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Listen up, if only for a minute. Put the phone face-down, close the forty tabs, and listen.
You know the message. You’ve seen the message. You are deep in the thing, the real thing, the lesson adaptation is finally coming together like a fist, and the machine clears its throat and tells you, in a voice not unlike that of a hotel front desk clerk telling you the pool is closed, that you have used up your allotment of thinking for the day. Come back at two. Be a good boy.
I have been chewing on that little gray rectangle all week, and I want you to understand that I am not being cute. Not this time. Because everywhere I looked, people were arguing about the same thing in different clothes.
Everybody’s mad about the message. I’m not. The message is the one honest thing in the building. It tells you there is a limit, and it tells you who set it. Now look at what happened this week in the places where nobody posts a message at all.
One. A school board in Maryland switched on Gemini for every middle and high schooler, told the teachers they’d decide when kids could use it, and then discovered the teachers couldn’t turn it off. The parents hadn’t been told. A month later the board banned the whole business, pre-K through twelfth grade, by a vote of six to one. And in Chicago, a school looked at the noisy, sweating, argumentative work of teaching and put the kids in phone-booth pods with a laptop. Whatever you think of either decision, ask yourself who got a vote. Not the kids. Not the teachers. A limit nobody who lives under it helped set isn’t a limit. It’s a verdict.
Two. A limit that can’t say what it’s for is just a mood. Laura Spencer says it better than I will this week: a review tells you what's allowed; it never tells you what it’s aimed at. So we drift, and the defaults decide, and the settings menu becomes the curriculum. Kevin Kelly thinks that in fifty years AI will be air, so thoroughly everywhere that you only notice it when it goes down. Fine. But a veteran teacher with 39 years in the classroom wrote that the argument over direct instruction versus discovery has always been faux, because the good ones mix both and know why. Purpose first. Tool second. Always in that order.
Three. One English teacher turned two hundred and fifty-two agents loose on a fantasy basketball draft. Fourteen and a half hours of work. They couldn't tell you afterward what most of it was. I want you to hold onto that sentence the way you’d hold a live wire, because that is us, every one of us, handing off work we cannot audit and calling it productivity. The job now is not to stop the machines. The job is to teach kids to steer them, and to look under the hood when the hood opens.
Who sets the limit? Who gets to say enough? The machine? The board? The vendor with the pitch deck and the glassy smile? Or the kid in the third row who still has the nerve to ask why?
I don’t know. I’m just a codgery old man trying to make his way through a world on fire, not a prophet. But I know which side of the wall I’d rather be standing on when the clerk comes back from lunch.
Here are ten things. Read them before two o’clock.
A Maryland school board voted 6-1 to ban student AI use from pre-K through 12th grade after a Gemini rollout that teachers couldn’t switch off and that parents hadn’t heard about, and Laura Spencer reads it less as Frederick County’s failure than as a warning about any decision that passes a compliance review without anyone saying out loud what it’s for.
What do you learn from the last time a successful school network bet big on a shiny new tool? Michael Horn and Diane Tavenner sit down to unpack Summit Learning, and Tavenner pushes back hard on the “it flopped” story, pointing to the hundreds of schools that redesigned themselves around it and kept going even after the platform went away.
Picture handing an AI 89 agents’ worth of work on your fantasy basketball draft and then not being able to say what any of them did for 14.5 hours. That’s how one English teacher-turned-AI-educator makes the case that “agentic” should describe students too, reaching back to Plato’s charioteer to argue that kids need to be in the driver’s seat while adults ride shotgun with a hand near the brake.
Curmudgucation calls the direct instruction vs. discovery argument one of education’s fauxest debates, since no capable teacher he’s ever met uses only one, and after 39 years in the classroom he lands on a third option he calls exploration and examination.
“No teachers, only AI apps” is the pitch, and CBS News has now looked at Alpha School’s Chicago opening, where kids curl up in phone-booth-sized pods, staring at laptops while the school claims they learn two to three times faster.
Why did England and Scotland slide so far on PISA from 2000 to 2005 while America improved, and why did England and Estonia hold steady after 2015 while most of the OECD declined? Tyler Cowen says those patterns make it hard to pin everything on screens or education systems, and he’d like the screens-are-the-cause crowd to explain them.
Seth Godin sorts schools into two schools of thought: one built around culture, compliance, and community, teaching kids how to be kids, citizens, and eventually adults, and another he sets against it.
Kevin Kelly bets that in fifty years AI won’t be one huge brain in the sky but something more like air, a swarm of countless small minds so woven into cars, kitchens and doors that we only notice it when it goes down, and he thinks managing it will feel more like gardening than engineering.
Austin Kleon, fresh off watching an excavator flatten a house at the end of his street, wonders whether we’re a teardown or a fixer-upper, picking up last week’s newsletter thought that anything that can be built can be torn down.
With Anne Carson newly a Nobel laureate, Elisa Gabbert writes that the Canadian poet is the easiest difficult poet, formally audacious and mind-bogglingly wide-ranging but far too funny to be intimidating, and she remembers being assigned Men in the Off Hours in a college poetry workshop and being baffled and amazed.
That’s it, kids. Tune in next week for the next exciting adventure, same Mike-time, same Mike-channel.