Catechism and AI Revisited

This is the nature of the razor-thin path of scientific reality:
there are a limited number of ways to be right,
but an infinite number of ways to be wrong.
Stay on it, and you see the world for what it is.
Step off, and all kinds of unreality become equally plausible.
—Phil Plait

Two stories about artificial intelligence recently caught my attention. The first, out of the University of California, Irvine’s Digital Learning Lab, examined how successful ChatGPT could be at grading English and history essays when compared to an actual teacher. The second, an editorial about the AI revolution in general, exposited on the very practical and financial boundaries all AI technologies are rapidly finding themselves running up against. Together, I found these stories causing me to revisit some themes from my very first posting about AI, and as I reflected more on all of these items, some shared threads between the two stories rapidly became apparent that I want to discuss here today.

But first, a quick synopsis of each article.

In the story about grading, researcher Tamara Tate and her team sought to compare ChatGPT’s ability to score 1,800 middle school and high school English and history essays against the ability of human writing experts to do so. Their motive was to see if ChatGPT could help improve writing instruction by allowing teachers to assign more of it without increasing their own cognitive load. If, for example, teachers could use AI “to grade any essay instantly with minimal expense and effort,” then more drafts could be assigned, thereby enabling the quality of student writing skills to improve.

What they found was a lot of variability, with ChatGPT’s scores matching the human scores between 76% and 89% of the time, which Tate summarized as meaning that ChatGPT was “roughly speaking, probably as good as an average busy teacher [and] certainly as good as an overburdened below-average teacher. [But that] ChatGPT isn’t yet accurate enough to be used on a high-stakes test or on an essay that would affect a final grade in a class.” Furthermore, she cautioned that “writing instruction could ultimately suffer if teachers delegate too much grading to ChatGPT [because] seeing students’ incremental progress and common mistakes remain important for deciding what to teach next.” Bottom line, as the title of the article states, the idea “needs more work.”

In the editorial about the AI revolution, technology columnist, Christopher Mims makes the strong case that the pace of AI development is hitting three walls: a rapidly slowing pace of development, mounting prohibitive costs, and what I will call the productivity boundary. In terms of development, Mims points out that AI works:

by digesting huge volumes of [data], and it’s undeniable that up to now, simply adding more has led to better capabilities. But a major barrier to continuing down this path is that companies have already trained their AIs on more or less the entire internet, and are running out of additional data to hoover up. There aren’t 10 more internets’ worth of human-generated content for today’s AIs to inhale.

As for costs, training expenses are in the tens of billions of dollars while revenues from AI are, at best, in the billions of dollars—not a sustainable economic model. Finally, the evidence is mounting that AI does not quite boost productivity the way its evangelists have touted because “while these systems can help some people do their jobs, they can’t actually replace them.” Someone still has to check for AI hallucinations, and “this means they are unlikely to help companies save on payroll.” Or to put it another way, “self-driving trucks have been slow to arrive, in part because it turns out that driving a truck is just one part of a truck driver’s job.”

Which brings me back to why I think these two articles share common threads of thought and what made me revisit my original posting about AI. Both articles obviously point to AI’s limitations, and the grading one is simply a specific example of the “productivity boundary” Mims discusses. Both articles have a cautionary tone about AI being the be-all-end-all solution to “all life’s problems” the way its many proselytizers want to claim it can be, and the grading one even brings up the economics of AI as it warns about schools jumping on the proverbial bandwagon and purchasing AI grading systems too quickly.

But it was the analogy of the truck driver that caused all the metaphorical gears in my head to click into place. English and history teachers don’t just teach writing, and when they grade the writing, it is not just the quality of the writing they are grading. They are not “just driving the truck.” I am confident that ChatGPT could be a marvelous tool for catching run-on and incoherent sentences or for catching disorganized paragraphs and poor thesis statements, and if using it for that would enable an already overburdened teacher the chance to get a few additional drafts for an essay accomplished in their class, I’m on board. The only way you get better at writing is to write.

However, what ChatGPT cannot catch (and here is where I suspect at least some of those discrepancies in the percentages found in the grading research come from) is the quality, the originality! of thought and ideas that a given piece of writing expresses. Only the human teacher can do that because only the human teacher has actual intelligence as defined by biology: the capacity to use existing knowledge to solve an original, unique, and novel problem. No AI can solve a problem it hasn’t already seen—which is part of what Mims hints at with his remark about “10 more internets;” only a human mind could create them—and that is why we will still need the human teacher to do the final grading.

Which brings me back to some of the themes I first addressed in Catechism and AI. In looking back at that essay (where I first wrote about this misuse of the word “intelligence” in computer science), I realized that what the technological breakthroughs since then have made possible is the deepening of the illusion of intelligence. Once something like ChatGPT could be trained on the entire internet, pretty much every prior human answer to a problem was now part of the algorithm, and so when you present it with a problem that is novel to you, it appears like it can solve it on its own. It appears intelligent. And since problems truly novel to everyone who has ever lived grow exponentially fewer each day, AI can appear intelligent quite a bit of the time.

However, present it with a problem that is novel to both you and the AI and suddenly you get one of those hallucinations Mims points out you need an actual human to fix. That remains the limitation of AI: it cannot handle the truly novel, the genuinely unique. Nor can it create it. As I’ve written before, AI may be capable of producing a mimic of a Taylor Swift song, but it cannot produce an actual Taylor Swift song. The challenge is in remembering that the mimic isn’t really Taylor Swift.

Again, here is where the technological breakthroughs since I first wrote about AI have deepened the illusion. The content generated by AIs such as ChatGPT may look novel because that particular arrangement of words, images, etc. happens to look novel to you. But somewhere, at some time, some human mind already put those same words, images, etc. together; some human mind created. And you are just now on the receiving end of a tool that we can now train on what every human mind has created to date for the past 10,000 years. The ultimate catechism! And a lot of prior human creativity with which to fool someone. We see a parallel in the development of the performance of magic shows: one hundred years ago, we only had the technology to create the illusion of a woman sawn in half; forty years ago, David Copperfield has the tools to make the Statue of Liberty appear to disappear. None of it is any less illusory; it just gets harder to tell.

And where that fact may grow increasingly problematic is in the realm of another theme from my earlier writing: interpersonal relationships. When I first wrote about AI five years ago, Her was only a movie; now it’s a reality. For a monthly subscription, I can have the AI companion of my choice (romantic, platonic, and/or therapeutic), and have “someone” in my life who will never push back on me. Add DoorDash, Amazon, and Netflix, and I could spend the rest of my life once I retire (or get a work-from-home internet job) in my own solipsistic bubble without any need for any direct human contact ever again. Not gonna happen as they say, but the fact that I can write those words should be sobering (and shuddering) to anyone reading them. Because if we are ultimately successful at reducing our most basic humanity to an illusion, climate change and the next pandemic are going to be the least of our concerns.

Yet if Christopher Mims is correct, then AI may rapidly be approaching its illusory limits, and if Tate and her crew are correct, then watchful use of AI may help teachers give their students more practice improving their writing skills—and therefore their thinking skills—while not adding to their grading loads. So perhaps there is cause for optimism. The key, I think, is always to remember that the “I” in AI is—at least for now—a biological falsehood, and what I now realize was missing from my earlier work on AI is the necessary emphasis on novelty being at the core, the essence of what it means to be intelligent. That doesn’t mean the CS folks may not eventually pull off an algorithm that truly can create. But for now, we do not live in that world, and we just need to keep reminding ourselves regularly of the reality of that fact.

References

Barshay, J. (May 20, 2024) AI Essay Grading Could Help Overburdened Teachers, But Researchers Say It Needs More Work. KQED/Mind Shift https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/63809/ai-essay-grading-could-help-overburdened-teachers-but-researchers-say-it-needs-more-work.

Mims, C. (May 31, 2024) The AI Revolution Is Already Losing Steam. The Wall Street Journal. https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/the-ai-revolution-is-already-losing-steam-a93478b1?mod=wsjhp_columnists_pos1.

The (Hand)Written Word

Every time you invent a technology,
you also invent a responsibility.
—Aza Raskin, Co-founder
Earth Species Project

As someone who does a lot of thinking, values thinking, and does quite a bit of thinking about thinking, it can be hard sometimes to look at the general state of thinking in our society and not become demoralized. When 20% of voters believe President Biden is responsible for ending the constitutional right to abortion in this country, it can look like the conspiracy theorists have won. When a third of those aged 18-29 are getting 100% of their “news” from TikTok, it is little wonder that half the nation remains convinced that the unemployment rate is the highest it has been in 50 years (despite being at a near record low). And when we have people forming intimate relationships with AI companions rather than fellow human beings (at great risk to your national security it turns out), it can simply feel like it is time to toss hands in the air and start researching survivalist bunkers on-line.

Furthermore, adding fuel to all this has been one of my classes this academic year in which I have observed almost no collective intellectual growth from last September to today—something I have never witnessed in my now 35-year career. And lest I be accused of subjective bias, I am not alone in this empirical observation; the grade-level dean and others at my school are concerned by what we have failed to see happen over the past 9 months in so many of these students’ courses.

With one exception: math. Math classes have all seen growth—sometimes simply COVID recovery—but growth nonetheless and across the board at all levels.

Why?

My hypothesis is based on an observation. There were, of course, individual exceptions in my class in terms of growth over the year, and when identifying what both the act of learning math and these individual growth exceptions have in common, it is one thing: writing by hand. My students in my biology class that grew intellectually over the year completed all their work by hand—just as they would have had no choice but to do in their math courses; you can’t readily manipulate equations on a screen.

The science behind my hypothesis is pretty solid and grows with each new study. We have known since 2014 from research done at Princeton University that students who take notes by hand do demonstrably better on tests than student who only type their notes on a laptop. But recently, using fMRI to perform brain scans, we are discovering what is actually different in the brain between handwriting and typing and why writing by hand is so central to better learning outcomes. For starters, handwriting produces significantly higher levels of electrical activity across many more interconnected brain regions than typing does—perhaps most significantly in the motor cortex. While typing and handwriting both employ movements in your hands and fingers to generate words, writing by hand demands significantly more communication between the motor cortex and visual cortex, engaging the brain more deeply as it must constantly align each finger’s position with the mental models of the letters and words being written. Put simply, as neuropsychologist Audrey van der Meer says, “when you are typing, the same simple movement of your fingers is involved in producing every letter, whereas when you’re writing by hand, you immediately feel that the bodily feeling of producing an A is entirely different from producing a B.”

The implications for younger children are profound. Those, for example, who learn to trace out the alphabet by hand have significantly better and longer-lasting recognition and understanding of words, which when combined with the improvement in memory and recall handwriting produces, leads to better reading skills—the very foundation of all education. As van der Meer puts it, “if young children are not receiving any handwriting training, which is very good brain stimulation, then their brains simply won’t reach their full potential”—with all the scary possible long-term consequences that can come from that. It is, perhaps, why several states are passing laws to require handwriting lessons again in elementary schools and why California is going so far as to require training in cursive once more.

But it is not just the youngest who benefit from writing by hand. Having laid a foundation of literacy through the handwritten word, older children and adults who continue this practice have a better understanding of whatever material they are studying because the act of writing by hand causes the brain to engage with said material more intensely (their brains are literally working harder at the task). Thus, note taking with pencil, pen, or stylus (it is the physical motion that counts) leads to significantly richer, deeper learning as well as better memory formation and recall, and it is why, though I compose using a keyboard, I still always outline my thoughts for these essays by hand:

It is the only way I can assure that I am presenting my best thinking.

Which brings me back to my class that doesn’t seem to have demonstrated any collective growth this year and a world in which good thinking seems in short supply. I have watched for over a decade now as many individuals—and especially my students—have increasingly off-loaded cognitive tasks to their digital devices (taking a picture of something, for example, rather than trying to remember it), and I am left wondering if we have not reached a critical tipping point in that process. Yadurshana Sivashankar of the University of Waterloo in Ontario reminds us that “if we’re not actively using these areas (those involved in these cognitive tasks), then they are going to deteriorate over time, whether it’s memory or motor skills,” and my ah-ha moment with this particular class came when I recently had them correct a quiz in my presence rather than as homework. Instead of looking back at their notes to work out what they had done wrong, nearly all of them simply googled their questions and wrote down verbatim what appeared on their screens. It was not about learning from mistakes (or learning at all, for that matter); it was about completing a task and checking off a “to-do” box.

Well, that is something I can try to change as an educator. Starting next year, no more off-loading. Just a really, really big supply of paper, pencils, and pens, and a lot of higher quality thinking. Together, we’ll all write by hand.

References

Campbell, R.M. (Dec. 2023) “AI Chatbots Could Weaken National Security.” Scientific American, pp. 73-74.

Glueck, K. & Corasaniti, N. (May 28, 2024) Eyeing Trump, but on the Fence: How Tuned-Out Voters Could Decide 2024. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/28/us/politics/trump-biden-voters.html.

Hu, C. (May 2024) Hand-on: Writing by Hand Comes with Learning Benefits. Scientific American, p. 13.

Lambert, J. (May 11, 2024) Why Writing by Hand Beats Typing for Thinking and Learning. NPR. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2024/05/11/1250529661/handwriting-cursive-typing-schools-learning-brain.

Mueller, P. & Oppenheimer, D. (April 23, 2014) The Pen is Mightier Than the Keyboard: Advantages of Longhand Over Laptop Note Taking. Psychological Science. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0956797614524581.

Plait, P. (Dec. 2023) “Conspiracy Theories Then and Now” Scientific American, pp. 80-81.

Some Disheartening Developments

If you have raced with men on foot
and they have worn you out,
how can you compete with horses?
If you stumble in safe country,
how will you manage
in the thickets by the Jordan?
—Jeremiah 12:5

Despite what my title might suggest, today’s essay is not about the educational costs of the pandemic. I have already written extensively about that topic (see the LoC Archives page for anyone interested), and if you want the most recent data, I suggest checking out the NYT’s article available in the references. In fact, the only thing I will lift up about the latest findings is that we now know that all the school closings had nearly zero impact on slowing the spread of the virus; we could have kept them open and avoided nearly all of the learning damage.

No, what I want to focus on today are some recent developments in the world of education that are worth bringing to everyone’s attention because as I ended my last posting pointing out: we are all in this together. So here goes.

The most recent item to cross my attention was an article this past week about the expense of repairing the educational costs of the pandemic, as well as the—yet again—absence of political will to address it. As all Marylanders (and my regular readers) know, our state has recently legislated and initiated a massive 10-year, eventually $3 billion dollars per year education reform movement called the “Blueprint for Maryland’s Future.” In it are requirements to expand public Pre-K schooling for all children ages 3-4 and to provide all schools with high-quality and diverse educators (with an emphasis on National Board Certification). In addition, there are requirements for preparing students for college and career readiness, more resources for low-income students, and the necessary governance and accountability programs to oversee the entire effort.

However, in a state already facing a teacher shortage of 2,000 unfilled positions and now facing a projected revenue shortfall of $255 million dollars in the coming fiscal year, teachers and educational leaders are currently being asked to triage their biggest challenges in implementing the Blueprint before the process has even started. Here we are, in one of the richest states in the richest society in the history of humanity, and we are already shorting the necessary investment in our children because no one wants to state the obvious: you get what you pay for, and in this case, that means additional taxation—America’s “third rail” in politics.

Not that Maryland is alone. The same morning that I read the Blueprint article, NPR had a story on the negative impact that losing the $190 billion dollars in pandemic emergency relief funds from the Federal government will have on schools across the nation. As John Gies, a high school principal in rural Ohio put it, “while those pandemic dollars are running out, the problems the pandemic exploded, like missed learning and a student mental health crisis, are still here…we just really need some help from the government.” Help that all interviewed for the story openly acknowledged is not likely to come, leaving reporter Cory Turner musing at the story’s end:

So what happens now? It seems unlikely that Congress will be in the mood to agree on even more funding for schools. Which means in the coming months, districts across the country will face some hard choices about whether they can afford to keep giving students all the help they need.

All the help they need. Need. Not “help-full.” Not “beneficial.” Not “useful.” Need. As in necessary, critical, vital to their well-being. I know I have written before about how fundamentally anti-child our society is, but as both these news items came to my attention this past week, I was reminded once again of a quote of Barbara Kingsolver’s that bears repeating here: “if it takes a village to raise a child, our children are knocking on a lot of doors where nobody seems to be home…where we seem to regard children as a sort of toxic-waste product: a necessary evil” (pp. 102 & 100). Until we see our children in a different light than we currently do, then we will reap what we sow, and right now, I fear we are sowing our own dissolution.

And we seem to be doing so in more ways than one when it comes to what’s happening in the world of education. Another recent item in my in-box was Jessica Grose’s op-ed about a middle school in California where students have employed AI technologies to manufacture false pornographic photos and short videos of their female classmates by taking head shots from existing, decidedly non-pornographic on-line photos and combining them with nude photos and videos from other sources. Of course, the students involved then shared these digitally constructed items with others—making them a permanent part of the lives of both the victims and the victimizers (as well as violating numerous laws)—and all because these children don’t yet have pre-frontal cortices developed enough to know how truly stupid, irresponsible, and harmful they have been. Yet legislation at any level can’t seem to get out of even committee to put guardrails on such technology, let alone simply acknowledge the danger it poses—especially the threat to our children’s very capacity to become healthy adults.

Not that all adults in children’s lives are themselves of sound and rational mind. While we might consider as “sins of omission” the failure to adequately fund schools across this land and to protect developing minds from digital technologies that trigger the same neural pathways as cocaine does, the actions of Escambia County in Florida (home to Pensacola) most definitely could be considered “sins of commission.” There, elected officials have taken upon themselves the “obligation” to “protect young minds” from such “dangerous material” as the following: The American Heritage Children’s Dictionary, Webster’s Dictionary for Students, and Merriam-Webster’s Elementary Dictionary. All of which have now been removed from every school library in the county and placed into storage along with “eight different encyclopedias, two thesauruses and five editions of The Guinness Book of World Records.”

Fortunately, some sanity still exists in Florida, and two parents in the county—yes, 2! out of a population of 322,390 as of the 2021 census—have joined in a lawsuit against the county school board to return these alleged “hazards” to their schools’ libraries. Hopefully, as Heidi Stevens puts it, “the children of Escambia County [will soon] once again [be] allowed to look upon words.” But even more importantly, they will hopefully be allowed to learn that “definitions are not the enemy. Dictionaries are not the enemy. Thesauruses are not the enemy. Encyclopedias are not the enemy. Knowledge is not the enemy” (my emphasis). What is the enemy is ignorance, “and it should go without saying, but apparently it doesn’t: A child is far better served looking up a word—any word—in a dictionary than typing that word into Google, where a world of images, videos and misleading garbage awaits” (Stevens).

Which brings me to my last disheartening development of the past few weeks. This one is strictly anecdotal, but I do not think that makes what happened any less compelling. It was during one of my scheduled meetings with my advisory, and we were playing Pictionary as a way of unwinding right before spring break. It is a favored game of ours, and to make it a little competitive, I divide the group into two teams, with the winning team allowed to decide which confectionary treat I bake for them—which is itself an inside joke because the winning team always chooses my lemon bars—but nevertheless, they can still get quite competitive about it.

Well, on this occasion, the competition was a little more intense than usual, and both teams were trying to pick particularly challenging words for the other to draw. Or more accurately, they were googling on their phones for challenging words to use, and when I saw the terms they were picking, I was stunned. These are 10^th graders, most of who are at least 16 years old, and they were needing an on-line search engine to find words that were part of my basic vocabulary by the time I was in 5^th grade—vocabulary that I was expected to know and assessed for by the time I was 12. I knew my students of the past decade were not developing the same long-term memory storage banks as in the first two decades of my career, and I had seen the practical consequences of this reality in my classroom. But here, that ignorance—and the degree of it!—was staring me existentially in the face in a way it never has before, and the despondency that settled over me for the rest of the day was profound.

However, it was not my final outcome, nor can it ever be. No matter how disheartening the recent developments in schools, none of us in our society can afford to ignore them nor to be ignorant of them. Anyone who has read my project updates since their inception in the spring of 2020 knows that I regularly use these essays in part to process the realities of teaching in the 21^st Century, in part to share these realities to challenge others to action, and in part as an act of hope. The truth is: dispelling the darkness is never easy. But if we do not know the nature of its current character, we cannot know what type of flame to bring to the task. Thus, if any of this essay’s revelations have sparked a response in you, I encourage you to determine how you can fan it into a fire to light your own way forward.

I will keep offering these reflections to keep fanning mine.

Coda

Since I first drafted this essay, two things have happened that bear on it. The first is the tragic collapse of the Key Bridge into the Baltimore harbor. In addition to the pain of the families who lost their loved-ones that morning will come the economic pain that will reverberate in my adopted home for years to come. The region is losing $15 million dollars a day in revenue for every day the port remains closed, and even once re-opened, the impact of rerouting over 10 million cars and trucks annually will be felt for at least a decade (one woman interviewed shared that her commute is now an hour longer, and she will not be alone). The new reality is that in a state already struggling with how to pay for school reforms before this catastrophe, that $255 million shortfall is going to look like a pittance.

Yet, amidst this tragedy, I received an e-mail from a former student of mine from the class of 2010, informing me that her lab team was just selected to build the seismometers going with the astronauts to the Moon on the Artemis III mission in 2026. She was writing to thank me (as well as another friend and former colleague), and in her own words, “you both are the most influential teachers I have had over a *very* long time spent in school, so I wanted you to be the first of my non-space community to know other than my parents. Thank you for getting me here, even if it has been a while. :)”

Now, I do not wish to suggest that these two events are even remotely on the same scale. However, I share them because together they are intimate reminders that life’s journey is fundamentally the paradox of BOTH tragedy AND triumph, and if we spend too much time consumed with one or the other, we lose the necessary balance to navigate our “4,000 weeks” successfully. The same is true of teaching; if I cannot find ways to harmonize the heartening with the disheartening, I lose the ability to engage authentically in the classroom. It is a lesson worth relearning; it is a lesson worth remembering.

I suspect the same could be said of us all.

References

Grose, J. (March 2, 2024) A.I. Is Making the Sexual Exploitation of Girls Even Worse. New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/02/opinion/deepfakes-teenagers.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare.

Haidt, J. (March 13, 2024) End the Phone-Based Childhood Now: The Environment in Which Kids Grow Up Today is Hostile to Human Development. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/03/teen-childhood-smartphone-use-mental-health-effects/677722/.

Kingsolver, B. (1995) Somebody’s Baby. High Tide in Tucson: Essays from Now or Never. New York: HarperCollins.

Mervosh, S.; Miller, C.; & Paris, F. (March 19, 2024) What the Data Says About Pandemic School Closures, Four Years Later. New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/18/upshot/pandemic-school-closures-data.html.

Price, L. (March 20, 2024) School Leaders Outline Effort: Implementing Blueprint Law is Going to be ‘Herculean’ Task. The Baltimore Sun, pp. 1-2.

Schmitz, R. (March 19, 2024) Standardized Test Scores for Teens in Germany are Down. Teachers aren’t Surprised. NPR Morning Edition. https://www.npr.org/2024/03/19/1239388574/standardized-test-scores-for-teens-in-germany-are-down-teachers-arent-surprised.

Stevens, H. (Jan. 21, 2024) Now Dictionaries? Do Better, Grown-Ups. The Baltimore Sun (Life & Travel), p. 6.

Turner, C. (March 20, 2024) The $190 billion in Emergency Funds Given to Schools During the Pandemic is Ending. NPR Morning Edition.https://www.npr.org/2024/03/20/1239609135/the-190-billion-in-emergency-funds-given-to-schools-during-the-pandemic-is-endin.

The Good Teacher

We have committed what to the republican founders was the cardinal sin:
we have put our own good as individuals ahead of the common good.
—Robert Bellah

We can defend whatever image of man we choose to defend.
—Norris K. Smith

In their book, The Good Society, Robert Bellah and his team followed up their ground-breaking research about the negative impacts of unrestrained individualism in our society with a presentation of a case for how we as Americans might once again live more in accordance with the republican values argued for by our Founders—values in which the benefits of personal freedom are not found at the expense of the common good. They, like Alasdair McIntyre in After Virtue, make similar arguments that what has gone missing from our society today is a shared understanding of the purpose of communal life and an absence of the internalized personal qualities needed to achieve this purpose. Bellah, et al do not use the actual language of “telos” and “virtue” as McIntyre does, but a teleological understanding of what it means to be a good society and the character needed to achieve it inform their entire case.

I share all this because as I have thought about how I want to make my case from last time that we humans have some common—even transcendent—conceptions of what living a good life entails, I have come see that I may need to follow a similar path in my arguing. I inherit the language of “virtues” and “purpose” and “ends” from thousands of years of human thought, and while it jerks this Kantian’s chain to do so, I find myself needing to employ some pseudo-Aristotelian elements in my argument. Just didn’t want any of my readers with formal training in philosophy to suddenly go “Hey! Didn’t he say he’s an anti-Aristotelian??” and simply dismiss me as a hypocrite.

Okay. Enough digressing. What I want to do today is to explore the nature of the “good,” starting with a narrow lens and working my way out from there, and therefore, I want to start with something I am intimately familiar with and to examine: what makes the good teacher? I’ve clearly written plenty about what I think constitutes good teaching, but what about the character of the individual doing it? In the language of Aristotle, what virtues must one possess to achieve the end, the telos, of being a good teacher? I want to identify three (though I think there are more), and I will explore them individually to try to make my case. They are: integrity, courage, and compassion; so let’s start with integrity.

First, when I use the term “integrity,” I am employing it in its fullest meaning—not just the notion of accurate, honest, and truthful but the concept of having a fully integrated self—and I employ it that way because one of the fundamental tasks teachers have to do nearly every second of every moment in the classroom is to judge other human beings. From grading to classroom management to disciplining, teachers are judging those in their care nearly nonstop, and if a teacher does not have the self-reflective capacity that comes with a fully integrated sense of self, they cannot recognize those moments when they have mis-judged.

Which is, second, why I claim integrity is one of the virtues of the good teacher. Not only do all those judgements need to be made as accurately, honestly, and truthfully as possible, the reality is that when they are not (or are made poorly), that fact needs to be recognized immediately and the necessary steps taken right away to repair a now broken relationship. Because all the research shows that the quality of the teacher-student relationship directly determines the quality of the learning occurring; hence, without integrity, a teacher cannot provide the best environment for student success.

The next virtue I am suggesting is “courage,” and again, I mean it in the fullest sense of the word—everything from bravery to resilience to resolve. Effective teaching involves determination, caring, vulnerability, and appropriately intimate rapport, and as a co-learner, it involves risking and making mistakes, not always knowing an answer to a question, and other similar moments of exposure to the judgement of others. Furthermore, on a pragmatic note, the profession also involves long hours for subpar renumeration compared to similar levels of training, as well as these day enduring the proverbial “slings & arrows” of education’s stakeholders (we do not get a lot of respect from society at large). Yet again, though, it is all about the quality of the teacher-student relationship, and if an educator cannot find the courage to put their best self into that relationship, learning suffers. It is with much reason that renowned educator, Parker Palmer, titled his magnum opus, The Courage to Teach.

Finally, I want to argue that the good teacher has the virtue of compassion—also meant in the fullest sense of empathy, kindness, and forgiveness. I believe that they must have this virtue because to know others truly as we ourselves are known requires love. Without love, the trust children need to risk willingly withers, and without willful risks, growth and change are simply not possible. Hence, the good teacher loves their students and seeks constantly to draw out in their students the power and strength to create the meanings that will surpass the teacher’s, and it is therefore in this gift of loving that the strongest teacher-student relationship can arise and the very best learning can occur. Without compassion, fully effective education just doesn’t happen.

However, the same can be said of a lot of human activity, and that is my ultimate point. Place the word “good” in front of almost any descriptor of a human—good coach, good waiter, good person—and the qualities of integrity, courage, and compassion are central to our understanding of their goodness. Indeed, I suggest that what all those millennia of crowd-sourcing I referenced in my last essay have determined to be true is that integrity, courage, and compassion are intrinsic a priori to any human understanding of the “good.”

Take compassion. Variants of the Golden Rule are found in every religion, culture, and philosophical tradition on the planet. Or integrity. A social species may or may not be able to survive without it (though probably not for long without it), but as countless civilizations that have risen and fallen have empirically demonstrated, such a species will never thrive without it. Courage, of course, is the tough one on my list because synonyms of the word have regularly been associated heavily with militaristic roles and behaviors. Yet even there, I would suggest that the historical moments of nonviolent resistance have demonstrated what true courage actually is and have even regularly evoked the virtue of compassion in others (images such as those from the Edmond Pettus Bridge on Bloody Sunday helped make the success of the Civil Rights movement possible).

Which brings me back to where I left off the last time I wrote. I made the claim that humans have determined that to live a good life is our telos, and that certain qualities of what that means—a life of integrity, courage, and compassion—are transcendent. You can decide for yourself if I’ve now made good (no pun intended) on the second claim; therefore, I want to conclude by turning my attention to the first one, that the good life is our telos.

But to do that I first need to remind us that the original Greek word as understood by Aristotle was that anything and everything has an ultimate end or purpose and that you cannot understand an object or a structure without discerning what this end or purpose is. A hoe, for instance, has the ultimate purpose of cutting soil in a particular fashion, and the difference between Aristotelian teleological thinking and modern teleology is that Aristotle thought that this telos was inherent to the hoe itself, baked in to the very essence of its structure. A hoe could literally not be a hoe without its telos.

Well, humans can literally not be humans without making meaning. Our brains are genetically hardwired to take our sensory input and add narrative to it. And as I argued last time, billions of minds over millennia of millenniums have regularly, consistently, and continually constructed the narrative—made meaning—that the ultimate purpose of being human is to live a good life. Thus, if something innate to our very nature keeps doing the same thing, I want to suggest that maybe we’re on to something after all.

Why then, though, has our society seemingly either abandoned this telos entirely or reduced it to the isolated “my good life?” This is where the critiques of Bellah, et al and MacIntyre hold up a powerful mirror for us to learn from, and we fail to pay attention to them at our peril. All virtues, of course, are aspirational, never fully achievable. But if we stop aspiring—as the minute by minute news barrage would seem to indicate too many of us have already done—then we are in real danger. As Bellah and his team put it in The Good Society:

We have never before faced a situation that called our deepest assumptions so radically into question. Our problems today are not just political. We have assumed that as long as economic growth continued, we could leave all else to the private sphere. Now that economic growth is faltering and the moral ecology on which we have tacitly depended is in disarray, we are beginning to understand that our common life requires more [of each of us]… and if [individual] power is our only end, the death in question may not be merely personal, but civilizational (p. 295).

I plan to hold up my end of the proverbial bargain and keep striving to be a good teacher who seeks to help their students learn how to be human well, and I am confident that many of my fellow educators will continue to do likewise as well. But we are going to need some allies.

Any takers?

References

Bellah, R., et al. (1991) The Good Society. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Bellah, R., et al. (1985) Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, Ltd

MacIntyre, A. (1984) After Virtue, 2^nd Ed. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.

Palmer, P. (1998) The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher’s Life. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

The Inner Journey

The sun rises and the sun sets,
and hurries back to where it rises.
The wind blows to the south and turns to the north;
round and round it goes, ever returning on its course.
What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun.
—Ecclesiastes 1:5-6, 9 (NIV)

What are the conditions
that might make it possible for us to operate
at a modest level of prophetic inspiration,
to bring a daily beauty to our lives,
sustaining to ourselves, our students,
and our communities?
—Mary Rose O’Reilley

If you have read even elements of Part I or Part II of this project of mine or followed any of my updates since I finished the body of my e-book in the spring of 2020, you know that I have focused nearly 100% of my attention on either discussing how to improve what takes place in our classrooms or examining the very pragmatic challenges we confront in education today. Only rarely have I addressed some of my personal motivations for why I teach or spoken about the teaching sojourn itself.

Yet I find myself struggling this school year with one of my classes in ways that I have not had to in a very long time—which is both proof-positive that you never fully master this profession and a humbling reminder of my own “work-in-progress” as an individual even after six decades of existence. Granted, the value of so many years (both in and out of the classroom) is the insight that this is not my first time feeling utterly ineffectual with a group of students nor am I likely to fail to have some modicum of positive impact on some child under my care (I must never forget Mark!). However, what those decades of insight also bring is the recognition that it is possible to “stay too long at the party.” Effective teaching requires authentic engagement, and authentic engagement demands: embracing the role of co-learner; appropriately intimate rapport; and a thorough understanding of the neuroscience of the brain. And it doesn’t matter how good you may be at any one of them individually, without all three, the “stool” doesn’t stand and genuine learning doesn’t happen.

Which is what I find myself wrestling with right now. I cannot seem to generate the necessary rapport to generate the necessary investment on the part of a group of my students, and what I’m not sure about at this moment is whether I’m simply dealing with a situational issue or a generational one. If the former, I can accept a transient failure. Those moments of loss are painful and to be fought against at all costs. But my finitude can never be completely overcome, and I have had and will have classes where I perform inadequately in my keystone niche as the teacher. Sin is real, and I will not succeed with every class or every child I encounter during my career.

However, if the issue is a generational one, that gives me greater pause. In a world where many in the younger generations openly prefer an AI chatbot for a romantic partner—and get upset when software updates alter their “significant other” (oddly enough simulating what can happen between actual human beings)—I don’t know that I have the cognitive tools to develop appropriately intimate rapport anymore. Nor do I think I would want the tools that might be needed today. As was once wisely observed, “the ‘secrets’ of good teaching are the same as the secrets of good living: seeing one’s self without blinking, offering hospitality to the alien other, having compassion for suffering, speaking truth to power, being present and being real” (O’Reilley, p. ix). None of which are possible in the zombified digital realm that seems to consume today’s young (and, in fairness, many of their elders as well).

The simple truth is that I choose not to live unable to read a map, perpetually terrified of FOMO, attending to conspiracy theories, and addicted to a screen. Yet in doing so, am I making it no longer possible to relate existentially to the realities of my students in the ways needed to develop authentic engagement’s required rapport? For example, for decades, I deliberately listened to their music because I knew the connections it could bring. However, for the last five years, I have been unable to bring myself to do so because I cannot find the tolerance within me to expose myself to something I find totally banal and empty of all meaning. Has my own personal journey, therefore, reached a relational wall through which I can no longer construct a door?

I wish I had an answer to that question—it is obviously part of my conundrum—yet what truly unsettles me about the current situation is the memory it stirs of my grandfather. He and my grandmother acquired a VCR sometime in the late 1980s (the recall of how alludes me), and I remember my dad trying to show my grandfather how to program it to record TV shows. To which my grandfather firmly declared, “NO.” At nearly 80, he had simply reached the end of his willingness to learn yet-one-more-thing in a lifetime that had started before most homes in this country had plumbing and which had eventually witnessed humans on the moon and space probes taking pictures of Neptune. He was done, and he was okay with being done.

Have I, I wonder, reached a similar moment in my teaching? Have I reached the point of “done” with the generation of students now entering my classroom? That is what I find myself struggling to resolve, and it is a disquieting experience as anyone who has read my work can well imagine. On the one hand, the wisdom of Ecclesiastes reminds me not to take my challenge with this one class too seriously; as my maternal grandmother oft said, “this, too, shall pass.” On the other hand, the wisdom of Mary Rose O’Reilley reminds me that “it’s impossible to hear a subtle call if you do not create a conscious time to listen to it” (pp. 43-44); so what might I not be hearing that I should be?

One answer, of course, is that it is perhaps my disquiet itself to which I should be listening. The fact that I have kept trying to connect with this class, one thing after another, attempting to breathe life into what feels daily like a black hole of ennui, is probably indicative that I am not “done” in the way my grandfather once was. If I did not care, I would not be so dissatisfied with my efforts to educate this collection of students. Hence, maybe I need to “cut myself a little slack,” as they say, and accept that working my hardest this year is simply going to have to be the best I can do with this group for this year.

And I think I would be okay with that if not for the fact that I am not experiencing this challenge with my other courses. I’m co-learning, rapporting, and neurosciencing just fine with my juniors and seniors, and in fact, on my course evaluation this past week for my Genetics class, one of my students—in response to my query “what is one thing you would never want me to change about this course?”—replied “you as the teacher.” Hence, I am clearly engaging authentically with at least a subset of the population at my school; it’s just the 9^th grade which is proving so intractable this year.

Which pivots me back to the generational question. Ninth graders have been my area of expertise for nearly my entire career. Indeed, for 14 years on the 9^th Grade advisory team at my former school, my friend and Grade Dean, Paige and I would jokingly refer to ourselves as each new class’s “mom & dad.” Therefore, finding myself alienated from a group I have historically been so effective with as an educator is dispiriting and begs for an answer to “why?” that has so far alluded me this year. I do recognize that I could simply be struggling with the learning fallout from the pandemic (this specific group would have been in Middle school throughout it), and I recognize that I may just not have fully evolved and adapted my teaching toolkit yet to meet such a need. But that recognition doesn’t make it any easier to watch still another attempt to generate the conditions for meaningful learning in this class fall short, and I cannot avoid wondering what in this situation am I missing? And how does that “what” need to inform my future as a teacher?

The school year, of course, is not over, and I am too much the scientist not to finish collecting all the data before coming to any final conclusions. Furthermore, those same decades of insight mentioned earlier also remind me that this is not my first time questioning whether I should still be at the “party,” and it is unlikely that it will be my last. Again, it is when I am no longer having this internal dialogue about my capacities as a teacher that I should probably be bringing the journey to an end.

Until then, I have another lesson to plan.

References

O’Reilley, Mary Rose (1998) Radical Presence: Teaching as Contemplative Practice. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Publishers.

Plait, P. (Dec. 2023) Conspiracy Theories Then and Now. Scientific American. Pp. 80-81.

Campbell, R. M. (Dec. 2023) AI Chatbots Could Weaken National Security. Scientific American. Pp. 73-74.

The Pulse (Jan. 5, 2024) Virtual Worlds, Virtual Lives. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2024/01/05/1200586530/virtual-worlds-virtual-lives.

More Random (?) Thoughts

We know that the quality of parenting is critical to the educational outcomes of children and that in fact, it is the single greatest influence on their overall academic progress. Indeed, so important is the quality of parenting to individual student success in schools that neuroscientist John Medina argues that courses in what he calls “authoritative parenting” should be offered by school districts to enable parents to be better at their job in order for schools to be better at theirs.

Yet even so-called “authoritative parents” can have their blind sides, and that, in turn, can affect how well their child is learning. Which is why I was disturbed to read recently that 90% of parents of school-aged children in this country currently believe their child is working at grade-level. Given that reading scores on national assessments are down 6%, math scores down 12%, and half of all students in this country have been identified as behind grade level in at least one subject, there is clearly a serious and concerning disconnect between parental perceptions and academic realities—with all the attendant consequences for our efforts in schools to recover fully from the pandemic (see my The 2023 State of Education for a full accounting of the pandemic’s impact so far).

However, while this parental blind spot disturbs me, it does not surprise me. For well over a decade now (and long before zoom school brought parents into their children’s classrooms), polling has regularly shown parents decrying the state of education in the United States, adamant that our schools are failing today’s youth. Yet when asked about their own child’s specific school and/or district, their thumbs are always firmly up. It’s almost like a reverse NIMBY: the quality of my child’s education is just great; it’s everywhere else that’s a mess.

Zoom school may have changed that, though. Many a parent of early elementary aged children was inadvertently introduced to the pedagogical “reading wars” going on in American education, frequently discovering to their horror that their third grader couldn’t read after all. Others experienced the impact of the digital divide on their child’s school and, consequently, on their child’s learning, and still others found themselves banding together into small pods of kids, learning that they could provide both centralized instruction and the appropriate social development without the constraints of any form of institutional regulation. The result of all of this has been that as many as 20% of children in any given district have still not returned to their former schools—with all the negative impact that has had on school funding—and what’s more, there has been a revolution in the home-schooling movement as the pod idea has led to the creation of what are essentially mini-schools of 10 to 20 families, allowing for what home-school advocates argue is the best of consolidated teaching with individuated learning.

Where, then, does all this leave us as a society? The potential problem with parental ignorance of their own child’s learning loss is that when a real loss is genuinely identified, there may be resistance to addressing it properly. Given the power of parenting over teaching, that could result in a failure to adequately remediate, and consequently, we could have some portion of our population who never fully cognitively recover from the pandemic’s impact on their learning (which is going to happen anyway, but let’s not allow parental blindspots to make it worse). As for the impact of the “reading wars,” I’ve already addressed that in my post, Sound It Out, and with the digital divide, both the federal and state governments have finally started addressing the issue through the BEAD program, allotting nearly forty-three billion dollars for states to use to expand their internet access to underserved regions and populations (in fact, Maryland just revealed its plans for its share of the funding a little over a week ago).

Which leaves my random thinking focusing on the drop in school attendance and the rise of mini-schools within the home schooling movement. These thoughts actually have me more concerned than the parental blindspots about their child’s grade-level progress because our traditional schools are struggling enough already without finding themselves underfunded due to decreased enrollment. Just recently, for example, the Baltimore County Public Schools announced that they have endured 100 resignations since early August, and even my small school has abruptly lost two teachers this academic year due to economic need. The profession is hemorrhaging educators right now, and it is in no small part due to salaries that do not compete with the employment opportunities available to individuals with comparable skills and academic backgrounds.

But what concerns me even more about this increasing move away from traditional schools is the greater threat this transition presents to what Jonathan Rauch has called “the republican virtues”—those common values and ground-rules for public discourse that make shared democracy possible. Independent of the potential for actual physical and psychological danger these unregulated mini-schools pose for the children attending them (I am fingerprinted and my institution accredited for a reason), they also contain the potential for spreading one of home schooling’s greatest weaknesses: the possibility of children learning contorted and misinformed understandings about the world without any external curb or check. Granted, home schooling (whether for liberal or conservative motives) has always run this risk of creating a biased view of the world. But now, with these mini-schools making it easier for more parents to leave traditional schools for the echo-chamber of their choice—because they can still earn income while someone else home-schools their child—the opportunity to avoid being challenged by a pluralistic worldview only increases.

And without that challenge, the intellectual diversity so critical to healthy public discourse can die. Hence, my concern at the spread of this mini-school movement is that the potential for disengagement from participating in a shared common reality becomes possible for an even larger segment of our population since its advocates have found a work-around to what has traditionally been the primary limit to home schooling—its economic cost. Yet, that’s where things get even crazier as the mini-school participants have started lobbying statehouses for the equivalent of “vouchers” to start paying the instructors at these schools. They are arguing that since they are not sending their own child to traditional schools, they should be able to use those tax dollars to support their home-schooling efforts instead. Therefore, we now have an entire educational movement in this country devoted to creating unlicensed, unregulated, and unsupervised private schools paid for by the state.

Could education in this country get any more dysfunctional?

It turns out the answer is “yes.” The one disadvantage I have when writing during the school year is that while I’m trying to wrap up one essay, I read yet another news story during the week, and the one I came across this past Thursday makes my concerns about the mini-schools seem positively quaint. You can imagine my reaction when I read about a school in Louisiana—Springfield Preparatory School—where for $465, you can simply purchase an accredited high-school diploma without taking a single course of any kind. Moreover, you can do this because apparently:

unlike public schools, formal homeschooling programs or traditional private schools, nearly 9,000 private schools in Louisiana don’t need state approval to grant degrees…[consequently] a list of prices is taped to the front window of the school building: $250 for diploma services, a $50 application fee; $35 for a diploma cover and $130 to walk in a cap and gown at a ceremony… [moreover] there is no way for the government to verify safety, quality or even whether a school exists [because] by law, the state does not have oversight over the unapproved schools (p. 8).

Wow. The educational standards in at least one state in this country have sunk so low that the dangers and expense of illiteracy and innumeracy can simply be ignored and glossed over for the cost of a TV, allowing the woman at the center of this story to buy a diploma as “her ticket to better paying work,” even though, having been kicked out of high school, she possesses few if any of the skills said diploma claims she should have. If the citizens of Louisiana ever wonder why they rank dead last in economic performance in the United States, they might want to look in a mirror.

Coda

I need to conclude by being clear that I do not think home schooling is an inherently bad way to educate a child. I have known and taught some highly educated, deeply thoughtful and self-reflective individuals who were home-schooled, and there are some excellent home-schooling networks with guidance (and even some oversight) by state departments of education. However, I do think it is a hazardous way to educate every child, and when 1.2 million students are no longer in traditional schools, I think the risks of those hazards increase. It is why I plan to start paying attention to the lobbying efforts of the Home School Legal Defense Association and others like them after learning what has happened in Louisiana. I want people earning diplomas that mean something—both for themselves and, even more importantly, for their communities.

Because the quality of a society depends directly on the quality of education it provides its children, and that is not a random thought.

References

BroadbandUSA (2023) Broadband Equity Access and Deployment Program. National Telecommunications and Information Administration. https://broadbandusa.ntia.doc.gov/funding-programs/broadband-equity-access-and-deployment-bead-program.

Lurye, S. (Nov. 30, 2023) Diplomas $465, No Classes Required. The Baltimore Sun. https://digitaledition.baltimoresun.com/html5/desktop/production/default.aspx?&edid=d8b1c9d5-06ab-453e-b33d-f33caa3ac8b3.

Ma, A. (Nov. 15, 2023) Many Parents Unaware When Kids Fall Behind at Grade Level. The Associated Press. https://apnews.com/article/school-report-card-test-score-poll-755cc4b52f5c7946f28207ab07fd5794.

Meckler, L. (Aug. 17, 2023) For Many Home-Schoolers, Parents are No Longer Doing the Teaching. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/interactive/2023/homeschooling-microschools-pods-esa-vouchers/.

Medina, J. (2018) Attack of the Teenage Brain. Arlington, VA: ASCD Books.

Mullan, D. (Nov. 23, 2023) Teachers Union Asks District to Negotiate Amid Resignations. The Baltimore Sun. https://digitaledition.baltimoresun.com/html5/desktop/production/ default.aspx?&edid=6177b45c-15ad-4325-8fb9-a02b484c2fd6.

Office of Statewide Broadband (2023) Maryland State Plans for BEAD and Digital Equity. Maryland Department of Housing and Community Development. https://dhcd.maryland.gov/Broadband/Pages/StatePlans.aspx.

Rauch, J. (2021) The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press.