Tag: writing

The Aha! Moment (Revisited)

EUREKA!
—attributed to Archimedes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

Updates 2.0

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Coda

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Letter to the Class of 2026

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

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

Brock Advisory 2022-2026

Dear Members of the Class of 2026,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maybe.

Congratulations and good fortune in the coming years!

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nostalgia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Auld lang syne indeed.

References

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

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

Where Will We Go from Here?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

A Matter of Scale

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As for the material content of either test? Nada.

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

Unbidden Thoughts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And we all know what happened next.

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Flailing to Thrive

If you are here unfaithfully with us,
you are causing terrible damage.
— Jalal Al-Din Rumi

This topic is a challenging one for me.  Those closest to me know that I am not the biggest fan of my half of the species and that I can tally on one hand the number of fellow males I would count among my close friends.  In fact, I usually simply tolerate most of the other males in my life.  I loathe the banal culture of the “locker room,” and I am so actively antagonistic to the patriarchy that I like to claim that my mother jokes that she raised two children and one feminist and that it wasn’t her daughter.  Bottom line, I much prefer the company of women—to the degree that in classic couples situations where the men and women usually pair off with their respective genders, you will find me in the kitchen with the women.  There is a reason I spent the majority of my teaching career at a single-sex all-girls school.

However, today I find myself once again in a fully co-ed environment where I have a professional duty to authentically engage all my students for purposes of nurturing them to become their best authentic selves, and so I read Clair Cain Miller’s article in the New York Times with a profound sense of downheartedness.  I already knew that suicide rates have always been generally higher for men than for women and that those rates have increased for all young people in the past decade—much of it directly attributable to the impact of social media ([expletive deleted] Snapchat!).  But to learn that the suicide rate in the population of males I work with has effectively doubled from 11 per 100,000 to 21 per 100,000 since 1968 was disturbing to say the least.  That’s over 4,600 teenage boys and young men dead by their own hand in 2023 alone—a rate that only goes up as they age.

Why? What could be causing an increasing number of males—in a fundamentally patriarchal society!—to fail to thrive? Part of the answer seems to be economic.  As the types of positions traditionally identified with masculinity—so-called “blue collar” jobs—have been increasingly eliminated by robots and other forms of automation, the remaining employment opportunities and those where there has been steady job growth rely more and more on the so-called “soft skills” traditionally associated in our culture with women.  Which in a patriarchy can be viewed as problematic.  As Tracy Dawson, a 53-year old unemployed welder from St. Clair, Missouri, made abundantly clear in a 2017 interview: “I ain’t gonna be a nurse; I don’t have the tolerance for people.  I don’t want it to sound bad, but I’ve always seen a woman in the position of a nurse or some kind of health care worker. I see it as more of a woman’s touch.”

Of course, attitudes such as these have been around for a long time (pop-culture was recognizing this fact as early as the late 1970s, and Bruce Springsteen made a career out of examining them).  However, Robb Willer, professor of sociology at Stanford, is blunt when he states that, today, “the contemporary American economy is not rewarding a lot of the characteristics associated with men and masculinity, and the sense is those trends will continue.” So where does that leave the Tracy Dawson’s in this world? It leaves them under- or unemployed in an increasingly shrinking part of the work-force (see chart below)—with all the consequent potential for undermining and harm to an individual’s sense of self and well-being.

Yet, underlying this employment issue and any subsequent potential changes in how men in America perceive themselves today is an even deeper root cause and one that directly impacts me as an educator.  Since learning is the gateway to everything about a person’s life, any changes in educational status will impact a person’s entire existence, and the reality is that today, starting as early as kindergarten, boys are arriving in our schools less prepared than girls, both in academic readiness and their behavior.  The likely reason for this is the increased focus on college-readiness that has taken over schooling in the past two decades, forcing educational institutions of all kinds to emphasize academics at earlier and earlier ages.  That is something which boys, who usually mature later than girls, are less prepared to handle, and as a result, boys are not getting the same academic head start that girls now are.  Furthermore, this gender gap in academic performance continues to persist in today’s schools as both sexes move up through the grade levels, resulting in women being more likely to graduate, earn higher G.P.A.s, and even go on to college.  Indeed, women now outnumber men at the college and university level with 66% of female high school graduates compared to 57% of the male ones.

Again, where does this leave the young Dawson’s in this world? Well, since the link between matriculation from college and broader career prospects and higher earnings is well documented, it leaves a lot of them increasingly left behind economically, frequently still living with their parents, and ever more susceptible to the reckless ravings of an autocrat.  As Jonathan Rauch articulates in his Constitution of Knowledge, these are the men who hear the perfectly authentic and valid challenge to their male privilege, look at their employment prospects and long-term financial outlook, and reply “Privilege?! What privilege?!”  It is precisely because the implied social contract of the American patriarchy told them that simply being male guaranteed them a degree of status in our society that the perceived failure to deliver on that “promise” has resulted in men who will storm our capital, vote for a self-declared “dictator for one day,” and sometimes literally kill themselves out of their despondency.

So what are we, as a society, to do? The feminist in me may be tremendously excited by the data showing how far the status of women in our country has improved since my childhood (still can’t believe my own mother once could not have her own credit card!).  What’s more, the educator in me still knows how far there still is to go for women to achieve true equity with men in this country (especially in the face of the patriarchy’s current pushback under the Trump administration).  However, just because I personally am not a cheerleader for men does not mean I believe that they somehow do not deserve to have lives of meaning and purpose.  ALL humans deserve that.  Indeed, the foundational flaw of both the patriarchy and systemic racism is their refusal to believe this very thing!

However, the automation of the workplace continues unabated, and with AI, this is even going to start being true of some of the so-called “white collar” jobs.  Thus, it will not just be the unemployed welders and longshoreman dealing with the ennui in their lives; it will also be the unemployed estate lawyers and radiologists confronting their lack of purpose.  Which brings me full circle after my brief (but important) digression to my original question: what do we do about this?

There are at least two things in education we could do right away.  The first is to consider restructuring the configuration of our early elementary classrooms when it comes to males.  Just as there is data showing that single-sex classroom environments benefit middle-school aged girls in the math and science disciplines (and there are co-ed schools both public and private that segregate their populations accordingly for these classes during those years), there is data suggesting that a single-sex environment may benefit K-3 boys in terms of behavioral discipline problems, enabling them to focus better on their learning at this critical age.

Which leads to the second thing schools could be doing to address why some boys and young men are falling behind: teach and employ restorative justice practices in our schools instead of the more traditional punitive approach.  The data is clear: boys are far more likely to receive punishments (and frequently harsher ones) for poor decision making than girls do—especially among children of color—and the data is equally clear that by using restorative justice techniques, teachers and administrators alike can help students better manage their emotions and behaviors and find constructive resolutions in situations of conflict.  Schools that employ these practices have all shown improved academic performance, and they are safer communities for their inhabitants—again, particularly among children of color.

One additional thing I think we could be doing to address the segment of boys and young men in our population who are struggling to thrive is to reconsider what intelligences we choose to value.  Historically, we have always tended to undervalue the kind of critical thinking and problem solving associated with certain jobs such as waiting tables or wiring a house—or welding.  But in the recent hyper-focus on “college readiness,” practical, less traditionally academic intelligences have received progressively fewer and fewer formal supports.  The vocational tech programs of my youth—we had an entire high school in my district devoted to them—have been steadily dismantled and their government funding withheld or withdrawn, to the point where we actually have a critical shortage of such labor in this country.  Resurrecting the vocational tech schools of the past, as educator Mike Rose points out, would go a long way toward addressing a whole host of issues confronting our society—one of which I would like to suggest could be providing the young Dawson’s of our society with both a sustainable income (no one’s automating plumbing for the foreseeable future) AND a sense of meaning and purpose.

As for the one other thing I think might be helpful when addressing this essay’s topic, I will save that for next time.

References

CDC (2023) Suicide Among Adults Age 55 and Older, 2021.  https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db483.htm#:~:text=Among%20adults%20age%2055%20and%20older%20in%202021%2C%20the%20suicide,%28age%2085%20and%20older%29.

Darling-Hammond, S. (May 18, 2023) Fostering Belonging, Transforming Schools: The Impact of Restorative Practices.  Learning Policy Institute.  https://learningpolicyinstitute.org/product/impact-restorative-practices-report.

Miller, C.C. (May 14, 2025) It’s Not Just a Feeling: Data Shows Boys and Young Men Are Falling Behind.  The New York Times.  https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/13/upshot/boys-falling-behind-data.html.

Miller, C.C. (Jan. 4, 2017) Why Men Don’t Want the Jobs Done Mostly by Women.  The New York Times.  https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/04/upshot/why-men-dont-want-the-jobs-done-mostly-by-women.html.

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

Rose, M. (2014) The Mind at Work: Valuing the Intelligence of the American Worker.  New York: Penguin Books.

UCLA School Mental Health Project (2025) Single-Sex Education: Pros & Cons. https://smhp.psych.ucla.edu/pdfdocs/singleeduc.pdf.

“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.