A few weeks ago, toward the end of the semester, I left my classroom, walked into sunshine and 80 degrees, and started crying. The weight of the semester was lifting, I knew that was part of it, but I was also feeling something closer to grief than relief. I don’t know what else to call it. I am sure someone is out there working on the various types of professional grief that folks have been experiencing lately (or maybe for a long time, though I’m thinking of Covid cancellations, death of NEH, etc.), but that’s the label I’ve landed on.

Before I go any further, know that I am going to try to write without self-censoring too much. It is already hard to say things that sound so silly in the context of the gestures-wildly-larger-dumpster-fire, but I want to do a little work to name feelings in addition to feeling them. I also want to add the disclaimer that nothing here should be taken as me dumping on my students. This is not, ultimately, a them problem.

I walked out of that classroom feeling like I was saying goodbye to my pedagogy as I knew it. Like everything that I’ve been learning and tweaking for the past 10+ years in the classroom is useless now. The semester felt like a failure. I felt like a failure personally, but I was also resentful over being made to feel like a failure by forces much larger than myself. This was the term where AI finally won.

I can hear some of you saying, wait isn’t your whole program about responding to technology? Why weren’t you prepared? You should have been the early adopter!

I don’t feel like I’ve had my head in the sand, an accusation often thrown about by the tech bros. Trust me, I read the discourse. But what I don’t do is play around or experiment or vibe code because I ultimately have ethical issues with, if not the whole thing, a lot of the things about AI. I’m not going to cover all of them, but I don’t like made up facts. I like finding sources and I like critiquing sources and I like doing it myself. I grow my own tomatoes and I sew my own clothes and I am fortunate to have a job where I get to build things with other people I like using skills I like to exercise. I do not have a latent desire to make an app and monetize it. I do not need someone to find an AirBnb for me or summarize a novel or make a travel itinerary. Maybe I do need someone to help me write some code sometimes or transcribe hours of audio. I definitely would like someone to do the dishes. But mostly I like to do the research. I like to make lists of lists (librarians lol). I like to know actual things myself. I like to make bad art.

So setting aside the ethical and environmental issues, I just don’t really like the thing! Add in a layer of instant turnoff when the AI evangelist rhetoric starts flowing. I don’t care what Chatty G has to say about that question. I don’t want to see the generated image in your slides or social media post. I will be concerned about you if you tell me you’re treating your anxiety with a chatbot. I will be annoyed if you answer my request for your expertise with an LLM query. I will roll my eyes when you joke about your agents fighting like they’re battle bots during a campus presentation.

The problem is that while I’ve been over here being judgy (and teaching upper level courses), my students have been using it constantly. I used to be very aware of how my students used (or didn’t) technology. I knew the problems they would run into or the mistakes they would make when I asked them to complete any number of activities for my 101 course. That is all gone now. They are using Chat (even calling it that is wild to me) constantly for things that would never occur to me. And that is a big problem for my pedagogy. Because not only would it not occur to me to use Chat for something, I also would actively avoid using it unless I had to. Why would I want to risk it being wrong? But this semester I watched students use LLMs and sometimes Claude Code to basically do every single thing I ever ask students to do. They had it pulled up in class to summarize the readings. Obviously it was there to write basic HTML and CSS. It made data visualizations. It did all the reading and writing. It found and synthesized sources (including many that we do not subscribe to! Amazingly enough). It came up with project topics. It did some web scraping. Some students in a colleague’s class used Grok to generate a dataset of Tweets for a research project (what could go wrong?!). The only thing I’m not sure it did was actually navigate the labyrinth of WordPress design menus. It even summarized the final presentations before they had even happened!

Unfortunately, my initial instinct was/is to be angry. It sucks that even at a school with an honor system, with a clear AI policy for the class, students can’t not use it. It sucks for me - that feeling of being bottom of the list, of wasting my time grading something that a student won’t bother spending their own time on. It sucks to read something that I know they’re not capable of writing - not because they’re not all very smart, but because the language is too full of professional jargon for it to be real. It’s generic, it’s impersonal, it’s so precisely calculated to be “right.” It sucks to know that I’ve contributed to this mess any time I’ve had a student publish work online. It sucks they think I’m stupid enough that I can’t tell.

And it sucks for them! They’re over-scheduled, they’re overwhelmed, they’re afraid of failure, they are all aware of the shitty job market and the cost of their education. Why would they risk having a bad grade? They’re not ignorant either. They can sense what is happening to them - that’s part of the reason they end up in my class.

The last few weeks of the term are mainly open work sessions for their semester-long project (this time a digital essay, write first, then build out website with media/data). During one of these sessions, a student called me over to ask if it was okay that she used Chat for a data visualization because she couldn’t figure out Google Sheets. I asked, do you want me to show you how to do it? And she said, yeah I guess since my project is about AI taking over jobs I should try to learn something. I showed her what to do and it took about two seconds. Three clicks, including the click that happened in her head. But it was a much larger moment for me. The level of discomfort or not-knowing that students can tolerate has taken (another) drastic free fall. The discomfort and failure feelings are ones I pay a lot of attention to (I wrote about this in a chapter called “A Pedagogy of Trial and Error”). But AI has made everything so smooth, so easy, that it’s harder for them to stomach that discomfort. It’s also called into question the point of learning how to do anything “by hand.” It was pretty clear from in class and written comments that students weren’t sure of the purpose of what they were learning. While I definitely consider it my job to articulate that purpose, I completely understand why they might be wondering: is there a world where we will actually have to click any buttons or understand the architecture behind anything?

I teach basic HTML and CSS at the beginning of every class, mostly as a vehicle for communicating a lot of other things. We talk about the history of the web, what it looks like to write code, how to learn new tech, using a reference source, text editors, how the internet works, design, social life of Geocities, how folks study the internet (Ian Milligan’s History in the Age of Abundance? is great here). I admit that I’m not always successful with the “this is a vehicle” part of the messaging. Sometimes students overvalue HTML as a Hard Skill while others question its utility in the modern world. Both are fair takes, but miss the point. This term, it felt like everything we covered ended up in this “retro skill why bother” category. What a weird feeling! To be a dinosaur before I’m 40. AI is moving so fast that my seniors can’t finish a project on it before it is out of date. Curriculum has no chance.

None of my students directly pointed to AI in their final comments as the thing we should be learning instead. They just didn’t see value in the things we did cover. That’s on me for sure! But there were times during the term where we drifted into more existential territory. Like I was the only one who was participating in the social contract of College. Like it was an affront that I was asking them to learn something not already on their list. The majority of the students did their project on AI’s impact on something and mostly that something was my intended career path. They are feeling a sense of unease too. I’m sure the demographics of my students matter here. AI is forcing my upper middle class students to think about their career security in a way that they never have before. I know there are many, many teachers who have been dealing with students in more challenging circumstances for a long time. But there is something different about this moment. It’s a little gaslighty. I feel like I’m grasping at things that are slipping away and my students are looking at me like I’m crazy. Crazy for saying you can’t turn in something with fake citations or incorrect facts. Crazy for asking them to write a paper with their own brains. But then I read the news and who can blame them? Maybe they are the ones more connected to reality!?!

In some ways it feels a little like the bifurcated reality of Covid. There were plenty of people who kept living life as usual and plenty of people who didn’t. I taught a fully virtual class in spring of 2020 and I had students Zooming in on their way to the golf course. Many of my friends and colleagues are not interested in AI or are actively critical. However, at my university, the dominant voices are AI evangelists from the business school or this vague “why aren’t you doing more with AI” question that is never asked directly by administrators but is in the water somehow. I know this is a bit of a false binary, but it is a weird time! There is a dynamic where people don’t feel comfortable asking questions or expressing opinions because of the dominant rhetoric. I am frequently in meetings where people avoid asking pointed questions because they don’t want to offend someone who is using AI inappropriately. It can be a bit isolating. Bizarre to be biting your tongue over software.

I have no answers. I will redo this class this summer, somehow. I’m not going to do blue books or oral exams or any of the other retro solutions. I am going to bring together some faculty and staff to talk about humanistic approaches. I will have more conversations with students. I already feel better having articulated some of my values and sources of anger. I will remember that this is just my job, that I am getting paid to do it. I will continue to make bad art and start seeds and mend clothing and read whole books in the sunshine.