The Impact of Character

Character is your capacity to prioritize your values
over your instincts.
If personality is how you respond on a typical day,
character is how you show up on a hard day.
—Adam Grant

This past month, an interesting statistical analysis came across my digital desk. In it, Harvard economist and MacArthur genius grant recipient, Raj Chetty, studied 11,000 students in 79 schools in Tennessee in the late 20th century and discovered that he could predict the degree of economic success that these students achieved as adults entirely by looking at how experienced their respective kindergarten teachers were when these teachers taught them. The more experienced the teacher, the higher the adult salary, and “by age 25, students who happened to have had more experienced kindergarten teachers were earning significantly more money than their peers”—on average $2,000 more annually in 1990s dollars—and over the course of a lifetime, these now-former students would go on to earn an additional $320,000 more than peers who had had less experienced teachers at this same age (Grant, p. 8).

Yet, as organizational psychologist Adam Grant of the Wharton School points out—whose work brought this study to my attention—“most adults hardly even remember being five years old. Why did kindergarten teachers end up casting such a long shadow?” (p. 9).

The answer, it turns out, is character development. More specifically, it is four character skills that Grant in his own work has elaborated as:

Proactive: frequently initiates questions, volunteers answers, and actively self-engages in learning outside of the classroom;
Prosocial: the classic “works and plays well with others;”
Disciplined: pays attention and resists disruptive impulses; and
Determined: consistently takes on more than assigned, seeking challenging problems and persisting in the face of setbacks

Moreover, Grant identified these four skills explicitly because Chetty’s data from follow-up studies showed that “the capacities to be proactive, prosocial, disciplined, and determined stayed with students longer—and ultimately proved more powerful—than early math and reading skills” (p. 9). In fact, 2.4 times as much when it came to predicting adult income!

Now the idea that an individual’s character plays a major role in their success as a learner is nothing new. Journalists such as Paul Tough and researchers such as Angela Duckworth have been reporting on the power of character in the learning process for decades, and the concept of “grit” features regularly now in teacher training and professional development (almost to the saturation point of risking being cliché). But what the latest examination of character is bringing to the forefront is the role one’s environment plays in its development. Or as Grant states it: “people who make major strides are rarely freaks of nature. They’re usually freaks of nurture” (p. 6).

Which is where the character of schools comes into play. It turns out that individual “grit” is not quite enough; the nature of the learning environment itself (what Grant calls “scaffolding”) is also critical. This is especially true when it comes to evoking the power of growth mindset in students. I have written before about Carol Dweck’s pioneering research in this area, but recently, she has:

demonstrated that a growth mindset alone does little good without scaffolding to support it. Rigorous experiments with over 15,000 students reveal that nurturing a growth mindset among high schools boosts their grades only when their teachers recognize their potential and their schools have cultures of embracing challenges (Grant, p. 132).

In other words, to optimize student learning, simply promoting growth mindsets in your students is not enough. You also have to have school environments where the underlying assumption is that all students have significant cognitive capability waiting to be nurtured and where the driving value is that all students deserve weighty intellectual challenges to foster this ability.

However (and it is worth quoting Grant extensively here), too often in this country our school environments are:

built around a culture of winner take all. We assume that potential is rooted primarily in innate ability that shines through early. As a result, we value demonstrated excellence—which leads us to adopt practices geared toward identifying and investing in students who show obvious signs of brilliance. If you win the [cognitive speed] lottery, you’re rewarded with special attention in gifted-and-talented programs. If you’re branded as slow, you might be forced to repeat a grade and endure a lasting blow to your self-esteem. And if you win the wealth lottery, it’s easier for you to attend the best schools with the best teachers; your peers from poorer families face an uphill battle (p.159).

Yet this prevalent reality in America’s schools brings me back to an important feature of Chetty’s original research. The students in it had already been randomly assigned by the State of Tennessee’s Department of Education to the 79 schools he studied and, further, randomly assigned to which teacher they had in those schools. Thus, the kindergarten teacher effect Chetty observed was just as true in the low-income schools as it was in the high-income ones.

Therefore, what I would like to suggest is that the character of the teacher was ultimately what was playing a role in the character development of those students who were studied by Chetty. Moreover, my reason for this suggestion is because by year 15 in this profession, the majority of us in our careers have realized two things: what we teach is what it means to be fully human (the discipline or subjects are just the vehicle) and every child can learn to do that. Of course, the key word here is “majority” because the sad reality is that anything over 50% is, by definition, a majority, leaving some individual schools—and even some school districts—with significant populations of even experienced teachers still embodying the “winner-take-all” approach (or worse).

Yet, that brings me to another feature of school environments so critical to nurturing the four character-skills Grant describes: the quality of relations between the teachers. Research has shown that the amount of relational trust among the adults in a school community determines how well students learn, and since “trust is influenced by the conclusions we draw about our colleagues’ intentions” (Aguilar, p. 102), schools where the adults believe everyone has bought into a culture of high expectations and high support (what Zaretta Hammond calls “warm demanders”), the students thrive. Where such by-in and its consequent trust are missing, “students are being negatively impacted” (Aguilar, p. 101).

What, though, determines the quality of the adult relationships in a school? If the child’s character skills depend on the experience of the teacher and their classroom environment and this environment’s and that teacher’s character depend on the school’s adult culture, then at the apex of this developmental hierarchy, I would argue, is the character of the leadership chaperoning this entire process. Good leaders, of course, listen to the collective voices of all stakeholders (from children and parents to faculty and custodial staff), anticipate the community’s wants and needs (as well as potential pitfalls and opportunities), and guide all of their charges in the completion of the school’s mission. They oversee the character of the school itself and, thus, the nature of the characters that develop under its roof. Indeed, the very best leaders help generate that character, informing it and continually reforming it through the voices of the community.

However, as Adam Grant points out, leadership exists along a continuum, with “weak leaders [silencing] voice and [shooting] the messenger; strong leaders [welcoming] voice and [thanking] the messenger; [and] great leaders [building] systems to amplify voice and [elevating] the messenger” (p. 196). I would add a fourth leadership descriptor somewhere between “weak” and “strong”—call it “stable”—where voice is simply heard and its messengers merely acknowledged, and I would add it because I think the majority of leadership in most institutions is this stable kind where adequate is normally enough.

But we live in a world right now—especially in education—where “adequate” isn’t and where, simultaneously, the research of Chetty and Grant remind us why the need for strong, exceptional leadership in schools is so important for the futures of our children. I wish I had a clear solution to offer, but that is a work-in-progress for me. Thus, for now, I simply have to keep reminding myself of the wisdom of education coach, Elena Aguilar’s words: “you can’t get mad at people for their areas for growth” (p. 198).

References

Aguilar, E. (2018) Onward: Cultivating Emotional Resilience in Educators. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Grant, A. (2023) Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things. New York: Penguin Books.

Hammond, Z. (2015) Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

Kaser, J., et al. (2013) Leading Every Day: Actions for Effective Leadership, 3^rd ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

Tough, P. (2012) How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character. New York: Mariner Books.

“Reading Is Fundamental”

Reading is the basic skill for all subjects.
If you don’t have the motivation to read,
you can’t study any other subject.
—Kari Louhivuori,
Finland’s Council for Creative Education

A teacher’s task is not to ensure
that students have read the literary canons.
It’s to kindle excitement about reading.
—Adam Grant

Recently, I was eating breakfast at a local café when the thought occurred to me that all of us at the surrounding tables were actively bouncing up and down as the earth beneath us continuously flexed. And no, the seismic activity wasn’t strong enough to be felt; I was simply struck by the insight that between the earth’s rotation and the sloshing of the tectonic plates, that the ground beneath my feet is never actually rigidly solid. We live on the equivalent of a bucking bronco operating at such slow speeds that the only time we ever do notice is during the abrupt acceleration we call an earthquake. But the quaking? It’s happening everywhere on our planet’s surface all the time.

As for what triggered this unbidden thought, I was, of course, reading—in this case about seismometers in Antarctica—and as all reading does, it generated thinking and that thinking in turn generated a new bit of knowledge (at least new for me). Indeed, so critical to human cognition are reading and its corollary, writing, that we Homo sapiens have been attempting to design and construct these formal systems for the transmission of complex thought since at least 40,000 years ago (see Mogensen). Moreover, once we did successfully invent reading and writing, civilizations arose, and when we figured out via the printing press how to make the written word available to everyone, the intellectual explosions of the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and the rest of the Modern Era became possible. Having repurposed the necessary neural circuitry, our collective intelligences blossomed in kind.

Which brings me to a very interesting—and probably highly significant—correlation between reading habits and population IQ levels. Namely, the more people read, the smarter they test on such “gold standards” of general cognitive assessment as the OECD’s international PISA test and the U.S. NAEP’s “Nation’s Report Card.” What’s more, the correlations can be quite dramatic.

For example, during most of the first decade of the 21^st Century, the country with the highest PISA scores in the world was Finland and other countries rushed (legitimately but that’s another topic) to study what the Finnish educational system was getting right. But starting in 2006, this nation’s PISA scores steadily dropped for more than a decade in every domain the test assesses. Meanwhile, “compared to 2000, in 2018 the average Finnish teen was spending 77 fewer hours a year reading for fun” (Grant, p. 174). Interesting, no? Furthermore, since American reading habits were even more abysmal during this time, with “students’ enthusiasm about reading [continuing] to wane year after year” (Grant, p. 174), it should come as no surprise that the U.S. has consistently produced some of the lowest PISA scores in the world.

Yet, among 9-year-olds in this country, there is growing evidence of improving IQs (see Moyer) at the exact same time that reading scores on the most recent NAEP assessment improved significantly. Some of this, no doubt, is because more and more states have embraced using the science of reading in their elementary classrooms, but the correlation between reading habits and general cognitive ability persists—in this case, in a positive direction—and I think we ignore that at our peril.

Because while every good statistician and scientist knows that correlation does not equal causation, this is one situation where the brain’s hard-wired bias towards focusing on the negative should be used to our advantage. The assumption that reading more causes IQs to go up and that reading less causes IQs to do down is the safer evolutionary bet because should the correlation prove spurious, the worst that has happened is that people spent some additional time reading; while if the causal link eventually proves true, current dominant reading habits make us fish in the proverbial barrel for authoritarians and con artists alike.

Therefore, find ways to promote reading in your communities; model it for your children and grandchildren by reading with them and in front of them; make time for students to do it in your classrooms with books of their choosing (since the research is clear that doing so makes them more passionate about reading). And remember that “intrinsic motivation is contagious; when students talk about the books that light up their imagination, it crystallizes why they love them—and gives others the chance to catch that enthusiasm” (Grant, p. 175). So don’t just read; find ways to communicate what you are discovering with others and help the children in your lives do likewise.

Because the ultimate IQ booster is teaching what we’ve learned to others. It is called the tutor effect, and one of the most fascinating examples of it is with the firstborn in families. The oldest child consistently displays a slight cognitive edge over their younger siblings (even when the research controls for socio-economics, parental education level, family size, etc.), and even “only children—who get the most undivided attention—test as less bright than firstborns with younger siblings” (Grant, p. 134; original emphasis). Simply put, having a built-in group of “pupils” gives firstborns the necessary environment to grow their IQ just a bit more than those who come after them.

Unless, of course, those younger siblings are more avid readers. After all, to the most well-read goes the most IQ spoils.

References

Grant, A. (2023) Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things. New York: Penguin Books.

Mogensen, J.F. (May 2026) Ancient Lexicon. Scientific American. Pp. 14-15.

Moyer, M.W. (April 2026) The Kids Are All Right. Scientific American. Pp. 36-41.

Planning Backwards

I wisely started with a map,
and made the story fit.
—J.R.R. Tolkien

There is an old joke in the Jewish tradition that goes something like this: A celebrated rabbi on his deathbed has his students lined up by seniority to pay their respects. The rabbi signals to his most senior disciple and whispers to him, “life is like a river.” This piece of alleged wisdom is dutifully transmitted down the line until the most junior among them at the end has the naïveté to ask what that means. This query is then passed back up the line to the dying rabbi, who upon hearing it replies, “All right, so it’s not like a river.”

Insert polite chuckle. Because I never really laugh at this joke. But the educator in me does always smile in self-recognition because not only have I been the rabbi, but also the senior disciple, the naïve junior, and the entire line in between. When I started in this profession, I copied handouts on a mimeograph machine, submitted my grades on physical paper, and used the dedicated landline in the teacher’s lounge for personal phone calls. The future internet was still under construction, and email was an exotic feature only employed by those in academia and other research fields. What personal digital technologies there were involved cathode-ray monitors and CPU units the size of footstools, and I would teach more than a decade before one of these devices—singular!—was actually available for use in my classroom.

My, have things changed!

Today—to state the obvious—nearly 100% of humanity walks around with the entire internet in their palms 24/7, and our legal system is confronting the need to determine if certain forms of the digital realm have enough agency to be held criminally liable. In fact, so ubiquitous has computing technology become to almost every facet of daily life that we have had to invent terminology to reference those of us born prior to its eruption (digital immigrants) and those born afterward (digital natives).

I bring all this up—and use the term “eruption” deliberately—because as I was enjoying an adult beverage with a friend of mine recently, I had one of those insights that frequently trigger my next round of writing, namely the eerie parallels between when laptop computers erupted upon the educational landscape and the current explosion of AI in that same landscape. In both instances, the change came rapidly, even abruptly; there was little forethought given, with the positivity of the change assumed; and the unintended consequences for the brain produced significant disruptions to the learning process. In other words, those of us in education found ourselves in reactive rather than proactive mode.

Which admittedly fits with our national character. We have a long history in America of chasing the horse after it has left the proverbial barn (including our entry into nearly every war we have ever participated in), and our libertarian tendencies have made even clearly rational and obvious regulatory policies happen only after enormous numbers of people have died or been injured (think seat-belt laws and bike helmets). Granted, some things we have no choice but to react to rather than to anticipate (the scientific field of chemistry was not advanced enough at the time to grasp the impact of the industrial revolution on the world’s climate). However, we Americans have a bad habit of taking such laisse-faire to extremes, and our employment of technology in the classroom has been no exception.

Yet what if we resisted our cultural tendencies and actually started deliberately planning what we wanted to see happen with the latest technological revolution? What if we asked the “should” question even if our anticipated answer was already a default “yes?” There is in education a concept known as “backward planning,” and its essence is that only if we start with the educational target fully fleshed out and predetermined can we figure out all the intermediate steps that will lead a student successfully from novice to expert. By analogy, if my goal was to ascend Mt. Kilimanjaro, I should first ask what will I need to navigate the final alpine zone to reach the summit. Oxygen tanks? A certain number of days of acclimation? Then to reach those alpine altitudes, what will I need to navigate the temperate region of the mountain? Sleeping bags? Rain gear? Hence, as I descend backwards down the mountain in my mind, I plan for all that I will need to start my ascent at the bottom and achieve my goal. If I simply traveled to the base of Kilimanjaro and began hiking, it is highly unlikely that I would ever see its peak.

Too often in education, though, it is this latter approach that frequently dominates much of the teaching that occurs in schools, and nowhere is this truer than when it comes to the employment of technology in the classroom. I remember well the introduction of one-to-one laptop programs where each student now had their own personal device, and the question asked was not “what are our educational targets?” but rather, “how can we use these computers in as many ways as possible to justify their expense?” Some of us rebelled and kept planning backwards anyway, employing the new tool only in ways that helped us reach our educational goals. But not everyone did, and the learning suffered accordingly.

Of course, now the new tech-in-town is AI, and again, the response has been “what do we do with this?” rather than “here’s what we seek to achieve; how can this aid us in doing that?” Granted, most of us in schools would state that education’s target is empathetic critical thinkers who can communicate and collaborate effectively, and AI would appear to actively inhibit anyone developing any of these traits. But my point is that if you don’t take the right approach to asking the questions in the first place, we’ll never know. Perhaps—in the same way that laptops made libraries of knowledge accessible anywhere 24/7 (an advantage to any learning environment or educational goal)—there may be a role for AI in achieving education’s purpose. But we won’t know one way or the other without examining its use through the lens of backward planning.

A theme some colleagues and I intended to explore this summer; so I’ll keep you posted.

Coda

As a sidebar, I think it worthy to note that right now, the latest reactionary approach to technology in schools is an openly antagonistic one. The mounting evidence available about the negative impact of all manner of screens to the learning process has produced a nearly universal cry to ban cellphones, smart watches, tablets…the list of digital “outlaws” grows daily.

But as sympathetic as any of my regular readers knows that I want to be to this trend, the current process is no less reactive than the original introduction of all those screens into classrooms in the first place, and there are already potential problematic consequences. Many of our children with certain disabilities actually need laptops, etc. in order to learn at all, let alone successfully. Hence, our current rush to throw out all this technological bathwater threatens to take some people’s literal babies with it.

Yet, that leaves me pondering the fact that both the barndoor-horse and the baby-bathwater allegories are classical, uniquely American idioms about our reactive cultural tendencies. So apparently—to paraphrase the Apostle Paul—we can see rather clearly in the mirror after all; we are just either unable or unwilling to fix what we see.

Maybe we should map out a plan for that. Or we can keep doing this, broadcast the morning I had scheduled this essay for posting: Teacher Poll on AI in Schools.

References

Bechard, D.E. (Feb., 2026) AI Coding a Dyslexia Tutor. Scientific American. P. 22.

Mehta, J. (June 4, 2026) Screens Are Leaving Schools Fast, Though Some Students With Disabilities Rely on Them. NPR Morning Edition. https://www.npr.org/2026/06/04/nx-s1-5812850/screens-schools-students-with-disabilities.

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/.

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.

The State of Engagement

How we spend our days, is, of course,
how we spend our lives.
—Annie Dillard

As anyone reading my most recent essay will recall, one of the major factors Harvard Researchers Jal Mehta and Sarah Fine identified as inhibiting deeper learning in America’s schools is student disengagement. Children today, especially adolescents, have difficulty seeing the point of school, and as authors Jenny Anderson and Rebecca Winthrop point out in their book, The Disengaged Teen, who can blame them: “kids witness the world around them—wars, social injustice, climate change, disinformation, technology that can write novels and counsel on heartache—and wonder why on earth they have to learn the Pythagorean theorem” (p. xiii).[i] Include the fact that only 4% of them report experiencing the deeper learning discussed in my last essay (or the deeper teaching promoted by this project), and life in schools can seem not only pointless but mind-numbingly dull as well (which might explain why 75% of them report cheating regularly).

The simple truth is that:

[Our] young people, hungry to learn and grow, overwhelmingly associate school with apathy and stress. Trapped in buildings that feel like prisons (teens’ words, not ours), they are stressed out by a weird combination of competitive pressures and insufficient stimulation, and they develop a frustration that fuels a pervasive lack of meaning in their daily existence (p. xiv).

Indeed, sixty percent of young people today report having no sense of meaning or purpose in their lives, and 44% of those ages 18-25 report feeling that they do not actually matter to another person!

That’s terrifying. What’s more, it should alert every fully grown adult in our society to the realities of today’s youth and set everyone on a course to rectify this situation. But how? In a world where many of those same fully grown adults are experiencing almost as much ennui, dismay, and hopelessness as their children, how do we bring meaning, purpose, and caring back into young peoples’ lives?

One possible answer is what Anderson and Winthrop propose in their book. These authors rightly observe that it is not literal disengagement that is happening in our children’s lives but rather the mode of engagement they are participating in that is impacting how they perceive both school and themselves. These authors go on to identify and describe four such modes—Passenger, Achiever, Resistor, and Explorer—and they make the case for the superiority of the last of these modes (an argument resembling Mehta’s and Fine’s for deeper learning). They finish by providing insights for how to help children transition from any of the other three modes into the Explorer (with parents are their target audience).

However, while primary caregivers may be who this book is aimed at, the educator in me found some useful insights as well. Hence, let us take a deeper dive into Anderson’s and Winthrop’s discussion, starting with the Passenger. This mode, of course, is the dominant one in today’s schools. “It is the most common mode of engagement, with almost 50 percent of young people from sixth to twelfth grade saying their learning experiences at school inspire coasting” (p. 31), and the sad reality is that being in this mode may “make Passengers possibly the most rational learners we have: They are responding to an under- or overwhelming environment by doing what they have control over. They check out” (p. 37). Hence, like the “treaties” Mehta and Fine refer to in their work, these are the students who agree to do the class assignments in exchange for teachers not micromanaging their every move, and in return for this minimal investment, adequate progress gets made toward graduation and the eventual release from perceived “imprisonment.”

Where this approach to school gets problematic, though, is that “too much surface-level learning means Passengers develop poor learning habits and miss out on the myriad benefits that come from digging in and taking risks with their learning. Students in this mode are ‘wasting their time developmentally’ when it comes to building good learning skills” (p. 32), and that means they risk entering adulthood without the necessary cognitive toolkit to do everything from successful adulting to gaining full employment in a knowledge economy.

Which is why, Anderson and Winthrop point out, so many parents push for—and schools typically reward—the Achiever mode, the one where every stereotype of the “ideal” student resides. Children in this mode are the ones with the well-honed executive function and materials management skills. They are the ones who complete every assignment (and all extra credit opportunities), who have resumes of extra-curriculars at least a page long (single-spaced), and who take every accelerated or College Board AP class they can fit into their already over-booked schedules. They are the students for whom teachers write glowing, hyperbole-filled letters of recommendation, and they are the ones who never see the inside of the assistant principal’s office (that’s the disciplinary one for the uninitiated).

These are also the children who have complete emotional meltdowns when the grade isn’t at least 95%. Perfectionism is the danger lurking for individuals in this mode of engagement, and resilience is not a strength they are likely to develop. Achievers seldom have a sense of their own agency, and as a result, “all kids operating in Achiever mode are missing something: a level of self-awareness and proactivity that could help them be brave, take risks, and think about their own interests and goals in the education process, not just the goals that teachers and schools set for them” (p. 81).

Furthermore—and for obvious reasons—creativity is also a challenge for the Achiever, leaving them with stunted CQs and little capacity for reflective critiquing. That’s problematic because “when we fail to reflect, we miss the chance to notice that [perhaps] our strategies aren’t working. [Thus,] rather than adjust, we [risk doubling] down and [working] harder at something that doesn’t work at all” (p. 183). Achievers will find gainful employment and manage adulthood, but they risk living stunted lives, forever chasing the next accomplishment, never satisfied with the “now.”

Yet they will live lives (as will their fellow Passengers). The danger of the third mode of engagement that Anderson and Winthrop explore, the Resistor mode, is that they might not. In this mode, children do everything the term implies: they consistently and regularly misbehave in school; they are often chronically absent; they participate in high-risk activities outside of school; and they are the ones who live in the Assistant Principal’s office. These are the students with strong negative reputations among the faculty, and therein lies the problem (and true threat) this mode poses for a child who is stuck in it: namely that “too often when kids are resisting, adults see them as problem children rather than children with problems” (p.88). It then becomes all too easy for a young person to internalize the message adults are sending—that they are their problems—and that is an identity that can kill. Hence, it behooves all the adults in the life of a Resister to remember that, like Passengers, their choices are often quite rational ones for coping with overwhelming problems (if I’m starving, then stealing food makes a lot of sense) and that is why, as the founders of an organization devoted to helping children transition out of Resistor mode put it, “our greatest task is to buy students time to grow into themselves without giving up on them” (p. 103).

To grow into one’s self, though, requires acquiring a sense of identity that possesses agency, and therefore, “to find an identity, you actually have to look for it, you have to explore” (p. 120). That is Anderson’s and Winthrop’s fourth and final mode of engagement, the Explorer, and students in this mode are the ones who are truly thriving. They are the ones engaged in Mehta’s and Fine’s deeper learning, the ones generating novel and creative ideas and taking healthy risks. They are the ones using their agency to stand for something, fall down, and then learn how to get back up again. Hence, children in Explorer mode are discovering how to be their authentic selves.

More importantly, though, is the fact that “when young people are engaged in [even] one part of their lives [in this way]—a class or an extracurricular activity—it spills over to other areas” (p. 47). Indeed:

when students are interested in something, their ability to persist with cognitively repetitive and exhausting tasks doubles. For example, students [in one study] spent time on a difficult but mind-numbing task and were then given a short break to read or write about something that interested them. When presented with another boring and taxing task, their persistence was boosted by 30 percent because they were “replenished” by the interesting thing. Their energy did not run out; it was refueled (p. 50).

In other words, Explorers keep exploring.

Which brings me to what I think of as “aiding and abetting.” The reality, Anderson and Winthrop point out, is that everyone spends varying amounts of time in all four of the modes of engagement presented here, and they do so throughout their entire learning lives. Each of us can and does pivot from one to another (sometimes spending years in a particular mode, sometimes experiencing all four in the same 24 hours). Thus, what I find myself asking in a world where 44% of 18-25 year-olds don’t think they matter to anyone else is this: how do we help children identify the mode they are in; how do we help them transition more effectively from one to another; and how do we help them spend as much time in Explorer mode as possible?

The answer for parents, it turns out, (and the challenge) is to talk more with their teenage children. “Discussion is to adolescent develop what cuddles are to infants: foundational to building healthy brains” (p. 141), and the data across all OECD countries is clear: when parents asked several times per week what their child did at school, math scores of these same children went up 16% points—even after accounting for differences in the socio-economic status of the households. Thus, if you are a parent, the proverbial bottom line for helping your child manage their journey through their various modes of engagement is to speak with them regularly.

And don’t just ask “how was your day?” Anderson and Winthrop devote an entire chapter to the kinds of language and questions parents can ask to open up the conversation with their teenage child rather than close it down (e.g. “what did you learn in science today?” or “teach me about what you did in history”), and while space here does not permit a full elaboration of all they have to educate about this aspect of parenting, the gist of their message is clear: “talk to them about what they learn at school and what is happening in their lives, cheer on their academic pursuits, and help them get through hard times. This, much more than direct homework help, helps teens grow” (p. 142). Or as one of the parents (and a fellow educator) said when interviewed about his own successful work with his own daughter: “Notice. Ask. Play. Iterate. Do it again.” (p. 153).

That last advice sounds a lot like what goes on in a classroom, and thus it helps inform the challenges for schools to answer my “aiding and abetting” questions. First, schools need to be much more intentional about teaching students how to navigate the ways they are engaging in school because “when schools don’t create any space for powerful reflection, they undervalue the imagining network and the development need for adolescents to begin making meaning of what they are doing” (p. 197). Second, schools and the educators that compose them need to perceive themselves more as gardeners than as carpenters because:

rigorous research across multiple countries shows that in classrooms where teachers support students’ agentic engagement, kids get better grades and do better on tests. This is compared to classrooms in the same schools where teachers do not provide an environment that lets kids explore (p. 110; original emphasis).

Third, since “we want young people to spend their days learning well” (p. xxv), what we need to be spending more time on in schools is teaching children how to learn well and not simply assuming they will somehow absorb this “how” through some sort of intellectual osmosis. The brain science on this is clear (see Medina; Dehaene; and/or Brown, et al just to scratch the surface). Those of us in schools just need to start paying meticulous and deliberate (and deliberative) attention to this science.

Yet that may point to the greatest challenge of all for schools and parents alike: the willingness to let children fail. Anyone who has trained athletically knows that to build muscle, you first have to tear it down, and “to build the muscles of an Explorer, young people need to practice trying things, falling down, reflecting on why they fell, and getting back up and trying again. That is how any child learns to ride a bike” (p. 70), and it is how anyone learns anything deeply.

Including how one learns resilience. As Anderson and Winthrop point out, “we can do hard things because we have done hard things” (p. 252) only if we have, in fact, engaged in hard things! Granted:

we want kids who can get to the right answer. But we also want kids who know why it is the best answer among a sea of possibilities. We want kids who are adaptable and can explore hard questions in complex environments. They need [difficult challenges where failure is an authentic option] if things are to feel meaningful and joyful, leading to emotional engagement, which so many lack, busy as they are [simply] completing tasks (p. 198).

Therefore, what ALL the adults in young peoples’ lives need to be doing is helping our children manage their stress, not extinguish it. Because only then will we help them become the grown-ups they needed us to be when they become our age, and only then will they live bravely in “a messy world [where] to learn well is an essential ingredient to what it means to live well” (p. 260).

Coda

If all the brain science to date could be summarized in a single phrase, Anderson and Winthrop do it nicely when they write that “brains develop the way they are used” (p. 99). Or as the author of Curious, Ian Leslie puts it: “curiosity is contagious. So is incuriosity.” Which is why I was so deeply disturbed recently to learn about a new school in Austin, Texas called Alpha School where:

students spend a total of just two hours a day on subjects like reading and math, using A.I.-driven software [and then] the remaining hours rely on A.I. and an adult ‘guide,’ not a teacher, to help students develop practical skills in areas such as entrepreneurship, public speaking and financial literacy (Salhotra).

Worse, this school is the flagship for a movement that includes the Miami-Dade County Public Schools (the nation’s third-largest district) where, as I actively write these words, they are “introducing Google chatbots for more than 105,000 high schoolers” (Salhotra).

Now any regular reader knows my thoughts on AI, social media, and technology in general. But after the MIT study released this summer demonstrating that ChatGPT actually inhibits thinking (see Lemonade), the notion that entire schools risk making their charges deliberately dumber (and by design!) is horrifying. Furthermore, what ties this unfolding educational movement to the topic of this essay is that we know (again from the brain science as well as the catastrophe of the pandemic) that learning is a social process. We know as well that “a mind-bending amount of research shows that the best predictor of life satisfaction is the quality of relationships we have” (p. 191). Thus, how the so-called educators behind this Alpha movement can reconcile what they are doing with the realities of what it means to be fully human explains, to me, a LOT of the experience of those 44% of 18-25 year-olds I keep referencing.

Put plainly, Annie Dillard’s epigram at the start of this essay is one of life’s fundamental truths, and if you spend the majority of your day in school with an AI, then you spend the majority of your learning life with an AI. Since a similar failed experiment involving computers and education has already played out multiple times over the past few decades, you would think those of us in schools would have learned better by now. Moreover, for those who believe you can have an actual relationship with an AI and thereby meet the social conditions necessary for successful education, there is already the soulless anguish of the 44%—a number that will only grow bigger if the Alpha Schools of this world succeed.

We, in education, can and must do better.

References

Anderson, J. & Winthrop, R. (2025) The Disengaged Teen: Helping Kids Learn Better, Feel Better, and Live Better. New York: Crown Publishing Group.

Brown, P.; Roediger III, H.; & McDaniel, M. (2014) Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Dehaene, S. (2020) How We Learn: Why Brains Learn Better Than Any Machine…for Now. New York: Penguin Books.

Leslie, I. (2014) Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends on It. New York: Basic Books.

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

Medina, J. (2014) Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School. Seattle: Pear Press.

Salhotra, P. (July 27, 2025) A.I.-Driven Education: Founded in Texas and Coming to a School Near You. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/27/us/politics/ai-alpha-school-austin-texas.html?unlocked_article_code=1.cE8.fbGD.JPscHXYtIEf7&smid=url-share.

[i] Unless indicated otherwise, all quotes in this posting are from The Disengaged Teen.

Deeper Learning

The problem with schools isn’t that they are no longer what they once were;
the problem is that they are precisely what they once were.
—Roland Barth

As mentioned in my most recent essay, I spent a portion of my summer reading the research of Jal Mehta and Sarah Fine of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and in their work, they explore the status of what they call “deep learning” in America’s public high schools. They characterize “deep learning” as having three fundamental properties: mastery, identity, and creativity, and they elaborate on these properties as follows:

Mastery because you cannot learn something deeply without building up considerable skill and knowledge in that domain; identity because it is hard to become deeply learned at anything without becoming identified with the domain; and creativity because moving from taking in someone else’s ideas to developing your own is a big part of what makes learning “deep” (p. 299).

Or as educator David Perkins marvelously summarizes it: “playing the whole game at the junior level.”

Mehta and Fine also describe in their work that the classrooms where deep learning is taking place are spaces where “students had real choices, learning by doing was the norm, there was time to explore matters in depth, and students were welcomed as producers rather than receivers of knowledge” (p. 5). They then describe teachers successfully generating this kind of learning as individuals with strong links between their sense of self and their sense of purpose, educators who:

sought to empower their students; they wanted them to be able to approach both their fields and other life situations as people who could act on the world and not simply have the world act on them. While their hopes for their students as people came first, they cared about their students through their disciplines or subjects (p. 351; original emphasis).

However, while looking for these aspirational qualities of deep learning in nearly 100 schools scattered across the country and across the socioeconomic spectrum—ranging from progressive charter to International Baccalaureate to traditional comprehensive—what they actually found was not a lot of deep learning. Over the six years of their research, more than 300 interviews of administrators, teachers, and students, and over 750 hours of classroom observations, what they found was that the long-standing model for learning still dominated: teacher as transmitter; pupil as recipient. Indeed, “in classroom after classroom, students were not being challenged to think. Roughly speaking, about 4 out of 5 classrooms we visited featured tasks that were in the bottom half of Bloom’s taxonomy” (pp. 24-25), and it was clear that performance was valued over learning—with “treaties” between the students and teachers where students basically did what their teachers asked and, in return, the teachers did not micromanage every aspect of student experience.

Mehta and Fine did find examples of individual schools that did one of the three features of deep learning extremely well, and as I mentioned in Lemonade, they found individual teachers where deep learning was occurring in nearly every school. But these individuals were consistently the isolated minority in their building, and no school was found where all three—mastery, identity, and creativity—were the governing paradigm for school life.

Which of course begs the question: why not?

One answer discovered was inertia. The teacher-as-transmitter learning model has been around millennia while the student-as-active-problem-solver model is only roughly a century old. Combine that with parent resistance—especially in the higher income schools where parents associate their own success with their own traditional teacher-as-transmitter learning—and there has not been a lot of political pressure to change. In addition, with all “the state and district demands for breadth over depth and pressures for external credentialing,” what you have is a “core grammar of education that involves racing through a mass of information with few opportunities for choice or for exploring a subject in depth” (p. 249).

However, it is not only inertia that is preventing deep learning from being prevalent in our schools. The most successful teachers providing it in their classrooms spoke of long, lonely journeys, with few role models and little mentoring. Many had to earn enough of what my mother likes to refer to as “deviant’s credits” to enable them to buck the system, and Mehta and Fine are clear that “our most successful examples had to buffer themselves from external pressures” to conform (p. 44). Add in the reality that “there is no world where a supervisor would watch 15 minutes of a surgery or a trial and make consequential decisions about a doctor’s or lawyer’s professional performance” (p. 395), and the absence of general respect for the profession leaves little external motivation to take that long, lonely journey to becoming a deeper learning educator.

Nor is that journey a simple one even for those who do undertake it. Part of what Mehta and Fine identified in their research was that when examining the traits of the most effective teachers they observed, there was no “one-size-fits-all.” Each deep learning teacher had struggled through discovering their purpose as educators in their own unique way and had their own individual understandings of how to “play the whole game at the junior level.” Hence, examples of deep learning educators seldom contained any overlapping features beyond the fact that each had embedded becoming a teacher into their sense of identity. Or to put it another way, in deep and important ways, each of these teachers was the curriculum in their respective classes. Which, as the authors note, tends to frustrate those in education who are seeking best practices or simple technical solutions to confront the problem of deep learning’s absence from America’s schools.

Yet lest we put all this absence of deeper learning in America’s classrooms completely on the proverbial shoulders of the adults, our authors also discovered that student disengagement plays a significant role as well. Chronic absenteeism, the allure of cellphones, the new cultural normal that in-person is optional…all contribute to the statistics that between 5^th and 11^th grade, the number of students reporting that they find school engaging drops from 75% to 32%, and “since students have to be at school to take the poll, even the 32% underestimates the level of disengagement, because the most disengaged have dropped out of school and are not in the data” (p. 27). Furthermore, even when students seemingly are engaged, the lower levels of cognitive demand Mehta and Fine found in most of their classroom observations has the potential to lead to situations such as this one where:

One teacher told us that when she tried to refer to material that students had successfully answered questions about on a state science exam only three months earlier, the students not only didn’t know the content but argued that they had never seen it before! (p. 200).

Which points to something the neuroscientist in me recognizes that I’m not certain Mehta and Fine do. They are correct when they assert that the deep understanding that comes from deep learning “requires both a significant repository of factual knowledge and the ability to use that factual knowledge to develop interpretations, arguments, and conclusions” (p. 12). But the first portion of that claim—”a significant repository of factual knowledge”—requires a large amount of time, energy, and mental investment to get it embedded in the brain’s long-term memory (where we know from work on creativity that knowledge must reside or the brain literally won’t use it to think). Indeed, one of the explanations frequently offered for the lack of deep learning in schools of all kinds is that students must master the basic skills and knowledge before they can engage the material more deeply.

However, Mehta and Fine rightly point out that the teachers they observed who employed deep learning “led with authentic complex tasks, and embedded within those tasks the basic skill-building needed to take on those tasks” (p. 326). So deep learning is not antithetical to developing “a significant repository of factual knowledge.” What is, is time. If I’m “playing the whole game A at the junior level,” then—to paraphrase Oliver Burkeman—I’m choosing not “to play the whole game B at the junior level.” I can’t. As Burkeman wisely observes, any choice I make automatically precludes my other options, and therefore, the time spent to achieve deep learning in one discipline means a lack of time to achieve deep learning in another because our amount of time is finite and our brains simply work the way they do.

Hence, I will suggest that part of what may be keeping deeper learning from taking place more often in our public schools is the choices we have made about curriculum and what counts as being educated. We can only accomplish the current breadth of disciplines at the expense of depth, and so we may need to make some challenging choices about what we want our children learning deeply if we want deeper understanding to occur in our schools—recognizing that that itself also comes with its own risks as the world of computer science is learning the hard way right now, with AI replacing the entry-level coders currently coming out of college. Crystal balls are always cloudy, and as Harvard economist, David Deming, points out, it can actually be “quite risky to go to school to learn a trade or a particular skill, because you don’t know what the future holds. 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.”

Bringing me to one final thought on why Mehta and Fine found so little deep learning in the classrooms where they visited; something they fully acknowledged right at the start of their work. And that is the fact that:

Perhaps the most important reason that there has not been more deep learning in American schools: limited public demand for it. The qualities associated with deep learning—thinking critically, grappling with nuance and complexity, reconsidering inherited assumptions, questioning authority, and embracing intellectual questions—are not widely embraced by the American people. (p. 38).

We are fundamentally an anti-intellectual society, and in many ways, our public schools (and a lot of our private ones) simply reflect this fact back to us.

Why, though, should we care? I know; it’s a rhetorical question. Anyone who has read my letters to my graduating seniors knows why we should be concerned about the lack of deeper learning in our schools, and anyone who has observed the first 8 months of the Trump presidency really knows why. But I would like to give the final word this time to Mehta and Fine, whose book went to press right toward the end of Trump’s first term in the White House and whose final words in their book are:

Perhaps the most important role [schools] play is training our future citizens. These are people who will need to be able to tell truth from fantasy, real news from fake news; they will need to understand that climate change is real; and they will need to be able to work with people from other countries to solve the next generation of problems. If we cannot shift from a world where learning deeply is the exception rather than the rule, more is in jeopardy than our schools. Nothing less than our society is at stake (p. 400).

References

Barshay, J. (Aug. 4, 2025) 7 Insights About Chronic Absenteeism, A New Normal for American Schools. The Hechinger Report. https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-7-insights-chronic-absenteeism/.

Board of Editors (July/Aug. 2025) Education in the U.S. Needs Facts, Not Ideologies. Scientific American. P. 88-89.

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/.

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

The Death of Thinking?

Rage, rage against the dying of the light…
Do not go gentle into that good night.
—John Donne

It started with an assignment. My students were learning to use the standard APA-style citation method employed in the sciences, and one of my students who is a faithful and almost fanatical rule-follower kept calling me over to ask how to cite his next item of research. After multiple attempts at re-explaining the process, I finally simply asked this student to show me his screen. This is what I saw:

Now, my student hadn’t done anything atypical of today’s learner. He had typed his query directly off my instruction sheet into Google and awaited the response. It is, of course, not a good research habit (and one I keep trying to fight), but when I saw what it had produced, I was unnerved; I had not realized how much AI had invaded internet search engines. Here I had spent all this time teaching my students how to vet websites for academic and scientific reliability—an essential critical thinking skill, especially in today’s flood of misinformation and disinformation—and yet, here, confronting me on my student’s screen was an AI summary of only potentially relevant sources with no distinct authors or web addresses for my student to cite. No wonder he was confused!

So I showed my student how he could click on the little link symbol you can see there on the image right after the word “change” in order to bring up the list of web sites the AI had used for its summary, and I demonstrated how to find the source he needed among those sites so that he could formally cite it in his project. But if not for my own critical thinking skills enabling me to know what the AI was doing, both my student and myself would have been left in the dark, making unsubstantiated claims, reporting the thoughts of others as our own without any attribution to the original thinkers. The literal definition of plagiarism.

To say that I, as an educator, was appalled and alarmed by this development is like stating that hydrogen bombs make a noise when they go off (hyperbole intended!). However, I shortly thereafter read an editorial piece on Bloomberg that reminded me that my collegiate level colleagues have it even worse right now. At the preK-12 level, good schools are still doing a lot with pencil and paper in their classrooms, including formal assessments that require actual knowledge and the ability to think through a problem unaided by technology. But presently in academia—at institutions whose very raison d’être is the production and refinement of critical thinking!—“outsourcing one’s homework to AI has become routine” and “assignments that once demanded days of diligent research can be accomplished in minutes…no need to trudge through Dickens or Demosthenes; all the relevant material can be instantly summarized after a single chatbot prompt.”

Even more incredible (confirming a rumor I’d heard) is the fact that apparently more and more professors are starting to employ AI themselves to evaluate student work, leading to the mind-boggling and ultimately untenable reality of “computers grading papers written by computers, students and professors idly observing, and parents paying tens of thousands of dollars a year for the privilege.” The Editorial Board of Bloomberg News is indeed spot on when they declare that “at a time when academia is under assault from many angles, this looks like a crisis in the making.”

The coffin’s nail for me, though…the camel’s straw, the road’s end, the coup de grace…pick your cliché for finality and mine from this past month was the screenshot below:

I had read this remarkable article in Scientific American on the genetic fluidity of sex and gender in sparrows, and I wanted to share it with my fellow biology teachers for use in our inheritance unit next year (as well as some separate electives we each teach). So I scanned the article as a PDF to make it more permanently accessible for all of us, and that’s when I saw the message from ADOBE up there in the lefthand corner: “This appears to be a long document. Save time by reading a summary.”

I spluttered; I fumed; I cursed:

“Of course it’s a long document you [expletive deleted] piece of software! That’s the whole point! To provide the reader with rich, nuanced knowledge and understanding of one of the most complex ideas in all of biology!!! If I had wanted my colleagues and I to have a [further expletive deleted] ‘summary,’ I first would have written it myself before giving it to them and then I still would have provided them the formal citation!”

In case you cannot tell, gentle reader, I was pissed. Pissed at the seeming systemic and systematic attack on the human capacity to think (let alone actually valuing that capacity). Pissed that there is clearly a market for this disparagement of thinking, and pissed that so few in our world seem to be upset by this dying of the light. I have known that scientific reasoning has been under assault for some time now, but the death of basic thinking itself?!

I know, I know. One more thing to add to the agenda for my often Sisyphean-feeling profession. But I’m not just pissed. I am also deeply concerned, and something neuroscientist, Hanna Poikonen, wrote earlier this year is a good way to end this brief ragging on my part:

Each time we off-load a problem to a calculator or ask ChatGPT to summarize an essay, we are losing an opportunity to improve our own skills and practice deep concentration for ourselves…when I consider how frenetically people switch between tasks and how eagerly we outsource creativity and problem-solving to AI in our high-speed society, I personally am left with a question: What happens to our human ability to solve complex problems in the future if we teach ourselves not to use deep concentration? After all, we may need that mode of thought more than ever to tackle increasingly convoluted technological, environmental, and political challenges.

“May need” indeed. My money’s on “will,” not “may.”

References

Maney, D. (March 2025) The Bird that Broke the Binary. Scientific American. Pp. 48-55.

Poikonen, H. (Feb. 2025) How Expertise Improves Concentration. Scientific American. Pp. 81-82.

The Editorial Board (May 27, 2025) Does College Still Have a Purpose in the Age of ChatGPT? Bloomberg News. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2025-05-27/ai-role-in-college-brings-education-closer-to-a-crisis-point?utm_source=pivot5&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=nvidia-breaks-records-with-44-billion-sales-despite-china-ban-1&_bhlid=31b2ce1fa3444fd1982e5d64eb0f1a1b6d1ab0f3.

“It’s the Snapchat, Stupid”—Part 2

Treat people as if they were what they ought to be
and you help them become what they are capable of being.
—Goethe

I have never been more afraid for America’s future in my life.
—Thomas Friedman

In the original TV series, Dragnet, the character Sgt. Joe Friday is alleged to have said “Just the facts, ma’am.” But like Bill Clinton’s association with “it’s the economy, stupid,” it is a total fabrication. The famed comedian, Stan Freberg, said something similar in his parody of the show, and what would now be called a meme was born, with “just the facts, ma’am” forever associated—incorrectly—with Joe Friday. However, just as the meme connected with former President Clinton served as a useful lens for an earlier essay about education in this country, “just the facts” is an ideal one with which to start this posting; so here are just a few of the most relevant ones:

40% of fourth graders today read below the basic level on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), meaning that they “cannot grasp the sequence of events in a story.” It is the worst performance for this grade-level in 20 years.
33% of eight graders today also read below the basic level on the NAEP, meaning that they “can’t grasp the main idea of an essay or identify the different sides of a debate.” It is the worst performance for this grade-level in the five decades since the inception of the exam.
In terms of reading engagement outside of school, 34% of fourth graders now report that they read only 30 minutes or less each day, and though a mere 34% of eighth graders reported reading for fun in 1984, that number has now dropped to 14% in 2023.
As for the United States’ adult population, 30% of them can only read at the level of a 10-year-old, and both numeracy and literacy levels as measured by the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies have dropped consistently among those ages 16-65 (see graphic).

https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/2023/national_results.asp

Now since literacy of any kind is the foundation for the ability to reason and the basis for all background knowledge needed to make good decisions in a complex world, then these facts are extremely problematic—and that is a very generous understatement. As New York Times columnist David Brooks puts it—quoting retired generals Jim Mattis and Bing West—“if you haven’t read hundreds of books, you are functionally illiterate, and you will be incompetent, because your personal experiences alone aren’t broad enough to sustain you.” Reading—and lots of it—is the keystone to our capacity for critical reasoning, and just as the absence of a keystone species in an ecosystem will lead to its collapse, the absence of reading in a country’s population is a recipe for the breakdown of our entire social order.

And before I am accused of hyperbole, I am already witnessing the potential for this breakdown in my own classes and have been now for over a decade. Like Anya Galli Robertson, who teaches sociology at the University of Dayton, I too have continued to “give similar lectures, assign the same books and give the same tests that [I] always have,” and like Professor Robertson, I too have seen firsthand how “years ago, students could handle it; now they are floundering.” Moreover, while the mental coddling I’ve written about before is definitely playing a role in this situation, the even bigger causal source for this general decline in my students’ collective IQ, CQ, and EQ is their poor reading habits. Habits due in no small degree to the amount of screen time spent on their phones.

Also (to quote Brooks again):

Not just any screen time. Actively initiating a search for information on the web may not weaken your reasoning skills. But passively scrolling TikTok or X weakens everything from your ability to process verbal information to your working memory to your ability to focus. You might as well take a sledgehammer to your skull.

Or more accurately, a broom. To see why, a little brain science from my own classroom is in order. Each year around this time, I have my senior anatomy class perform a series of experiments. I give them a standard short-term memory (STM) test in the absence of their cellphones; we do a few other learning activities; then they take the exact same test a second time while grasping their phones in their hands after playing with their devices for two minutes. Data is scored, loaded into the spreadsheets, and then we wait until the next class where we do the exact same sequence of events with a different but equivalent STM test—only this time, no phones are present at all. Again, data is scored, and I “innocently” ask how many of them scored better the second time—to which every hand in the room rises, and I use this fact to introduce the concept of working memory.

Put simply, working memory is like a temporary storage shelf that your hippocampus uses to place items from your immediate STM that you might want to add eventually to long-term memory (LTM). It’s a parking lot for thoughts and experiences needing evaluation as to whether they are important enough to dedicate to your LTM, and it’s why you can recall what you had for dinner last night—something that is no longer in your current STM awareness—but cannot say what you had for dinner a month ago (unless you have one of those extremely rare autobiographical memories). Basically, your working memory still has last night’s dinner on its shelf waiting for processing while nearly every previous meal you’ve ever eaten has been swept from the shelf as not having enough significance for LTM (again, those special ones you do remember got the required import tag).

Having taught all this to my students, what I do next is bring up the graph below, and this is when their eyes all widen and why I do not, like David Brooks, have to say “so the main cause is probably screen time” (my emphasis). The blue line represents the impact on STM of asking it to store and recall increasingly longer sequences of random letters. It is the averaged student data from the very first STM test, and it is exactly the trend neuroscience would expect. The yellow line represents what neuroscience says should have happened after my students took the exact same test a second time that first day (and which did happen with the second STM test). The red line, though, is what happened when my students were holding their phones after playing with them while taking the exact same test a second time: the mere physical presence of the devices wiping their working memories clean. Groundhog Day for the brain, every day, 365 per year.

Anyone not unnerved at least a little by this data about our devices is probably not reading this essay in the first place, but if not convinced, then, like David Brooks:

My biggest worry is that behavioral change is leading to cultural change. As we spend time on our screens, we’re abandoning a value that used to be pretty central to our culture — the idea that you should work hard to improve your capacity for wisdom and judgment all the days of your life. That education, including lifelong out-of-school learning, is really valuable.

However, as I reminded my seniors this year, let’s be generous and assume anyone reading this essay gets that our society’s changing habits about reading and learning may be endangering our very future. Then the logical question to ask next is: how our society is handling this potential crisis? Again, “just the facts” can be useful:

The Baltimore City Public Schools have had to close their tutoring program for reading remediation for 1,100 students because of the withdrawal of $418 million dollars in promised pandemic recovery funds (as a district, they will not be alone).
The former CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment—the “apotheosis” of demanding intellectual engagement!—has been confirmed as the next United States Secretary of Education, with the explicit charge to dismantle and destroy the entire department (the executive order was signed a month ago).
Harvard University has lost more than $2 billion in federal research funds for having the temerity to basically say that critical thinking matters (with additional threats to their tax-exempt status on the line).
And, finally, as a country, we have ceded to China the global leadership in research output in the fields of chemistry, physics, and earth & environmental science (with biology and the health sciences soon to follow due to the recent defunding of the NIH and the firing of many of their scientists).

That last fact may be the most telling one, and it is why I was sorely tempted to title this essay “The Stupidifying of America.” Our collective education system in this country no longer produces enough “home grown” PhD scientists and engineers, as well as other levels of expertise, to meet our most basic economic needs, and the “cruel farce” that is the Trump administration is simply going to make things worse. As Thomas Friedman points out:

Do you know what our democratic allies do with rogue states? Let’s connect some dots. First, they don’t buy Treasury bills as much as they used to. So America has to offer them higher rates of interest to do so — which will ripple through our entire economy, from car payments to home mortgages to the cost of servicing our national debt at the expense of everything else…[Thus] bond yields keep spiking and the dollar keeps weakening — classic signs of a loss of confidence that does not have to be large to have a large impact on our whole economy…[Furthermore,] you shrink all those things — our ability to attract the world’s most energetic and entrepreneurial immigrants, which allowed us to be the world’s center for innovation; our power to draw in a disproportionate share of the world’s savings, which allowed us to live beyond our means for decades; and our reputation for upholding the rule of law — and over time you end up with an America that will be less prosperous, less respected and increasingly isolated.

Like Friedman, I am truly frightened for our country, but like Goethe, I know what I need to do in my small corner of influence to combat the rising tide of ignorance, anti-intellectualism, and antipathy. As the sign at one of the Hands Off protests suggests, I’ll keep teaching critical thinking to my students—in the hope that future elections might turn out for the better.

References

Bowie, L. (April 4, 2025) Baltimore Schools to Cut Tutoring and More After Trump Administration Backtracks on Funds. The Baltimore Banner. https://www.thebaltimorebanner.com/education/k-12-schools/baltimore-city-schools-federal-funding-AM5PH4I6G5B3PCG66S6RC3IKDE/.

Brooks, D. (April 10, 2025) Producing Something This Stupid is the Achievement of a Lifetime. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/10/opinion/education-smart-thinking-reading-tariffs.html.

Friedman, T. (April 15, 2025) I Have Never Been More Afraid for My Country’s Future. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/15/opinion/trump-administration-china.html.

Lukianoff, G. & Haidt, J. (2018) The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure. New York: Penguin Books.

Nation’s Report Card (2025) National Assessment of Educational Progress. https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/.

NCES (2023) Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC). https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/2023/national_results.asp.

Math Deficits, AI, and Other Current Conundrums

One of the advantages of this time of year for me as an educator is the ease in workload as the academic calendar makes the turn from first semester to second semester. Exams are done; final grades calculated; coursework caught up; and for a brief window of time, there is nothing needing any kind of assessing (i.e. I’m done grading for a while!). It means I can get caught up on news and research in the world of education that are not immediately critical to my specific everyday needs and to reflect on what insights this information might have for the larger mission of teaching and learning.

Two such items to catch my attention this time around involve math and AI. The first, a report issued this past September, chronicles the severity of the academic decline in math skills of our youngest learners. The latest research is indicating that the children who were pre-K or kindergarten during the most severe restrictions of the pandemic not only lost a critical learning window when it comes to math; they are, in fact, not catching up to pre-pandemic levels the way their older elementary age peers are. Worse, many of them are actually falling further behind, and what makes this fact so highly problematic is that there is a limited window during brain development for mastering such skills effectively. Hence, the long term impact of a failure to do so can have devastating economic consequences—for both the individual and our society—and that means that this “math gap” that a portion of an entire generation is facing is not inconsequential.

Moreover, that may be even more true for those of us entering the later stages of our lives. As Jenny Anderson and Rebecca Winthrop report out, “in a survey by Gallup and the Walton Family Foundation of more than 4,000 members of Gen Z, 49 percent of respondents said they did not feel prepared for the future. [In addition,] employers complain that young hires lack initiative, communication skills, problem-solving abilities and resilience.” Hence, we already have individuals entering the workforce self-identifying as ill-prepared; just imagine what today’s second graders are going to be like as the long-term caretakers of late Boomers (such as myself) and every single Gen Xer and early Millennial! It is difficult not to shudder.

Nor is AI going to be the answer to this “math gap” problem. The other report to catch my attention came from researchers at the University of Pennsylvania who studied the impact of using AI as an aid to learning math. 1,000 high school students were divided into three groups: a third had full access to ChatGPT while completing practice problems; a third had limited access to a tutorial version that would give hints but not divulge any answers; and a third did their work the traditional way. The results were very clear: while the first group solved 48% more practice problems correctly and the second group solved an incredible 127% more problems correctly, the first group earned 17% lower grades than the control on the final test and the tutorial group scored the same as the control. In other words, good old-fashioned “grind it out” for the win.

Of course, when analyzing the data more deeply, the researchers found that part of what they were observing were flaws in the bot itself. Its computations were sometimes wrong (8%) and “its step-by-step approach for how to solve a problem was wrong 42% of the time.” However:

the researchers believe the [biggest] problem is that students are using the chatbot as a “crutch.” When they analyzed the questions that students typed into ChatGPT, students often simply asked for the answer. Students were not building the skills that come from solving the problems themselves.

Again, score one for basic grit; something we’re going to need to aid our current 2^nd graders in learning if they are to bridge their “math gap” successfully.

What is more, this general capacity for doggedness is something we are all going to need to reacquire if we’re going to meet the massive challenges facing our world today. While ruminating about these math and AI stories from September, the more recent world was also impinging on my awareness, and as often happens in those circumstances, a kind of Gestalt emerged with an insight I had glimpsed before but never fully fleshed out. I was listening to Brittany Luse interview former Missouri congresswoman, Cori Bush, on the NPR show, “It’s Been a Minute,” and Ms. Luse kept trying to get Ms. Bush to address how a progressive political agenda could survive in the face of the recent election to which Ms. Bush kept responding that change takes time—an answer Ms. Luse just didn’t seem to want to hear—and as I listened to this repetitious back and forth, the proverbial “light bulb” went on: change does take time, but that’s an answer nearly no one in today’s world can psychologically hear anymore.

It was like a syllogistic moment out of one of those scenes in The Queen’s Gambit where the main character manipulates the chess pieces in her mind while staring at the ceiling. Premise 1: Digital technologies have all but destroyed any capacity for delayed gratification in enormous swathes of the human population; the creation of AI has simply been the pinnacle of these efforts, offering instant essays, instant math solutions…instant chimeras of any manner of complex thought. Yet (premise 2) ALL real, authentic, lasting change is NEVER instantaneous, and so (conclusion) we find ourselves today living in a society in desperate need of change with almost no capacity for the patience to achieve it. Instead, when the needed change doesn’t happen right away, too many of us now either give up and disengage in fatalistic disgust or succumb to the Siren’s song of fallible simplistic-ness (if I may coin a word).

And the outcome of the recent election is a classic example. While a six-year study of the prices of 96 items at a Walmart in Georgia revealed that the overall price increase between 2024 and 2023 was a mere 0.7% inflation, that same study points out that the price increase between 2024 and 2019 was 25%. Given, I’ll suggest, that five years to an adult memory is probably the equivalent of the 15 minutes in the famed Stanford Marshmallow Experiment and you had most of society declare in early November that they wanted their “one marshmallow” now! and be damned the “two marshmallows” they could receive from patience with a (documented!) growing economy. Hence, the guy touting instant access to the single “marshmallow” won because it was the simplistic solution to a perceived “immediate” need.

Moreover, the fact that the solution offered was a materialistic one was key to the public’s response. In a society obsessed with stuff, entire populations of this country were prepared to ignore all the other bellicose threats Trump promoted—no matter how potentially detrimental to their own immediate lives and communities—and such is the power of this collective obsession that today, we are willingly standing by as a nation as corporate leaders such as Mark Zuckerberg openly prepare to sacrifice truth itself to maintain their profits against any legal onslaughts from the incoming administration about fact-checking (and God help you if you have the temerity to try to call out this greed in a nation-wide publication!)

So where does all this leave me as an educator? First, I’ve got children who can’t do basic math. Second, I’ve got AI that can’t solve the problem and actually threatens to exacerbate its difficulties. Third, I’ve got a society too incapable of delayed gratification to deal with either of these first two problems (let alone the enormous ones such as climate change and environmental degradation), and I’ve got a simpleton to lead them getting sworn into the Oval Office. Kind of a grim outlook for a grim winter.

However, there was one other story during this down time that came to my attention that reminded me that there is a solution to these problems (or any other), and that is: patient, steady, determined resolve. Granted, the story itself is really kind of trivial, namely that my alma mater officially rebranded itself as “WashU.” But you need to have the insider view of the story that underlies this story to know why it uplifted my spirits, and so please bear with me as I fill in some of the “behind-the-scenes.”

It starts in 1982 in the Public Relations Department of a university recognized regionally for its excellence, who has recently hired a new director who has made a small name for himself at some other midwestern schools for raising the profiles of those institutions. Washington University in St. Louis wants to stop being known as “the Harvard of the Midwest” and start being said in the same breath as Harvard instead. It wants to be “Washington.” The only problem is that there are at least 20 other institutions in this country that have “Washington” in their name, and all the locals and students know this school by its folksy title, “WashU.”

Enter the new director, Fred Volkmann—who has as one of his employees, a sophomore work-study student, hired to run the mimeograph machine and mail out press releases to the local and regional media outlets. Fred recognizes that there is authentic marketing power in the folksy, “WashU,” and he has a plan, a plan he generously shares the broad strokes of with his young work-study student (helping with the grunt work of the first rebranding campaign) who impudently wonders aloud why we can’t just make the switch immediately to “WashU?” Said student is given a quick but firm lesson in the intricacies of PR, and he goes back to mailing press releases.

By now, of course, any reader has filled in the blanks, and as an alum (and that former employee), I have watched Fred’s plan unfold from afar for over 40 years. I have watched my alma mater achieve the national recognition it aspired to all those years ago. I have watched its brand change from “Washington University in St. Louis” to “Washington University” to “Washington”—all stages in Fred’s original plan. But when he retired about eight years ago, there was as yet no “WashU,” and I wondered if “Washington” might be the end of things. That is until this past fall, when I learned through my alumni magazine that Fred’s grand dream from the early 1980s had finally come to fruition and that, henceforth, the official branding of my alma mater would be and is “WashU.”

Like I said, a rather trivial story—especially in a world where Palestinians are enduring threatened genocide and Los Angeles, California is basically burning to the ground. Yet, I think it is also a story full of potency and import because it is the story of the fundamental power of patient, steady, determined resolve to change the world. Like Fred, all any of us can do is plant seeds and quietly tend them, keeping faith that the crop will eventually bear fruit, and like Fred, there is a lot of anonymity to that task (most people reading this will never have heard of him). Therefore, when I think back to my earlier question in this essay, “where does all this leave me an educator?” it leaves me as it always does (and always will!): planting the seeds of knowledge, critical thinking, and wisdom in my students, doing so one day, one lesson, one moment at a time—something no AI or material “stuff” is ever going to be able to do.

It is not an easy task. Nor is the patient, steady, determined resolve needed to accomplish it a comforting reality. But it is the task at hand, and as I have oft quoted Luther, those of us committed to this profession “kann nicht anders.” Our world and its future are literally depending on it.

References

Anderson, J. & Winthrop, R. (Jan. 2, 2025) Giving Kids Some Autonomy Has Surprising Results. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/02/opinion/children-choices-goal-setting.html.

Barshay, J. (Sept. 2, 2024) Kids Who Use ChatGPT as a Study Assistant Do Worse on Tests: Researchers Compare Math Progress of Almost 1,000 High School Students. The Hechinger Report. https://hechingerreport.org/kids-chatgpt-worse-on-tests/.

Camera, L. (Sept. 20, 2024) In the Rush to COVID Recovery, Did We Forget About Our Youngest Learners? The 74. https://www.the74million.org/article/in-the-rush-to-covid-recovery-did-we-forget-about-our-youngest-learners/?utm_source=The+74+Million+Newsletter&utm_campaign=6dcaab7edb-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2022_07_27_07_47_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_077b986842-6dcaab7edb-176301373.

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