (i.e. “the hour of [your] birth is the hour of [your] death”), then firefighting itself has the potential to feel pointless.  If I can’t make my existence matter, why bother?

Yet “maybe our responsibility isn’t to justify ourselves before [the universe], but to embody as completely as possible the momentary expression of it that we are” (Burkemen, p. 157)—to live a modestly meaningful life. Which brings me to my final toolkit offering for this letter:  the capacity to distinguish between want and need and to balance them appropriately.  Not that I don’t think most of you already know the difference between the two.  But we are at a juncture in your lives where illustrating how easy it is to get the two mixed up is, well, easy.  Because, right now, I am confident that most of you want—maybe even desperately—to go away to college this coming fall.  So much so that I’m equally confident that you have probably convinced yourself that this “want” is really a “need,” that you need to go to college.  You don’t, though.  Your biological survival is in no way dependent on your matriculation at an institute of higher education, and in fact, you could live the rest of your life after graduation never “cracking another book” as they used to say.

Now, if you want the kind of employment that feels emotionally purposeful and financially gainful, then, yes, you need to go to college because a basic bachelor’s degree is the required, necessary precursor to certain types of careers.  Or if you want a life partner with certain qualities, then you need to date individuals who possess them, and if you want long physical health, then you need proper daily exercise and diet.  Put simply for any given “want” you might have, there will always be a corresponding need, and so identifying those “wants” most important to you will enable you to identify what “needs” you will have to meet to obtain them—including if one of those “wants” is a better world than the one we currently have.            

There may come a time, though, when you still have some unfulfilled “wants” but no real unfulfilled “needs”—at least as Maslow’s famous hierarchy would define them—and when that happens, you face a choice:  remain discontent in the face of life’s realities, forever chasing after what eludes you, or find satisfaction in those same realities, embracing with gratitude and humility what you have already found.  It will be up to you to decide, but should you find yourself at such a future juncture, before making a choice, never forget the wisdom of the farmer: 

Maybe.

Congratulations and good fortune in the coming years!

References

Burkeman, O. (2024) Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts.  New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Friedman, T. (April 7, 2026) Anthropic’s Restraint Is a Terrifying Warning Sign.  The New York Times.  https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/07/opinion/anthropic-ai-claude-mythos.html.

Newport, C. (March 27, 2026) There’s a Good Reason You Can’t Concentrate.  The New York Times.  https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/27/opinion/technology-mental-fitness-cognitive.html?unlocked_article_code=1.WlA.6ZKN.Zf47rdbx8Sqm&smid=nytcore-ios-share.

Stokel-Walker, C. (April 7, 2026) Scientists Invented a Fake Disease.  AI Told People It Was Real.  Nature.  https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01100-y.

[i] Which, as a sidebar, is basically what the Marvel and DC franchises have been doing now for more than two decades—I mean how many reboots of Spiderman and Batman do we need?? As The Boss once wrote, “fifty-seven channels and nothin’ on.”

[ii] For anyone wishing to learn more about this decidedly non-partisan issue, it has been well documented by organizations as far apart on the political spectrum as The Brookings Institute and The Heritage Foundation. 

Nostalgia

I was so much older then.
I’m younger than that now.
—Bob Dylan

A report came out this month about the growing number of colleges and universities that are trimming down the hours required to earn a basic bachelor’s degree (with corresponding approval from the numerous accreditation bodies) so that a student can now achieve their B.A. or B.S. in three years rather than in the traditional four.  Much was made about the cost savings to individual students, the faster increase in people entering the workforce in high-demand fields, and even the need to join certain professions as quickly as possible before AI takes them over.  It was all very utilitarian and pragmatic, and as I read it, I could not help but recall this long-ago Doonesbury I keep posted in my classroom and, like the Chancellor in it, wearily sigh.

Granted, there are powerful socio-economic realities these institutions of higher education are trying to address with this new approach—both their students’ and their own.  Student debt in this country is nearly $2 trillion dollars, with the average borrower in debt for around $40,000, and I know from my own family how large that number can truly get as one of my relatives continues to pay off educational loans greater than their mortgage! Furthermore, shrinking birth rates have schools at all levels in the educational pipeline scrambling for their organizational lives to keep lights on, doors open, and the teaching staff employed.  It is a fraught time to be a tuition-based business!

I also want to acknowledge that for nearly all its centuries of existence, academia has been the almost exclusive domain of wealthy males whose leisure to philosophize and experiment—“to embrace both the joys and sorrows of intellectual maturation!”—rested on the hard (and usually uncompensated) labor of women, the enslaved, and young children.  We may laude Socrates’ and Confucius’ wisdom and Copernicus’ and Al-Biruni’s empirical insights.  But an entire underclass of people toiled to make what they achieved possible, and even today, the skin color of those attending higher education’s classes is regularly much lighter than those maintaining its campuses.  As for my own four years of undergraduate work, they were made possible by a large community of people whom I’m ashamed to say I did not even see at the time.

But what I did see then was how precious an opportunity I had to immerse myself in all that collective knowledge and to explore intimately the many disciplines and outlooks that adulting might one day prevent me from having the leisure to do.  Hence, I deliberately feasted like a glutton. Of course, not everyone does—Arum and Roska were able to write their book for a reason after all. But for me, those four years were the beginning of my journey toward education’s ultimate goal, wisdom, and while like my pal, Socrates, I know this journey is an asymptotic one, I know as well that without that time apart to do all that growth, I would not have what little of this precious resource I actually do possess today.  And in a world so desperately in need of people with as much wisdom as possible, anything that might stunt its potential growth should give us all pause.  Thus, my nostalgia for what feels like a bygone era for higher ed:  where will wisdom’s enkindling come from now?

Then again, where will passion for anything in education come from in the future? I ask because the other thing making me nostalgic right now is a rather superficial contest I am currently participating in that came across my desk from the National Science Teaching Association entitled, “America’s Favorite Teacher.”  It involves essentially employing one’s social contacts to cast votes for you as a teacher, and it is a blatant fundraiser for a legitimate science education organization (not NSTA).  While the participating teachers cannot do so, everyone else who casts a ballot can purchase votes for their candidate through charitable donations to this organization, and the donations are even tax-deductible.  There are no qualifications for the teachers involved other than active employment in the classroom, and the winner of this essentially silent auction gets a significant monetary prize.

I know, I know; WHAT was I thinking?! However, before the preceding paragraph causes the few active followers I actually do have to sever all ties with me immediately, my only reason for participating in this silly contest is that it came across my desk at the exact same time a beloved colleague of mine was in the final stages of dying from ALS.  She was a French teacher at my school, and a program very dear to her was our two-week Foreign Language Immersion program for which there is a dedicated financial aid fund to help students to participate in who might not otherwise have the means.  I have told my social “network” (what there is of it) that anything I earn in this contest will be donated to that fund in her honor because the last thing I could possibly need at this point in my career is any more professional recognition.

Yet, it is precisely the intersection of those two facts that has me feeling nostalgia.  I can still recall the time in our society when being a teacher was revered and honored, when it was even referred to as—or at least highly visible lip-service given to—the noble profession.  Beyond the usual teacher appreciation week, there wasn’t any real need for elevated public recognition or awards, and there certainly wasn’t that kind of need when it came to funding in classrooms.  Furthermore, when education’s well did begin to run dry and the profession began to be a regular scapegoat for society’s ills (yes, that’s a lot of cliched metaphors), the various recognition programs seeking to elevate public awareness of good teaching (such as Disney’s American Teacher Awards and Toyota’s Tapestry Grants) still demanded that recipients meet some standard or degree of excellence.  Maybe not every educator was a Jaime Escalante of Stand and Deliver fame, but solid individuals were held up to whom younger teachers could aspire.  I know; I was one of them.

Today, though, nearly every one of those major teacher recognition programs has gone the way of the non-avian dinosaurs (Trump even killed the Presidential Awards for Excellence in Math and Science Teaching this past year), and now what is left is a group of underappreciated and frequently demonized individuals who are scrambling regardless of their teaching qualifications to garner what amounts to “likes” on social-media platforms so that an underfunded educational organization can keep its doors open.  I am too old and experienced not to know that “the good ol’ days” are always a myth, but I’m hard-pressed right now not to think there were perhaps better ones. Oh well, at least the long, productive, and meaningful life of a former fellow educator will be honored, and future children who might not otherwise have had the chance will acquire some cultural perspective—otherwise known as wisdom. 

Auld lang syne indeed.

References

Arum, R. & Roksa, J. (2011) Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses. Chicago:  University of Chicago Press.

Marcus, J. (March 11, 2026) Faster, Thinner: Colleges are Swiftly Trimming a B.A. Degree to Three Years.  The Hechinger Report.  https://hechingerreport.org/faster-thinner-colleges-bachelors-degree-three-years.

AI: Education’s Frenemy (Part 2)

O brave new world,
That has such people in ’t!
—The Tempest

When I first wrote about ChatGPT three years ago, concerns about AI in the classroom were just beginning to emerge.  Much handwringing was done over fears of rampant cheating—especially in the text-heavy disciplines such as English and history—and anxiety among educators steadily mounted that AI tutors might soon be coming for people’s jobs.  There was an almost universal apprehension that the digital age’s ultimate disruptor to the education had perhaps finally arrived.  Lots of angst.

Which now seems positively quaint.

Because today, we have computers grading computers; brain scans showing AI inhibiting neurons; and thought leaders coining a new term, “anti-intelligence,” to describe what is happening to our youngest minds (more on this later).  Enormous data centers are sprouting like weeds—with the same corresponding economic costs and environmental harm as their literal botanical counterparts—and for over a year now, I have received at least two offers a day on Linked-In to earn hourly income training artificial intelligences that have a biology focus. 

Yet the real eye-opening/face-slapping/jaw-dropping/pick-your-cliché moment for me recently was when I discovered that all my video lectures for my senior electives now open on-line with a searchable 100% AI-generated transcript of what I am saying that I neither created nor gave any permission to create.  Google’s AI simply spontaneously takes my entire audio and creates the corresponding text on the screen to the right of the visual component—all in the few seconds it takes to start the usually 35-40 minute video.  Here’s a screenshot for any skeptic:

Now, I would hope that the implications of what Google is now doing spontaneously would invoke at least a quiver of discomfort (if not outright abject terror!).  But if not, then my reader is probably itself an LLM AI to begin with, scouring the internet for its own training purposes, no emotional response required.  My writing has simply made it more proficient at invading what little remains of my already barely existent privacy.

However, what disturbed me most when discovering Google AI’s latest feature was not the act itself; it was the reality that here was one less opportunity for my students to have to think for themselves.  As English teacher Thomas David Moore sums it:

There is nothing new about students trying to get one over on their teachers — there are probably cuneiform tablets about it — but when students use AI to generate what Shannon Vallor, philosopher of technology at the University of Edinburgh, calls a “truth-shaped word collage,” they are not only gaslighting the people trying to teach them, they are gaslighting themselves. In the words of Tulane professor Stan Oklobdzija, asking a computer to write an essay for you is the equivalent of “going to the gym and having robots lift the weights for you.”

And without opportunities for cognitive heavy-lifting, brains atrophy; minds devolve; and the entire point of education becomes at risk.

But that brings me back to what I mentioned earlier, the notion of “anti-intelligence.”  As its originator, John Nosta, describes it:

Anti-intelligence is not stupidity or some sort of cognitive failure. It’s the performance of knowing without understanding. It’s language severed from memory, context, and even intention. It’s what large language models (LLMs) do so well. They produce coherent outputs through pattern-matching rather than comprehension. Where human cognition builds meaning through the struggle of thought, anti-intelligence arrives fully formed.

Thus, for example, when Google automatically transcribes my lectures, my students do not have to wrestle with grasping the cognitive story I am asking them to learn by watching and engaging with the video; they can simply look up the factoid they need for a particular question, without any concern for the larger intellectual context within which that question resides.  In other words, they no longer need to learn anything from my lectures; they just need them as employable databases.

Which is fine, I freely acknowledge, if you already know how to think.  I do not need to possess all human knowledge in my brain because I possess the critical thinking skills honed by decades of training that enable me to effectively employ those databases containing that knowledge for constructive cognitive purposes.  Where things become problematic is that anti-intelligence has become the “cognitive climate” where the minds of today’s youngest children develop, and “when AI answers arrive instantly from childhood, it may affect whether certain cognitive capacities develop.”  Every theory of brain development is clear: children learn through a series of encounters with constraints that carry costs when mistakes are made.  Without both those costs and those constraints, they will fail to generate both the necessary knowledge and the intellectual capacity to make steadily more informed decisions. 

Yet today’s children, as Nosta points out, “aren’t just using artificial intelligence (AI) as a study aid; they’re building their cognitive patterns in an environment where answers arrive before questions even fully form.”  We have never lived in such a world, and that’s what makes the potential future of AI in education so troubling: the pathway the brain needs to follow during childhood “doesn’t just make thinking harder; it makes thinking possible.” If we remove that path, do we remove thinking?

It’s a disturbing (if not distressing) thought; especially given that 61% of Americans can’t name the 3 branches of government, half our adults can’t read a book written at the 8th grade level, and—my personal favorite—25% of us apparently still think the sun revolves around the earth rather than the other way around! Add in the fact that nearly half of college graduates report never reading another book of any kind following graduation and that significant majorities of today’s youth report either being bored or otherwise disengaged at school and the notion that AI could interfere even further with this current situation is positively disheartening.  We are already a society where “the rejection of learned knowledge is often seen as an expression of personal liberty” and “hostility to education is now actively separating us from a shared reality” (Millet, p. 148).  If AI’s increasing ubiquity inhibits our collective cognitive capacity beyond the damage digital technologies and underfunding have already done to our educational systems, then we really are “sitting ducks for tyrants and profiteers, willing to believe whatever tales they choose to tell us” (Millet, p. 149).

Lest we “abandon all hope,” though, I need to point out that steadily increasing numbers of us in education—at all levels—have begun adapting to this new reality—as we always have even since those first aforementioned cuneiform days (it was hard to cheat in the strictly oral culture preceding them).  High schools and colleges alike report returning to Bluebooks for exams and in-class writing for essays.  Hand-written lab notebooks are making a comeback in the sciences, and at least two universities, Purdue and Ohio State, have now made proficiency with AI in one’s matriculating discipline a graduation requirement because A) there is the practical need for individuals in general to be able to distinguish truth from fiction and because B) you won’t be able to do your job in the future without such knowledge.  As one microbiologist put it:

AI has already “revolutionized” her field. Recent research suggests that AI-enabled analysis of large genomic data sets, for instance, is allowing scientists to look at DNA directly from environmental samples, revealing entire ecosystems of previously unknown microbes.

In other words, there are questions of value in need of answers that the human brain does not have the computing power to solve but which our brain does have the critical thinking to put to meaningful purpose.  AI can do things we can’t; we just need to stop surrendering to it the things we can do that it can’t.

The challenge, therefore, is to determine where AI has value in educational situations and where active resistance to it needs to take place.  For instance, if we know a climate of anti-intelligence threatens proper brain development, then we need to pay careful attention to how we construct pre-primary and early-childhood educational environments and experiences, and we need to teach parents not to park their toddler(s) in front of an I-pad, no matter how exhausted and tired the work-day may have left them.  Knowing that screen time inhibits neural activity, we need to plan lessons that don’t require extensive use of computers, and we either collect cellphones at the start of the school day (as so many K-12 institutions are finally doing) or ban them from being out in the classroom (as so many colleges and universities now do).

At the same time, where an AI program can enhance educational investigation in ways no human brain can ever accomplish, then designing lessons to actively employ it adds value to the learning.  For example, if I want my students to explore the actual attitudes of Americans about gun control, I can have them see how many times any type of restriction has been proposed by every level of legislature in the land.  Or if I want them to have a better understanding of a pastiche before making them hand-write their own, I can have them generate such a thing from an entire body of an author’s work.  Indeed, in my discipline, the sciences, where genuinely enormous databases are the rule rather than the exception, the potential uses of AI to enhance student learning are almost too numerous to list here.  The bottom line is that there are lots of potential positive possibilities for education’s frenemy in the classroom; they just require wise discernment on the part of the teacher.

But that is perhaps the greatest challenge for dinosaurs such as me when it comes to AI and teaching because I have zero interest in artificial intelligence.  Period.  In fact, I would go so far as to say I have negative interest; I’m actively antithetical to it even.  The simple truth is that I relish difficult, hard thinking.  I enjoy the excitement from the intellectual uncertainty of being “lost” and finding my way “home.”  To state the obvious, I treasure the blank page and what it is going to demand of me to fill it.  I am “the life of the mind.”  Thus, learning that Google now spontaneously generates transcripts of my video lectures simply fills me with annoyance since I will now have to reconfigure how I have my students employ them in their learning.  I know I must adapt as an educator to this changing environment as I have so many times before, and I know that I will do so.  But after 37 years of adapting, I’m starting to appreciate my grandfather’s attitude when VCRs arrived on the scene (and this from a man who was born before airplanes and lived to see the space shuttles):  nope; done; don’t want to deal with this. 

Maybe I can find an AI that can help.

References

Millet, L. (2024) We Loved It All: A Memory of Life.  New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

Moore, T. (Sept. 8, 2025) Jelly Beans for Grapes: How AI Can Erode Students’ Creativity.  EdSurge.  https://www.edsurge.com/news/2025-09-08-jelly-beans-for-grapes-how-ai-can-erode-students-creativity.

Nosta, J. (Jan. 22, 2026) Growing Up Anti-Intelligent.  Psychology Today.  https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/the-digital-self/202601/growing-up-anti-intelligent.

Toppo, G. (Feb. 17, 2026) At These Universities, Using AI Isn’t Shunned–It’s a Graduation Requirement.  The 74.  https://www.the74million.org/article/at-these-universities-using-ai-isnt-shunned-its-a-graduation-requirement/.

Confronting Ugly Truths

Blind, closed,
Suspicious, afraid,
Ignorance
Protects itself,
And protected,
Ignorance grows.
—Octavia Butler,
Parable of the Talents

I remember when I first learned about the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre.  I was in my mid-fifties, and I was listening, ironically, to the NPR station out of that very city as I was driving down I-44, headed west to visit my beloved New Mexico.  The local broadcast was carrying a story about the debate over reparations for the descendants of the survivors, and I distinctly recall thinking “how is it possible for me to have lived to be 53 years old and never have heard of this before now?” I was appalled that a significant dark chapter of our history had never made it into any textbook or lesson I had ever encountered during my schooling years, and I can still feel the consequent internal shift in my paradigms as I realized how much more unpacking my white privilege still needed than had been done to date.

I share this preface because about a month ago, I was again listening to NPR when the series Throughline came on as I was prepping for my morning run, and they were airing an episode about the science fiction writer, Octavia Butler.  Butler—who black, female, and gay was the antithesis of the stereotypical sci-fi author—is a voice I have known about for many decades but whom I had never actually read, and by the end of that Throughline, I knew it was time to change that fact.  Fortunately, my school’s library has copies of what are considered her three most significant works, and so I borrowed both volumes in the Parable series and got to work. 

And after reading them, I can declare categorically that I would choose to live in Orwell’s 1984, Huxley’s Brave New World, and Collins’ The Hunger Games trilogy COMBINED before I would ever willingly live in the dystopian hell that Butler describes.  So nightmarish did I find the alternate reality she sets forth that there were times when I had to compel myself to read further.  What she writes is just that bleak and disturbing.

Yet why, a reasonable reader might ask, would I do that? Why force myself to read something so obviously discomfiting? My answer is: for the same reason that I should have learned about the Tulsa Race Massacre long before I did.  Ugly truths are no less truths, and it became very clear early on in both books that Butler is using her own experience as a black, gay woman in the Los Angeles of the 1990s to inform the storyline.  She is effectively elaborating what it is like to live as a black person in this country, a woman in this country, and a homosexual in this country, and very little of that experience is “pretty.”  It is why I don’t think I can ever read what is considered Butler’s other most significant work, Kindred, because while I have understood for quite some time now the horror that nearly 100% of black women in this country’s history experienced rape (and often multiple times), the awareness that one would not exist as a black person today without that long ago act of rape (and sometimes not so long ago)….  I have no words.

Still I write, and I do so because part of what makes Butler’s work so compelling to this privileged white, heterosexual male is that she confronts readers of any background with the reality that ugly truths inform and impact all of our lives and that the most dangerous thing about ignorance of any kind is the threat it poses to acknowledging this reality.  We already avoid so-called inconvenient truths at our peril; we avoid ugly truths at our demise.

Which is, of course, fine with the current administration in charge of the Executive branch of this country.  The less truth the better as far as anyone in the White House is concerned.  Ignore the U.S. Constitution and the Rule of Law.  Ignore medical science and its impact on public health.  Ignore climate change and its consequent loss in lives and livelihoods.  Ignore the murder of two U.S. citizens in cold blood. Ignore basic human moral decency.  Ignore. Ignore. Ignore.

The danger of ignoring, though, is the cultivation of ignorance, and as Butler wisely observes, ignorance will do anything and everything in its power to grow.  We are watching that reality even now as one of the greatest social experiments in human history—a nation “of the people, by the people, and for the people”—systematically self-immolates because we don’t like confronting ugly truths about ourselves. Doing so is messy, uncomfortable, and regularly painful, and the simple certainty is that I owe my very existence to violence perpetrated upon others because there is at least one rape, murder, or pillage somewhere in every genetic line. In addtion, I owe at least a portion of my current status and wealth in our society to the programmatic violence that was slavery in this country.  I do not “enjoy” knowing either of these facts, but their knowledge enables me to understand what actions I must take with others to create the conditions for less violence, more empathy, greater compassion, and increasing justice for “all God’s children.”

Again, the most perverse conviction of the Trumpian weltanschauung and those who seek it is the belief that returning to the willful ignorance of a previous age—when closets weren’t just for clothing, misogyny was hip, and the N-word not forbidden—will somehow make the perceived “flaws” in the liberal agenda for building a more humane, equitable, and ecologically sound world go away.  Trump and his allies (which ironically include some women and people of color) want to make “everything better” once more for the white male heteronormative hegemony, and their principal tool in these efforts is the elevation of ignorance:  to promote falsehoods, to attack even the most vaguely unpleasant truths, and to disable critical thinking through a firehose of compassion fatigue.  All to maintain a caste system grounded in a myth of American exceptionalism.

Which brings me to a personal “ugly” truth I find distressing and distasteful to acknowledge: the realization that I, too, have bought into to certain components of that myth.  Don’t get me wrong; anyone who has read pretty much anything I have written knows my embrace of the truth that the United States is fundamentally and foundationally a racist, sexist patriarchy built on the blood of generations of disadvantaged people.  We’ve got a LONG way to go before declaring ourselves “the New Jerusalem.”  But in fits and starts, we did at least seem to be going—chattel slavery was abolished; my mother would eventually possess her own credit card; there is a minimum wage—and that’s where I realized the impact of the myth on myself:  I believed the social experiment itself was exceptional, that a “nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal” could survive anything thrown at it and eventually evolve into its more noble potential.

However, I now have more than a year of observable primate behavior of the basest sort to confront me with the ugly truth that the American experiment in democracy is no more exceptional than any other social construct humans have invented, all of them utterly dependent on the qualities of the experiment’s participants.  Qualities that right now I am at my most pessimistic about, especially given the rise of technologies with deliberately designed algorithms to cater to the human brain’s most primitive whims.  Ignorance growing indeed!

Yet pessimism doesn’t let me off the hook.  As I have oft quoted my mentor, the Jewish philosopher, Steven Schwarzschild, “just because the world is ending doesn’t excuse you from getting dressed for dinner.”  The American experiment may not be exceptional, but that doesn’t make the fight for civil rights, empowering women, and fair compensation for employment any less important or worthy an endeavor.  If anything, that is the actual value of ugly truths:  without confronting them, you cannot grow and change for the better.

Which, interestingly enough, is a significant message in Octavia Butler’s work.  None of her protagonists are hapless, helpless, or hopeless.  In the face of world’s they did not create, they are the very embodiment of strength, resilience, and resolve, and they manage their lives successfully amidst the proverbial “gloom and doom”—much as humans have been doing daily ever since our ancestors first evolved a little over 350,000 years ago.  We have been fruitfully navigating ugly truths for a very long time.

So tomorrow morning, I will get up as I have now for more than thirty-seven and a half years and head off to school.  I will teach my students of all colors about the heightened cortisol levels of their dark-skinned classmates and the negative impact this has on their daily health and lifespans.  I will teach my students of all sexualities and genders about the evolution of the LGBTQIA+ phenotypes throughout the entire animal kingdom and why natural selection has maintained these value-added traits for millions of years.  I will teach my students of all socio-economic backgrounds the realities of a finite planet and its limited carrying capacity for any species and why, thererfore, it might be a good idea to learn how to consume less and to share more.  And I will teach my fellow carbon-based lifeforms that the natural cycling of this critical element has been vital to the wellbeing of our planet for billions of years but that continuing to abruptly dump millions of years of fossilized photosynthesis into the atmosphere might not be our smartest idea as a species.

In other words, I will teach truth, however unfashionable or ugly it might be, and I will fight ignorance, however quixotic that can sometimes feel.  Because to do anything less is to dishonor the millennia of ancestors who confronted their own ugly truths to make our lives today possible.  The lie presently in the White House may be endangering the American experiment, but that lie only succeeds if we ignore it.

References

Arablouei, R., et al. (Jan. 1, 2026) Winter Book Club: Octavia Butler’s Visionary Fiction.  Throughline.  https://www.npr.org/2026/01/01/nx-s1-5643047/winter-book-club-octavia-butlers-visionary-fiction.

Butler, O. (1993) Parable of the Sower.  London: Headline Publishing Group.

Butler, O. (1998) Parable of the Talents.  London: Headline Publishing Group.

Where Will We Go from Here?

You’ve got to be proud of your wounds.
—Nancy Pelosi

One of the great challenges I have when I’m writing these days is having anything I say remain remotely significant before getting the chance to upload it, such is the deranged chaos of the Trump presidency.  Because I can only compose on weekends during the school year, I will start discussing my reaction to something I’ve encountered only to have what I’m writing about feel almost banal before I can return to it.  Case in point, here is how this current essay began quite recently:

As most who know me can well imagine, I have been a loyal subscriber to Scientific American for almost 30 years now.  In addition, I am one of those readers who actually starts on the first page and reads the entire issue cover-to-cover, including the math articles I can barely follow at times.  I’m just that curious. 

However, as the ancient dictum about cats reminds us, sometimes curiosity can be a dangerous thing—or at least psychologically problematic—and so I found myself finishing up the December 2025 issue just moribundly depressed—or at least discouraged.  With one exception (which, ironically, was about post-partum depression), every feature article contained gloomy news about the future.  There was the story about oil and gas companies pivoting to plastic to keep their profits flowing as more people purchase all-electric vehicles.  Potential individualized cancer vaccines are being defunded by Kennedy’s HHS while Martian soil samples are now trapped inside NASA’s Perseverance because of Trump’s budget cuts to basic research.  And the “highlight” of all “highlights:”  a story about AI avatars for grieving the dead.  Heck, even the commentary section contained news of more teenagers turning to chatbots as alternatives to personal relationships.  It was just dark reporting piled on top of dark reporting.

I share all of this because I want readers to know the kind of mental mindset I was in when—on only the second day of the new year—I read the following headline in my local newspaper:

“Paramedic Under Investigation for Explicit Videos Defends Urinating in Family’s Food.” 

Yes, reread that.  Defends.  Urinating.  In food.  A headline featured not in a tabloid but in a reputable news source was informing me that someone who society entrusts with people’s lives was arguing that it is okay to piss on material intended for human consumption. And that wasn’t even what had gotten him into trouble!

How did we get here? And more importantly, where do we go? While I pretty much know the answer to the first question (much of my writing is about it), I find myself feeling so mentally gob-smacked right now by everything that headline implies about us as a culture, that I am at a loss for any possible answer to the second one.  Essayist Robert Fulghum reminds us to be wary of judgment, that “change the name, and the story is told of you.”  But I find myself living in a world where there are now “shoes” I just cannot envision ever “walking in” and where there are now entire “warehouses” of such footwear strolling around our public domains.  Granted, this guy got into trouble because he crossed a boundary in what remains of our social norms, but look at what our President’s done this past year and how much of our paramedic’s trouble is just his lack of political capital?

Oh! To go back to the relative naivete of when I wrote those words! News of some nitwit videotaping his genitals pales—indeed becomes outright invisible—when held up against the unprovoked invasion of a sovereign nation and a government condoned murder of a mother of three.  My bewildered appall at someone defending their stupidity appears almost silly now when compared to the disgusted outrage I should feel at the absolute madness coming out of the minds of this administration.  Where do we go, indeed!

Yet as tempting as it is, I can’t just rant.  Cursing the darkness solves nothing, defeats nothing, illuminates nothing; it doesn’t even ultimately make the curser feel any better.  The only way to banish darkness is to irradiate it, to make it fully visible for the evil it is and to chip away at its shadow with truth, honesty, and integrity.  Admittedly, those three things feel in short supply right now (with AI threatening their very existence in today’s world).  But as an educator (and especially as a science teacher), I am here to tell you that we in the veracity-manufacturing business are still hard at work, doing our best to fight the fundamental root of all evil: ignorance.

And a partner in that fight is nuance—bringing me to a marvelous book I just finished entitled, The Light Eaters.  In it, the author, Zoë Schlanger, explores the latest science about our green friends, the plants—who, for those who don’t know this, literally build their bodies out of light itself and then pass that light onto us in the form of food—and near its beginning, Ms. Schlanger shares a sentiment both pertinent to this discussion and too beautiful not to pass on when she writes:  “the world we could have if complexity was not backgrounded was the world I wanted to live in.”  She then effectively invites the reader to join her in doing just that during the remainder of the book, and as I simultaneously processed both her book and the stupidity coming out of the White House, I began to realize that THAT was the root of all the overall awfulness of Trump’s actions (as well as those of any other petty tyrant): the “backgrounding” of the complexity of truth.

What’s more, I realized that this dismissal of truth’s fundamental nuanced nature is not only the foundation of Trump’s evil, it is also the source of its ultimate downfall.  Because reality is going to BE complex regardless of whether any human might wish it otherwise.  You can rip a brutal dictator out of his bed in the middle of the night, but doing so isn’t going to cause multinational corporations to suddenly risk billions of dollars in investments in a just-destabilized country.  You can invade and terrorize entire communities of people, even murdering some of them in cold blood, but you still cannot make the jobs the foreign-born fill any less central to our economy or any more likely to be filled by so-called “real” Americans.  You can even go on national television and bully the citizens of this country about the “affordability myth,” but you can’t make the price of groceries and housing come down with tariffs.  The bottom line is that everything the Trump administration does offers nothing but simplistic (and often simpleton) responses to complex situations, and the people impacted—including his MAGA political base—have only seen those situations get worse.  We are in desperate need of nuance.

Yet such a thing is challenging to find in today’s society, and before I address what we might do to change that fact, I do need to acknowledge first that I get the desire for simplicity; I truly do.  I know firsthand the deep psychological longing for simple, binary, black-white, on-off, arithmetic answers:  1+1=2; a2+b2=c2; plug in “x” and find “y.”  No need for the difficulty of adjusting one’s personal lifestyle or worldview.  No need for the complications that come with inconvenient truths such as climate change or human infidelity.  No need for the involvedness of truly “loving your neighbor as yourself.”  Nice simple solutions, and I can get back to my Netflix.

Life, though, (as I continue to repeat ad nauseum to anyone who will listen) is messy.  Always has been; always will be.  Even math, that ultimate arbiter of simplicity, gets messy once you reach calculus (I will never forget the class where I discovered that an integral could have more than one totally correct answer!).  Therefore, messy is simply “baked in” (just ask the quantum physicists), and no amount of apps or AI is ever going to remove all the messy from our lives (just ask the biologists).

Which brings me back why I write any of these essays—education.  If ignorance is the root of all evil, then teaching and learning about what is true and real is the ultimate defense for the good.  Furthermore, that teaching and learning can only lead to any good if it is messy and nuanced in its character and structure.  What I think that needs to look like is the fundamental point of this whole on-line project; so I’m simply going to steer anyone interested to actually read some of the chapters in my book to learn more about my concept of “authentic engagement.”  But for now, I conclude this particular set of musings by offering one possible interpretation of what I think Nancy Pelosi might have meant when she spoke the words in this essay’s epigram in an interview I once overheard:  messy and wounded are inexorably linked; so wherever possible, engage in messes where you can be proud of your inevitable injury. The wounds are how we show we cared.

References

Doyle, C. & Bansil, S. (Jan. 2, 2026) Paramedic Under Investigation for Explicit Videos Defends Urinating in Family’s Food.  The Baltimore Banner.  https://www.thebanner.com/community/criminal-justice/chris-carroll-baltimore-county-paramedic-XQODS6ZUQVH4TPPSCSUFNKBQSA/.

Fulghum, R. (1989) It Was on Fire When I Lay Down on It.  New York: Villard Books.

Schlanger, Z. (2024) The Light Eaters.  New York:  Harper Perennial.

The Future of ….

My original title for this essay was “the future of education.”  But if you’ll stay with me, you’ll see why I ultimately decided on the ellipsis, and why the potential future of education (at least in this country) led me to that choice.  It has to do with the fact that there are some serious challenges to teaching and learning in the United States right now (as well as significant chunks of the rest of the world) that have caught my recent attention and that have me pondering the future of all manner of educational practice moving forward.  Hence, it was time to take up my metaphorical pen and paper again to share my musings—as always in the act of hope that some might find them adding at least a degree of value to their own reflecting.

One of these challenges, of course, is the now ubiquitous one of digital technologies and their latest AI variants, and because I have already written so much on this particular topic, I simply invite anyone interested to visit my archive for those essays.  Today, my only addition to this subject is to share that while Australia had the courage to pass a law banning access to social media to anyone under the age of 16 over a year ago, it has taken my school nearly a year and a half of sometimes fierce debate among the faculty about well-researched brain science simply to finally collect students’ cellphones during the academic day.  American individualism at its finest!

No, the two challenges catching my interest in the past month both involve the intersection of demography and child development, and the first of these has to do with plummeting birthrates in much of the world’s developed economies.  Here in the U.S., for example, the number of babies being born annually has dropped below the replacement level of 2.1 children per couple, and while the environmentalist in me sings hosanna for the planet’s sake, the educator in me who lives in a capitalist economy recognizes the threat this poses to schools across the land.  In Maryland alone, the loss of more than 11,000 children from the public schools this academic year (an estimate that nearly tripled during the week it took to write this) has endangered funding in several of our counties, and the competition among the area private schools risks becoming cut-throat as institutions with sometimes literal centuries of existence struggle for butts in chairs.  Already, three such schools in my immediate area have shut their doors in the past five years, and even a Baltimore City public charter school with a 30-year storied history just announced its closure. 

Those are all lost jobs—as well as lost professional experience and wisdom—and the impact is likely only to exacerbate the teacher shortage already facing this country as the economic uncertainty confronting anyone thinking of entering the profession continues to grow.  However, for me, the saddest truth about these school closures is that they are lost opportunities for certain children to find their safe and successful learning “niche.”  My niece was never able to find hers, and it almost cost her her life; so I know firsthand how important the quality of a learning environment can be.  Shuttered and silenced classrooms leave gaping holes in any community, and in the coming decades, what is happening today will only be the beginning.  As Marguerite Roza, the director of Edunomics at Georgetown University puts it, “cratering birthrates will seriously remake education in the country”—and unlikely for the better.

But there is perhaps an even more insidious challenge presented by the contemporary link between demography and child development, and that is the impact of the current cost of early childhood education in this country.  Pre-K schooling for even a single child costs the typical family more than they pay for monthly rent in 17 of the 50 states, and nationwide, more than 60% of families cannot afford the kind of high-quality daycare so critical to developing brains.  We know now that age 0 to 5 is the most important stage of growth for the human brain—with impacts that last for the entirety of an individual’s lifespan—and we know equally well that maximizing this growth requires well-trained, highly attentive adults guiding the process, with more than just one or two such adults present (the “takes a village” cliché has some literal truth).  Furthermore, without this level of investment of adults in infants’ and toddlers’ lives, the quality of all future learning is compromised, and there is a direct correlation between a country’s investment in early childhood education and the PISA scores (the world’s gold-standard for testing academic progress) of their high school-aged children.

Yet if so much is at stake, why would our country not invest significantly in providing superior pre-K education—especially given the potential long-term economic benefits vs. economic costs? Part of the answer has to do with how our society has historically sought to use markets as the solution to so many of our social problems.  Economies of scale and technological innovation have lifted much of the world—and especially us—out of poverty and material want; so why wouldn’t they—the thinking goes—be able to solve any seemingly intractable problem?

However, you can’t increase productivity in the interactions between an adult and a 2-year old (the genetic limitations of both their respective attention-spans preclude it), and you can’t innovate a way to make a small child any less of a time-suck.  Hence, as Senior Fellow at the think tank Capita, Elliot Haspel, points out: the bottom line is that market forces are incapable of solving the need for well-trained, well-compensated adults “caring for and shepherding the brain development of [our] very young children.” 

What’s more, he argues:

that market failure makes childcare essentially a hot potato. No one has any incentive to do that work, and everyone has an incentive to dump that work downstream onto others who are more vulnerable than they are — from policymakers onto families, from fathers onto mothers in many cases, and not even just to mothers, but from mothers in more privileged positions onto paid care providers.

Simply put, no one wants to acknowledge that small children are expensive, demanding, and inconvenient and that all the proverbial “king’s horses” and all “the king’s men” can’t make this reality be otherwise.  Thus, we find ourselves today with either brain-drained, exhausted mother’s forced to stay at home (which the data is clear is not optimal for brain development either; again “the village”) or with families who already need two incomes to meet basic needs having to compromise those needs to pay for the childcare the second salary demands.

Which actually circles us back to the “cratering birthrates” as more and more adults are now deliberately opting out of having children simply because they cannot see how they can afford them.

Interestingly enough, our country once did provide nearly universal daycare for our smallest children.  During World War II, the need for women in the nation’s factories drove congress to pay for daycare centers across the country that cost those families the equivalent of $10 per day in today’s money (imagine only $3700 a year for childcare!), and staffing was not an issue because it was considered one’s patriotic duty to contribute to the cause.  However, once the war ended, the patriarchy reasserted itself, and so we find ourselves in the mess we have today, with parents of all varieties mortgaging their economic futures just to have families and American society enduring the largest collective drop in intelligence since the 6th and 7th Centuries in Western Europe.[i] 

It is challenging time to be a toddler in the United States.

And that’s the reality that compelled this latest round of writing and why I am pretty confident that anyone reading this can figure out the reason for my original working title.  However, to connect the dots explicitly: fewer children in schools is likely to lead to even less investment in education (both human and capital); less investment is likely to lead to lower and poorer quality education; and that is likely to lead to pre-K teaching and learning—if there even is any—that fails to adequately develop little brains to their optimal capabilities.  We are obviously still going to educate our children, but the character of that education and its results may not be what our society needs to thrive…or maybe even survive.

Hence, the ellipsis in my title.  The future of education isn’t just about what goes on in classrooms and schools, and it isn’t simply about what I and many others do for a living.  It is about the nature of the act of learning itself, and that means the future of education is the future of everything human.  What we learn as children—every concept, every skill, every thought—is the entire foundation of our adult lives, and as the author of the Gospel of Matthew wisely had Jesus say, that foundation can be one of rock or of sand.  Right now, I sense we are at a great tipping point in this country (and perhaps this world) where we still have the power to build on rock instead of sand.  But we are dangerously close to defaulting to the latter, and should that happen, then the author of Matthew is quite clear about the consequence:

The rain fell, and the floods came,
and the winds blew and beat against that house,
and it fell—and great was its fall!
—Matthew 7:27 (NRSV)

[i] As a total sidebar, I find it intriguing that in the era from 1965 to 2005, the productive adult brains of those war era babies with their subsidized daycare produced some of the most robust R&D, discoveries, and inventions in all of human history.  Hmm! Coincidence? Correlation? Or causation? You decide.

References

Bowie, L. (Nov. 24, 2025) Maryland Schools Lost Students This Year, Early Estimates Show.  What’s to Blame? The Baltimore Banner.  https://www.thebanner.com/education/k-12-schools/maryland-schools-enrollment-declines-C6FWKKHNYZH4DNJWAUOM4KLDGE/.

Griffith, K. & Richman, T. (Dec. 9, 2025) Maryland Public Schools Lost Over 11,000 Student This Year.  The Baltimore Banner.  https://www.thebanner.com/education/k-12-schools/maryland-public-schools-enrollment-drops-I7FPW6AIAJGNFDXFQDBMNMLME4/.

Kahloon, I. (Oct. 14, 2025) America is Sliding Toward illiteracy. The Atlantic.  https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/10/education-decline-low-expectations/684526/.

Kukolja, K. (Nov. 29, 2024) Australia Passes Strict New Social Media Bans for Children.  NPR All Things Considered.  https://www.npr.org/2024/11/29/nx-s1-5210405/australia-passes-strict-new-social-media-bans-for-children.

Lora, M. (Dec. 5, 2025) How a West Baltimore Charter School’s 30-year Legacy Collapsed in Months.  The Baltimore Banner.  https://www.thebanner.com/education/k-12-schools/new-song-academy-closed-charter-school-baltimore-NIBASIGPAZA6HJKTS3JDH2BSCU/.

Luse, B; et al (Nov. 24, 2025) Kids are Expensive.  Do They Have to Be? NPR It’s Been a Minute.  https://www.npr.org/2025/11/24/nx-s1-5617226/kids-are-expensive-do-they-have-to-be.

A Matter of Scale

To exist is to participate in an endless cycle
of neither creation nor destruction,
but redistribution.
—Zuyva Sevilla

I form light and create darkness.
I make weal and create woe.
I the Lord do all these things.
—Isaiah 45:7

In the late 1970s, videographers Charles and Ray Eames filmed a short, 9-minute  documentary exploring what it might be like to experience reality at a variety of different scales, from the subatomic to the cosmological.  This now iconic (and apparently trademarked) video, the Powers of Ten™, would become the gold standard in many a science classroom for teaching about the concept of magnitude, and for the tiny fraction of my readers who were never exposed to it during their school years or whose memories recall it only vaguely, I recommend a brief pause here to take a short cognitive detour to watch it before continuing.

Because “scale” very much informs this posting’s essay.

It started with the article I mentioned last time about black holes and the accelerating rogue stars shooting across interstellar space at 400 times the speed of a bullet.  Reading that, I couldn’t help but wonder at the enormous dimensions of time and distance this research was hinting at, and I also couldn’t help but think about how absolutely amazing it was that we have the time and resources to know such things and how absolutely utterly irrelevant this knowledge was, is, or ever shall be to the survival of any human that has, does, or will live. 

Unless, of course, we’ve not been looking at quite the right quadrant in the night sky with our telescopes.  Then, one of these hypersonic suns may very well plow into our solar system unbeknownst to us, instantly reducing every quark of matter from Mars to the Kuiper Belt into pure plasma.

But that’s sort of the whole point: everything we experience involves a degree of scale, and the character of that scale can change in less than the wink of an eye.  Take the kind of privilege I wrote about in Unbidden Thoughts:  while differences in economic status may impact how likely one is to engage in proactive civic action (i.e. I have the wealth to fight against Trump), widen the gap of that status enough and suddenly you have the storming of the Bastille—or in our case, potentially, the new, unfinished White House ballroom.  Or—using my other example of privilege from that essay—increase the degree of illiteracy enough in this country and all the AI in the world can’t prevent the consequent financial collapse (go read economist Paul Krugman’s substack if you want the terrifying details).

The bottom line is that matters of scale are all around us, and it behooves us (I know; a very “me” verb) to identify them, pay attention to them, and—ultimately—choose how they will guide our actions.  For example, at the scale of the Big Bang, the very process of evolution that led to an organism capable of understanding its own origin as a species is irrelevant and empty of all meaning:  our mere 80-year organized structure of atoms does not last long enough in a 15-billion-year sequence to count as even a fleeting moment. 

Heck, simply from the perspective of the Voyager probe’s famous “pale blue dot,” astronomer, Carl Sagan reminds us:

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there—on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

However, simply because we are an organism who can possess such a breadth of awareness does not mean that we can actually live at such scales.  At the very least, basic biological needs prohibit it—you have to eat, you have to sleep, and you have to excrete; all very immediate requirements of one’s attention.  Yet, precisely because we can possess a sense of scale well beyond these things, humans have a bad habit of forgetting the dimensions at which we truly do operate, insisting on striving for what is ultimately unattainable and making ourselves miserable in the process: like anyone, I can have a modestly meaningful life, but nothing I nor anyone else ever does will last at the scale our minds are capable of envisioning.

Acceptance, though, of this fundamental truth about our finite nature needn’t result in the anguished cry of Shelley’s Ozymandias—something my adolescent charges regularly and consistently forget as they persist in their belief that every test, every grade, every performance must somehow have life-altering consequence.  I can inform them all I want that when they are my age, they will not remember this academic moment at all, and that the brain science is clear that real learning only follows equally authentic failure.  But they possess neither the fully wired pre-frontal cortex nor the sheer quantity of dunder-headed adult moments to truly comprehend—let alone embrace!—what I am saying to them.  EVERYTHING means EVERYTHING to a teenager, and at best, I can hope that some of my offered adult outlook gets remembered at some future “Ah ha! THAT’s what he was talking about!” moment.

Yet this adolescent preoccupation with the “drama of it all” is, itself, a matter of scale.  And a very age appropriate one, too.  In fact, while I recall being as theatrical in my magnification of the state-of-affairs as the next teenager, the only two actual formal assessments (i.e. tests) I remember from my high school years are the Anatomy final at the end of my Junior year and the AP English exam at the end of my Senior one.  What’s more, the reason I remember these specifically has nothing to do with the weight of their impact on my life but because both situations involved highly intense emotions. In the case of the Anatomy exam, my best friend at the time had convinced me to see the midnight opening of The Empire Stikes Back, where we picked up a couple of the girls standing in line, and so I didn’t start studying for a 7:30 a.m. exam until 3:30 that morning. Meanwhile, at the conclusion of the AP English exam, one of my fellow classmates marched over to me and snarled in a voice drowning in vitriol, “THAT had to be hard even for YOU!”

As for the material content of either test? Nada.

Thus, at age 62 and counting, I am left with a fun, playful memory from my youth along with a somewhat painful, searing one—both of which simply reside with all the other electronic files buzzing around my synapse from a lifetime of emotionally intense experiences.  Again, a matter of scale: is the “I” my brain creates each moment simply the sum-total of my memories? Or are my memories simply a subset of what my brain uses to create “me?” Am I my fate or is my fate my doing? Or is it, perhaps, a little of both-and?

I ponder these things right now because in addition to reading about black holes and literal shooting stars I have also been reading some more Oliver Burkeman (whose work is dedicated to encouraging people to live at realistic scales and who has to have a playfully mischievous sense of irony that it will only take 4 weeks). And I have been doing all this reading while simultaneously living with the anxieties of the college admission’s process manifesting in most of my classes, a government shut-down (thankfully over for a while) that is leaving my neighbors threatened with starvation and no health care, and ICE agents terrorizing whole populations throughout the United States.  Add in the most stunningly beautiful fall foliage seen here in the mid-Atlantic in my memory, one of the best set-building crews my former colleague and I have ever had for the fall Musical, and my gratitude for meaningful employment, a secure domicile, and financial security and…OMGg! So many different magnitudes of scale for the brain to cope with that I can practically feel the cortisol and dopamine sloshing around inside my skull in mutual antagonism!

But again, that’s the point.  We all live at different scales all the time, and while the knowledge of genocides in Darfur, the Congo, and Gaza leave me simply depressed because there is little, directly, that I can do about them, I can ease my seniors’ distress about the next chapter of their lives; I can donate to my local foodbanks and organizations that fight injustice; and I can steward my gifts and my talents to impact my immediate world constructively.  I can engage in hope.

Which leads me to one final thought related to exploring Burkeman’s efforts to do likewise.  It was interesting to read his 28 essays (one for each day in a month) because while some of them brought fresh insights into how to handle the finitude of being human, others evoked moments of “been there; done that; already know it.”  And that got me to thinking about one of the most important scales of all for the individual: aging.  It turns out— I continue to learn—that some of life’s most significant understandings just come with growing older, and the extra twelve years I have on Burkeman are just enough for me to have found some of his ideas bemusing—in the same way I look at my current students and have to shake my head sometimes with a smile on my face, thinking “You’ll get it…eventually” while simultaneously feeling blessed to have seen so many former of them into adulthood to know that they do.

It is, after all, just a matter of scale.

References

Burkeman, O. (2024) Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts.  New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Plait, P. (Sept. 2025) The Black Hole Next Door.  Scientific American. Pp. 83-84.

Sagan, C. (1994) https://www.planetary.org/worlds/pale-blue-dot.

Srikant, K. (Feb. 26, 2025) Fact Check: Is there a consensus that a majority of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck? Econofact.https://econofact.org/factbrief/is-there-a-consensus-that-a-majority-of-americans-are-living-paycheck-to-paycheck.

Unbidden Thoughts

priv◦i◦lege (priv⸍’l) n.—a special right or immunity granted or available
only to a particular person or group; an unearned advantage

In my own highly imperfect way, I try each day to remind myself what my white, male, cisgender, heterosexual privilege “buys” me in our society—to recall how blessed I am to have my health, work that I love, and the economic stability to spend my evenings watching Netflix.  However, recently, I have had a couple of experiences that have caused me to view both my own individual privilege as well as the general inequitable distribution of it in our society in a whole new way, and the insights this has provided about the current political situation in this country have been illuminating.

The first incident occurred while I was walking to breakfast one Saturday morning and I encountered two men having a heated discussion over money.  I only caught about 30 seconds of it as I passed them on the sidewalk, but that was enough for me to know that the two men were acquainted enough for the one to loan the other money to cover some household expenses, that the loaner was in anxious need of being repaid to cover some of his own, and that neither of them were adequately employed to cover everything.  Indeed, I recognized the shirt uniform of a local grocery store on the loaner, providing me with a very realistic idea of his likely weekly income.  It was clear there was no danger of things escalating to physical violence, but it was also equally clear that the attentions of these men were wholly occupied with their financial dilemmas and nothing else.

That’s when the insight struck, unbidden: the economic realities of their lives pretty much precluded either of these men from having the time or energy—the luxury—of concerning themselves with the current political situation in this country.  Daily survival was consuming all their attention, and as Maslow wisely observed, until you have met basic physiological and safety needs, there are absolutely no additional inner resources for anything else.  Concerns about democratic norms and Trump’s authoritarian behaviors are meaningless white noise to someone apprehensively worried (if not panicked) about food, clothing, and shelter.

Now, I had never considered the notion that civic engagement might be a luxury—a privilege—but as I recalled an incident in my own early adult life where I made a very stupid financial decision that forced me to eat nothing but cooked white rice and unseasoned lentils for a month (and I wish I was joking or exaggerating), I realized that of course such engagement is a luxury! We can talk all we want about responsible citizenship, but as an individual, I or anyone else must have the additional resources beyond survival and safety before someone can literally afford to take on that responsibility.  As an affluent white male, I can express my outrage at the Trump administration all I want and as loudly as I want because my economic status more than meets my basic needs.  I have the privilege of being pissed off.

But that got me to wondering how many other people in our society find themselves in the same situation as the two men I encountered, and while the answer is, frankly, a “moving target”—some surveys have the percentage of households living paycheck-to-paycheck as high as 62%, some as low as 34%—the most conservative evaluations done by Jeffrey Fuhrer of the Brookings Institute identifies 43% of American households as unable to meet the benchmark of what he calls “the cost of a basket of basic necessities.”  In other words, for nearly half the families in the United States, their total monthly incomes do not cover the cost of paying for the fundamental necessities to meet Maslow’s physiological and safety needs.

Which means that a disturbingly high number of people in this country simply do not have the necessary luxury to worry about the fate of their immediate communities, let alone the fate of the nation or something as abstract as “democracy.”  Add in the fact that these individuals therefore also do not have the extra “bandwidth” to be sorting the disinformation and misinformation flooding their lives, and the state-of-affairs right now in our society suddenly makes a lot more sense to me than it did a couple of weeks ago: if you are truly a “have-not,” then the only “truth” that can matter is whatever enables you to be less “not.”

Granted, that may sound awfully cynical of me. But like I said, I remember my own beans-and-rice moment, and I know for a fact that I did not spend a lot of that month worried about the Iran-Contra Affair of the Reagan presidency.

Yet, what those in the MAGA movement might be more likely to accuse me of than cynicism is elitism, and that brings me to my other experiential insight of the recent past. Again, another breakfast.  Only this time, the unbidden thought came as I was reading an article about black holes.  Apparently, the gravitational well of the super black holes at the center of galaxies can slingshot actual stars through space at tremendous velocities, and in fact:

S5-HVS1 was the first confirmed such hypervelocity star, and it’s moving at more than 1,700 kilometers per second.  Feel free to take a moment to absorb that fact: an entire star has been ejected from a black hole at more than six million kilometers per hour [four orders of magnitude faster than the 4,200 km/hr of the fastest bullet]. The energies involved are terrifying (Plait, p. 84).

I learned further that the Large Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy orbiting our own has its own super black hole and is consequently effectively “shooting stars at us!”  Granted, the asteroids in our own solar system are far more problematic (ask the dinosaurs!), but still….

I know; I digress.  Back to my unbidden thought.  Or perhaps I should I say thoughts, plural. First, here I sat with the time and leisure to read something interesting that had no practical value to my physiological or safety needs.  Second, I also had the benefit of a level of education that enabled me not only to comprehend this article but to have the consequent and correlating cognitive capacity to parse and analyze the very threats to democracy and our social order that the Trump administration now presents.  In other words, I can be outraged at Trump’s actions because I can fully understand what the consequences of them are.  Again, I possess the privilege—of a different kind—to be pissed off.

Now, education should neither be a “luxury” nor a “privilege”—especially in a democracy!—yet sadly, the historical record in this country reveals that education has seldom been an absolute right for everyone in the population.  The closest we probably came was in the post-war years following WW2, with the GI bill and Brown vs. the Board of Education (along with some other curricular reforms such as “the new math”).  But even those efforts often faced heavy resistance or were not equitably distributed, and by the end of the school busing conflicts of the 1970s and the rise of the Reagan era in the 1980s, an unbiased, just, and equivalent education for “all” began once more to be a “right” of only the more affluent.

Not that there weren’t significant efforts to change this trajectory.  The “No Child Left Behind” and the “Every Student Succeeds Act” were national legislative efforts to improve America’s schools—as were the creation of the Common Core set of national educational standards for literacy and numeracy.  But, too often, the assessment methods of these efforts ended up being either punitive in character (with poor urban and rural school districts frequently taken over by state boards of education) or publicly unpalatable (the Common Core demonstrating how badly devolved critical thinking skills had actually become in the U.S.).  Thus, by the time of the pandemic, an equitable education for all in this country had been on a steady decline for over a decade, and even where it was happening (as Mehta & Fine demonstrated), the quality was at best mediocre.

And we all know what happened next.

Which brings me back to my unbidden thoughts of these past few weeks.  First, they are obviously correlated.  One’s level of education and one’s economic security go hand in hand, and so it should not be surprising to find so many people in our society dispossessed of the “privilege” of civic engagement—nor the rise in authoritarianism that comes with that.  Second, my newfound awareness that civic engagement is in any way or to any degree a privileged luxury that not everyone in our society has full, unfettered access to frankly horrifies me—it is not a truth I am thrilled or excited to learn.  But, third, now that I am aware of my additional privilege, it is incumbent on me to employ it as best as I am able to combat the negative changes I see today in our society, and I believe where I can do that best remains for now the classroom.

Moreover, the reason why I believe that this is true is because of the life and work of fellow educator, Paulo Freire.  For those not familiar with him, Freire revolutionized the teaching of reading in his native Brazil, empowering once illiterate farmers and dayworkers in his country to confront the authoritarian power structures of their day, and so successful were Freire’s efforts that he was exiled by the 1964 military junta.  However, the seed he planted remained, and a little over a decade later, he returned to his native land, where his literacy efforts would one day lead to some of Brazil’s first democratically elected governments.  Today, the power of that educational legacy remains, and Brazil’s democracy has recently survived (and imprisoned) its own Donald Trump. Thus, never doubt what the power of the written word and the education it provides can do.

Nor, for that matter, the power of those who can—and still do—read. I keep writing my hope for a reason.

References

Freire, P. (1970) Pedagogy of the Oppressed.  New York: The Continuum Publishing Company.

Fuhrer, J. (June 20, 2024) How Many are in Need in the US? The Poverty Rate is the Tip of the Iceberg. The Brookings Institute. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/how-many-are-in-need-in-the-us-the-poverty-rate-is-the-tip-of-the-iceberg/.

Mehta, J. & Fine, S. (2019) In Search of Deeper Learning: the Quest to Remake the American High School.  Cambridge:  Harvard University Press.

Plait, P. (Sept. 2025) The Black Hole Next Door.  Scientific American. Pp. 83-84.

Srikant, K. (Feb. 26, 2025) Fact Check: Is there a consensus that a majority of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck? Econofact.  https://econofact.org/factbrief/is-there-a-consensus-that-a-majority-of-americans-are-living-paycheck-to-paycheck.