Cinemorphosis

Tag: education

  • Give Me Chaos and I Will Make You a Syllabus

    Give Me Chaos and I Will Make You a Syllabus

    If you are a good college instructor, you provide a haven for your students. By haven, I mean that you give them structure and order in a world of chaos and nonsense. There is a world outside the classroom, and it is a tempest of confusion, trickery, deception, wild-goose chases, chimeras, and misguided Holy Grails. Inside a young person’s mind, the world can resemble a jumble of blurry lines, flashing lights, and static on a 1960s television with a faulty UHF antenna. As an instructor, you have to pull your students out of that blinding, cacophonous television set.

    Your first job is to understand that they are rather comfortable living there. Just as a fish doesn’t know it’s wet after spending its entire life in water, students don’t necessarily know they live in confusion because confusion is their default environment. You have to make them see the disorder of their living space, persuade them that it is not normal, and convince them to look for an exit.

    This part of your class does not feel like a haven because it is disruptive. You must, as Kafka writes of good literature, be the axe that breaks their frozen ocean. You must create tumult. Students should occasionally feel as if the ground has been removed from beneath their feet. They should feel disoriented, even vertiginous.

    But this is where the haven enters. It is your course syllabus.

    The syllabus contains your purpose—not merely the official student learning outcomes but what educators Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe call Enduring Understandings. These are the large ideas students should carry with them long after the class is over. If you’re teaching a unit on the life of Frederick Douglass, for example, you don’t merely teach the courage of an adolescent who defied laws forbidding him to read and write. You teach that the interiority produced by advanced literacy allows a person to understand and crave freedom in ways that would otherwise be unavailable.

    But your syllabus contains more than course purpose, student learning outcomes, and Enduring Understandings. It contains the manual for implementing those goals. You give students a purpose, a structure, a timeline, and a method.

    That is the haven.

    There is something very American about the course syllabus. By American, I mean that our culture is embedded in the optimistic belief that we can fix things. The world is broken because, in part, people are broken, but give us the right how-to manual and we will get to work. Because we grow up with this belief, we tend to take free will and self-agency for granted. We can improve particular forms of intelligence, critical thinking, communication skills, marital intimacy, leadership, and financial stewardship. We can learn to write screenplays, become comedians, actors, yoga instructors, computer programmers, and whatever else the instructional manual promises.

    We recognize few bounds. We can pull ourselves up by our bootstraps. We can transcend economic and social class and ascend to the highest altitudes of American finance and status, where presumably everyone has a personal chef and a diversified portfolio.

    College instructors participate in this national faith. Depending on what course we teach, we provide a syllabus that is more than a schedule of due dates. It is more than a manual. It is an affirmation of self-agency and the hope of self-reinvention. It provides a haven of order and structure in a world of chaos.

    So being an instructor is a big deal. In fact, the word instructor doesn’t capture the gravitas of our calling. Perhaps another term is required. Perhaps we should be called priestocrats. Our very existence and role in society constitute an argument for self-improvement, self-agency, and order in a chaotic world.

    As someone who has taught college and written syllabi for forty years, do I really believe all this?

    I honestly don’t know.

    But I do know this: Writing a syllabus is enormously comforting because it makes me feel ordered and structured in a world of chaos. A syllabus gives me the sensation of control. I love writing them so much that I can imagine retiring from teaching less than a year from now and continuing to write syllabi “just for fun.” I will scour essays from various authors, discover some thematic through-line connecting them, and create an imaginary sixteen-week course complete with reading and writing assignments. There will be an Enduring Understanding, of course. There will be a telos, a higher purpose. There will probably be due dates even though no students exist.

    I will never stop writing syllabi because I have the Syllabus Gene.

    The gene revealed itself early. When I was thirteen, I became an Olympic weightlifter and, shortly afterward, a bodybuilder. I spent hours in my father’s office, where he had a beautiful blue IBM Selectric typewriter. I would type workouts, read them over, revise them, throw away the paper, and begin again. Each new version seemed to bring me closer to the haven of the Perfect Workout, the program that would optimize my fitness and provide the order I craved.

    The world was chaotic. The average man looked like a tomato with four toothpicks sticking out of him, and by God, I was going to create a manual that would spare me that indignity.

    Looking back, the connection seems obvious. The thirteen-year-old typing workout schedules on an IBM Selectric and the college instructor constructing sixteen-week composition courses are essentially the same person. Give me chaos and I will make categories. Give me confusion and I will create a sequence. Give me sixteen weeks and I will assign due dates.

    Perhaps that is what I have been doing for forty years. I thought I was creating a haven for my students. Maybe I was creating one for myself as well.

    So I am retiring from teaching college writing.

    But I will always write a syllabus.

    My sanity depends on it.

  • I Lived in the Before Times

    I Lived in the Before Times

    The Boomer shaking his fist at the television while denouncing the stupidity of the world—or standing on his lawn, arms akimbo, broadcasting his bitter displeasure with the neighborhood’s rapid decline—is an archetype of a particular kind of pathetic old-timer. He cannot accept his growing misalignment with the world. His rage is fundamentally rooted in fear: he is living in a world he no longer understands and increasingly lacks the ability to navigate. Unable to adapt, he acts out. He is a man sinking in quicksand with no rope within reach.

    Understood this way, retirement and old age are partly about misalignment and the primal terror of becoming isolated by it.

    It is tempting to dismiss the Boomer accordingly. He is simply curdling in old age and knows there is nothing he can do about it. Like the Wicked Witch screaming, “I’m melting!” he is slowly disappearing from the world.

    But we oversimplify the Boomer’s demise at our own peril. Two seemingly contradictory things can be true. On one hand, the Boomer really is misaligned with the world and may lack some of the adaptive skills necessary to flourish in it. On the other hand, some of his roots in the past point toward a superior way of being.

    I’m talking about reading.

    I’m talking about reading a paragraph containing complex ideas and understanding it.

    Not just a paragraph, either. A long essay. Even a book.

    The Boomer has lived in the Before and After Times. In the Before Times, his brain was trained for sustained reading. He processed the world through text, made sense of his place in it, and constructed a worldview by reading enormous amounts of material. Through reading, he learned to identify patterns, cycles, sophistry, trickery, deception, charlatanism, and occasionally authenticity.

    He was literate.

    The After Times are considerably less hospitable to literacy. We now spend large portions of our lives inside engagement farms, euphemistically called “social media platforms,” where fragmented attention is not a design flaw but the business model. The platforms compete to keep us clicking, swiping, gawking, raging, desiring, and returning. Sustained thought must compete against an industrial apparatus designed to interrupt it.

    The Boomer terrified by his misalignment therefore confronts an uncomfortable paradox. He legitimately fears his own growing ineptitude while also witnessing a different kind of ineptitude spreading around him: people losing their tolerance for sustained attention.

    Living in a post-reading society and knowing the difference because you lived in the Before Times is a peculiar privilege of age. I have students who were in sixth grade when the pandemic denied them anything resembling normal schooling for nearly two years. They spent much of their adolescence with TikTok, Instagram Reels, Snapchat, YouTube, and Roblox. Reading rarely occupied the center of this world. When assigned, it could feel less like intellectual discovery than community service for toilet-papering somebody’s house.

    Short video clips engineered to deliver immediate stimulation became the staple product of the engagement farms young people carried everywhere in their slender glass bricks. Childish Gambino captured something about this condition in “This Is America.” Violence and social breakdown erupt throughout the video while dancing, spectacle, and entertainment continually hijack our attention. The catastrophe is happening right in front of us, but something more stimulating keeps wandering into the foreground.

    If someone as young and culturally fluent as Childish Gambino can suggest that we are losing ourselves inside spectacle and distraction, the old Boomer ranting on his lawn suddenly deserves another hearing.

    There really was a Before Times when sustained literacy occupied a larger place in ordinary intellectual life, and its erosion has consequences. This is the subject of James Marriott’s The New Dark Ages: The Death of Reading and the Dawn of the Post-Literate Society. As part of his research, Marriott contacted senior academics who told him that it was becoming increasingly difficult to assign a novel and expect students to read it within a week.

    I can attest to the larger problem. Assign long books and many students won’t read them. Some will drop the class. Eventually word spreads that you assign books, and students may avoid your section unless circumstances force them into it. You can assign one short book and give students the entire semester to read it. Even that is no longer a surefire proposition.

    I saw the accelerated decline of books in my own classrooms around 2012, almost exactly when smartphones reached critical mass and became mandatory accessories. Around that time, the lavish visits from textbook representatives began disappearing. No more kiosks and catered food. No more giant boxes of composition readers, essay collections, and grammar books arriving at our offices for inspection. The hundred-dollar composition textbook began its long march toward extinction. Even the used-book buyers vanished—the cheerful scavengers who once wandered into our offices and handed us cash for unwanted textbooks gathering dust on our shelves.

    College is a business. The business model had changed.

    Students were finding cheaper alternatives to outrageously priced textbooks, which was often a welcome development. But something larger was changing at the same time. We were increasingly creating classroom content for students living inside an information environment that competed directly against sustained reading.

    To my credit, I have adapted. I now break reading and writing assignments into shorter visual components using Google Slides. I make the concepts visible. I map arguments. I isolate terms. I provide examples.

    But sometimes I wonder whether adaptation has quietly become accommodation.

    I find myself hand-feeding information more than I did in the past. Instead of asking students to wrestle with a difficult text until they extract its argument, I increasingly extract the argument, put it on a slide, define the terms, provide the mapping components, and lead them through the analysis. The very skills I want reading to develop are sometimes the skills students need before they can tolerate the reading.

    There is the trap.

    So yes, I am misaligned.

    I am the aging man standing on the lawn wondering what happened to the neighborhood. I lived in the Before Times, and part of me will always remain there.

    But misalignment does not necessarily mean error.

    Sometimes the old man yelling from the lawn really is yelling at a fire.

  • Bulking Up

    Bulking Up

    On the very day it became clear to me that I needed to put guardrails on AI editing—telling it to keep 90% of my original content to prevent my writing from morphing from my natural bodybuilder self into the PED-bloated version—I attended my daughters’ high school open house, where their English teacher told us she was teaching the students AI literacy. This entailed helping them use AI to “bulk up their resumes” because, in a competitive world where everyone was using AI, our children could not afford not to use generative AI. In fact, the teacher said, AI itself is now sorting through resumes and discarding the ones that aren’t sufficiently juiced up.

    It became clear to me that we are living inside a contradiction. On the one hand, writing needs to be “bulked up” and “on the juice” simply to compete with other AI-enhanced writing. On the other hand, in our post-reading society, where literacy rates are in steep decline, writing itself has never seemed more forlorn and withered. We are producing prose with bigger muscles at precisely the moment when our own writing muscles are beginning to atrophy.

    I was living through a cataclysmic moment in history. My personal retirement from teaching college writing had dovetailed with the world’s collective retirement from the kinds of literary pastimes that develop interiority and critical thinking. Reading books was becoming a rarity. Books had been displaced by sports gambling and short-form videos. To complicate matters, Rose Horowitch observes in “The End of Reading Is Here” that Americans have never read so much. The problem is that much of what they are reading is slop: “bulked up” AI writing, threads, captions, and text messages. Horowitch points to UCLA cognitive neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf, who argues that “people are losing the ability to think deeply about writing.” The brain muscles required for this kind of thinking are atrophying, perhaps to the point of no return. As a result, we are moving toward a postliterate society.

    This is not a stagnant condition. It gets progressively worse. New generations may read less and less. They may become increasingly inclined to see teachers’ reading assignments as punitive. Bereft of strong reading and writing skills, they will need AI to “bulk up” their assigned writing more and more.

    Members of a postliterate society are vulnerable because they live increasingly at the surface level. They don’t dig underneath a text to find subtext, subtlety, and contradiction. They struggle to identify the logical fallacies that accompany manipulation. They can become more vulnerable to demagogues and more susceptible to being duped. A society that loses these habits of critical reading also risks weakening the habits of thought on which democratic life depends.

    A postliterate society also loses something of its humanity when its members can no longer recognize the richness of what, in good writing, we call authorial presence. To savor such presence in the writing of James Baldwin, H. L. Mencken, Evelyn Waugh, and Annie Dillard is part of being human.

    Not all is lost. Humans still find authorial presence in YouTube presentations, podcasts, and musical artists. No amount of AI “bulking up” can replicate the spectacular music and persona of SZA.

    But authorial presence in writing may be disappearing. “Bulking up” writing may eventually mean the death of writing.

    I may not simply be retiring from teaching writing. I may be retiring at the very moment I have become increasingly misaligned with a world that is uncoupling itself from literacy while diligently bulking up its resumes. 

  • I Wanted My Own Sentences Back

    I Wanted My Own Sentences Back

    It was the middle of September when my Medicare card arrived in the mail. I held it for a moment and studied my name printed beneath the red, white, and blue bands. It felt like a rite of passage, another bureaucratic marker on the road to retirement. No ceremony. No gold watch. Just a government-issued card informing me that I had entered a new demographic.

    That same day, I held a Zoom office hour. One student showed up. I told her I was retiring, and somehow our conversation wandered from Mr. T as an icon of the 1980s to whether AI could replicate the music of SZA to Zach Cregger’s Weapons, which she was writing about for her essay. We talked about how the movie could be frightening and funny at the same time. Before leaving, she told me she felt fortunate to have taken my critical thinking class before I retired. I thanked her. After forty years of teaching, you learn not to brush aside a compliment from a student. You put it in your pocket.

    After the Zoom meeting, I started thinking about the tools that had changed my teaching. Google Docs was one of the great breakthroughs. A student’s paper no longer had to exist as a stack of stapled pages handed across a desk. The document floated somewhere in the cloud, a kind of fairy manuscript that student and teacher could enter simultaneously, revising sentences together from different locations.

    Then my wife introduced me to Google Slides. Once I realized how visually my students processed information, I practically lived on Slides. An assignment that seemed hopelessly dense on a two-page handout could become intelligible when broken into a sequence of clean visual ideas. I can scarcely imagine the final seven years of my teaching career without it.

    Then came generative AI.

    At first, AI seemed like another extraordinary professional tool. It accelerated research. It intensified brainstorming. It helped me develop assignment prompts, test arguments, generate counterarguments, and discover connections I might have overlooked.

    But AI was different from Docs and Slides because it didn’t merely change how I presented my writing. It could change the writing itself.

    For my first three years using generative AI, I became intoxicated by its powers of augmentation. Give it an ordinary paragraph and it could return something brighter, sharper, funnier, and more muscular. It added metaphors, jokes, comparisons, rhythms, and linguistic tricks I hadn’t conceived myself. The results were seductive precisely because they sounded better.

    There was only one problem. Increasingly, they didn’t sound like me.

    I think of those old photo cutout boards at cowboy-themed restaurants and tourist traps. You stand behind a painted cowboy and stick your head through a hole. The photograph contains your face, but everything below your neck belongs to somebody else: narrow waist, six-shooter, boots, chaps, heroic posture. Technically, you’re in the picture. But that isn’t your body.

    AI can do the same thing to prose. Your ideas and anecdotes remain visible through the hole, but the rhetorical body surrounding them belongs to the machine.

    My second metaphor is less flattering. AI became my literary performance-enhancing drug.

    Without AI, I was the natural bodybuilder. Maybe I looked pretty good. Nothing spectacular, but the muscles were mine. Then I discovered rhetorical steroids. Suddenly I could walk onto the stage swollen with metaphors, acid wit, vivid descriptions, elaborate comparisons, and perfectly engineered sentences. Every paragraph flexed.

    Worse, I learned how to order the injections.

    “Rewrite the following with lucid prose, acid wit, and vivid descriptions.”

    That became one of my favorite prompts. I would feed AI a perfectly serviceable piece of writing and watch it return wearing a posing thong and covered in bronzer. My paragraph hadn’t been edited. It had been juiced.

    I loved it.

    Then a regular reader of my blog finally had enough.

    After reading one particularly steroidal post, he left an angry comment filled with expletives. His opening line was memorable:

    “Hey, Boomer, cut the shit.”

    He told me to tone it down. He was tired of the verbal pyrotechnics. Tired of the relentless jokes and metaphors. Tired, though he didn’t use my metaphor, of watching the Technicolor 4K bodybuilder flex under the stage lights.

    I apologized and told him I would tone it down. He later apologized for snapping at me. He’d had a bad morning, he explained, and admitted that he actually enjoyed reading my blog.

    “No worries,” I wrote back. “Thanks for the honest feedback.”

    And I meant it.

    His irritation had exposed something I had been reluctant to admit. I had become so accustomed to AI-enhanced prose that ordinary writing began to look inadequate to me. I had trained my eyes on rhetorical 4K until my natural prose looked like a 250-nit IPS screen. I kept turning up the resolution, contrast, saturation, and brightness until eventually somebody in the audience yelled for me to turn the damn thing down.

    So I changed my AI prompt.

    “Edit the following for syntax, grammar, and clarity, but keep 95 percent of my original language.”

    I call it the 95 Percent Rule. AI remains a powerful professional tool, but the rule establishes a boundary: the machine can clean the window; it doesn’t get to replace the view.

    I eventually shared the rule with my students under “Academic Integrity and Best Practices.” It seemed fitting. After years of warning students about outsourcing their thinking to generative AI, I had discovered that I needed guardrails of my own.

    That realization arrived at an appropriate moment. My Medicare card was sitting on my desk. Retirement was approaching. Forty years of teaching had taken me from paper essays to documents floating in the cloud, from classroom handouts to Google Slides, and finally to machines capable of rewriting a person’s sentences in seconds.

    The tools had changed my teaching. Some had even changed the way my brain worked.

    Now, as I prepared to leave the classroom, I had one more thing to retire.

    The cowboy body could go back behind the plywood.

    The PED-bloated bodybuilder could leave the stage.

    I wanted my own sentences back.

  • You Can Take My Office, but Not My Syllabus

    You Can Take My Office, but Not My Syllabus

    As Steve Lopez interrogates the strange psychological territory of retirement in Independence Day, I discovered an unnerving similarity between us. Lopez can be on vacation, officially released from work, walking around somewhere he is presumably supposed to be relaxing, and still find himself composing a newspaper column in his head. Nobody assigned it. No editor is waiting for it. There is no deadline. Yet the sentences begin assembling themselves anyway. After decades of journalism, the column has become a phantom limb. The job may be absent, but he can still feel it twitching.

    I understand the condition because I suffer from my own occupational haunting. Mine is the syllabus.

    To most people, writing a syllabus sounds like administrative dentistry. They imagine policies, due dates, grading percentages, office hours, and several pages of warnings about plagiarism. I experience something entirely different. Writing a syllabus is glorious. It is the intellectual equivalent of sitting at the master control panel of a spacecraft, surrounded by switches, blinking lights, and navigational screens while plotting a sixteen-week journey through the cosmos.

    Everything matters. Where does the first reading go? Which essay prepares students for the documentary? When do I introduce the counterargument? Which assignment arrives too early? Which one needs another week to ripen? I move readings forward and backward as if positioning armies before a decisive battle. A good syllabus has rhythm, escalation, reversals, callbacks, and a climax. It is not a calendar. It is narrative architecture.

    And I always want the final week to deliver the intellectual equivalent of the ending of the original Planet of the Apes. Charlton Heston rides along the beach, sees the Statue of Liberty half buried in the sand, falls to his knees, and realizes what has happened. That is Week Sixteen. I want the semester’s earlier ideas suddenly locking together. I want the students to see that the course they thought they were taking was actually about something larger. I want the Statue of Liberty sticking out of the sand.

    Then I can retire the course with a mic drop.

    When I am building a syllabus, I enter flow—that peculiar condition in which concentration becomes so complete that time disappears. I can sit down at five in the morning intending to move one reading and look up two hours later having reconstructed half the semester. Breakfast has been forgotten. Coffee has gone cold. The outside world has temporarily ceased operations. I am exactly where I want to be.

    This creates a problem for retirement.

    What happens when there are no more courses?

    I call it the Phantom Syllabus Principle: after decades of constructing courses, the professional task survives the profession that required it. Retirement can eliminate the classroom, the paycheck, the meetings, the grading, and the students, but it cannot necessarily shut down the machinery that spent forty years arranging ideas into sixteen-week journeys.

    I can already see the pathology developing. Three years after retirement, I will be sitting at home reading some fascinating book when a thought strikes me: This would pair beautifully with “The Lottery.”

    There will be no class.

    This will not matter.

    Within twenty minutes, I will have identified the documentary, formulated the essay prompt, devised three mapping components, constructed a counterargument, and determined that the entire unit belongs in Week Seven rather than Week Five. By lunch I will have a Canvas module for students who do not exist.

    At first glance, this sounds like another warning about the inability to let go of work. But I think it points toward something more hopeful: The Unretirable Self.

    One of retirement’s great terrors is the fear that when the job disappears, the person attached to it disappears as well. If I am no longer Professor McMahon standing in front of a classroom, who exactly is left?

    Perhaps more than I thought.

    The parts of teaching that exhausted me can retire quite easily. Grading can retire. Committee meetings can retire. Student Learning Outcomes can retire with full honors and never contact me again. I will not lie awake yearning for another opportunity to enter assessment data into an institutional website.

    But the creative machinery may refuse the pension.

    That is because some activities we perform at work are not merely occupational duties. They are expressions of temperament. Lopez doesn’t compose columns only because the Los Angeles Times pays him. His mind naturally turns experience into narrative. I don’t construct intellectual sequences only because a college gives me three units and a classroom. My mind likes taking books, films, arguments, cultural phenomena, and stray observations and arranging them until they reveal something larger.

    That part of me may be unemployable after retirement.

    It will not be retired.

    Perhaps retirement does not require the wholesale invention of a replacement identity. Some identities were artificial scaffolding: title, office, department, schedule, institutional status. Those can come down. But underneath them may be habits of mind that belonged to us all along.

    The institution can take back my office. It can remove my name from the schedule. It can deactivate my email, assign my courses to somebody thirty years younger, and eventually erase nearly every institutional trace that I was ever there.

    Fine.

    But someday, long after my final class has ended, I will wake at five in the morning with the sudden realization that Week Sixteen needs a better ending.

  • Nobody Is Building a Statue of You

    Nobody Is Building a Statue of You

    Part of the panic surrounding retirement comes from the suspicion that you are not merely leaving your job. You are disappearing.

    Consider all the colleagues you have known over the decades who retired before you. Some moved to Arizona, Oregon, or Florida. Others remained in the same Southern California houses where they had lived for thirty years. Some have died. But be honest: How often do you think about them?

    Not often.

    This can be unsettling because many of these people once occupied substantial real estate in your daily consciousness. You saw them in hallways. You stopped by their offices. You complained together about administrators. You sat beside them at meetings and exchanged glances when someone announced an exciting new initiative involving assessment. You knew who was getting divorced, who had bought a house, who hated the dean, who had developed sciatica, and who had recently discovered pickleball.

    Then they retired.

    Within a few years, they became characters from an earlier season of the show.

    Before condemning yourself as shallow, consider the obvious: they probably aren’t thinking much about you either.

    This is the reciprocal disappearing act of retirement. Out of sight, out of mind sounds callous, but it describes an essential economy of attention. Human beings cannot maintain equal psychological intimacy with everyone who has passed through their lives. You have to pay attention to the people standing in front of you. Your spouse. Your children. Your friends. Your current colleagues. The student sitting in your office explaining why he couldn’t submit his essay because Canvas apparently entered into a conspiracy against him.

    Forgetting is not necessarily indifference. Sometimes it is efficiency.

    The alternative would be madness. Imagine carrying every former colleague, neighbor, student, childhood friend, dentist, supervisor, gym acquaintance, and Trader Joe’s cashier around in your head at full emotional resolution. By sixty-five, your brain would resemble a Costco parking lot on the Saturday before Christmas.

    And yet, as retirement approaches, the ego rebels against this perfectly reasonable arrangement.

    Surely they won’t forget me.

    After all, I have been here for decades. I have taught thousands of students. I have developed courses, served on committees, attended meetings, written reports, helped colleagues, annoyed administrators, and contributed enough institutional labor to qualify as geological activity. My departure will leave a hole.

    A tremendous hole.

    This is the Meteor-Crater Delusion: the belief that your departure from an institution will leave such an enormous cavity that future generations will gather around it in reverent silence and contemplate the magnitude of the object that once occupied the space.

    You imagine the department staggering around after your retirement.

    “How are we going to replace Jeff?”

    “We can’t.”

    “What will happen to freshman composition?”

    “God help us.”

    Perhaps the college will install a bronze plaque outside my former office. Students will make pilgrimages. Faculty will speak in hushed tones about the ancient period when McMahon still roamed the corridors, carrying his coffee and complaining about Student Learning Outcomes.

    Then you retire.

    Someone gets your office.

    Someone gets your classes.

    Someone changes the password to something.

    By September, a new instructor is sitting in your chair eating a turkey sandwich.

    The crater has mysteriously filled itself.

    This realization can feel humiliating only if you misunderstand what a career was supposed to accomplish. The purpose was never to become irreplaceable. In fact, an institution that collapses when one sixty-five-year-old employee leaves is not an institution. It is a hostage situation.

    A better metaphor is the Baton Principle.

    Think of your career as one leg of a relay race. Long before you arrived, somebody else was running. That person taught the students, attended the meetings, complained about the parking, fought battles now forgotten, and eventually handed the baton forward.

    Then somebody handed it to you.

    You ran.

    You ran for forty years.

    You taught thousands of students. You read mountains of essays. You changed your courses, learned new technologies, survived new administrators, watched entire pedagogical religions rise and collapse, endured COVID, Zoom, smartphones, learning-management systems, declining reading stamina, and finally generative AI arriving at the classroom door with a flamethrower.

    That’s a respectable leg of the race.

    Now somebody else is waiting with an outstretched hand.

    Give her the baton.

    Do not clutch it to your chest screaming, “But what about my legacy?”

    Your legacy is that the race continues.

    This is where the Baton Principle corrects the Meteor-Crater Delusion. The immature ego wants to leave devastation behind as proof of its importance. Look at the enormous hole created by my absence! The mature person should hope for precisely the opposite. The students keep coming. The classes keep running. Younger professors bring different ideas. They discard some of yours. They preserve others without remembering where they came from. Eventually your fingerprints disappear from the institution altogether.

    Good.

    You did not spend forty years constructing a monument to yourself. You participated in something that existed before you and, with luck, will continue after you.

    There is dignity in accepting this because it frees you from one of retirement’s most poisonous confusions: mistaking disappearance from the workplace for disappearance from life.

    You are supposed to disappear from the workplace.

    That’s what retirement means.

    The mistake would be standing outside the college afterward, pressing your face against the glass, waiting for someone inside to notice that you are gone.

    Let them forget you.

    You will forget some of them too.

    Pass the baton. Leave the track. Go home. Become somebody appropriate to the life you have now rather than demanding that an institution preserve the person you used to be.

    The race continues.

    It just no longer requires you to keep running in it.

  • The 5-Stage AI Laundering Cycle: How Students Make Machine Writing Look Human

    The 5-Stage AI Laundering Cycle: How Students Make Machine Writing Look Human

    My college, like other places of higher learning, wants academic integrity, but some of my former students tell me they use AI more cleverly than they did four years ago to the point that it’s getting more and more difficult to detect AI-generated essays because of the AI Laundering Cycle: the five-stage process by which a student transforms machine-generated prose into something engineered to resemble authentic student writing. 

    Some of my former students admit they use AI differently from the way they did four years ago. The early adopters were almost charmingly unsophisticated. They generated an essay, copied it, pasted it into Canvas, and submitted prose so conspicuously artificial that a student who normally wrote “The guy was really mad” suddenly sounded like an associate professor of postcolonial theory. The evidence practically arrived wearing a name tag.

    That era is disappearing.

    Students are becoming more sophisticated at disguising synthetic prose, creating what I call the AI Laundering Cycle: the five-stage process by which machine-generated writing is transformed into something engineered to resemble authentic student work.

    Stage One is Generation. AI produces the original essay, relieving the student of the inconvenient business of developing ideas, wrestling with contradictions, organizing an argument, and composing sentences.

    Stage Two is Humanization. The essay goes through another AI pass designed to remove recognizable machine fingerprints: formulaic transitions, inflated vocabulary, suspiciously balanced paragraphs, excessive polish, and that relentlessly smooth cadence in which every sentence seems to have graduated from business school.

    Stage Three is Kiddification. Now comes the remarkable part. The student deliberately makes the writing worse. AI is instructed to lower the vocabulary, shorten sentences, flatten the analysis, introduce awkward phrasing, and otherwise transform competent synthetic prose into something more plausibly adolescent. Technology powerful enough to assist scientists and engineers is enlisted to make a freshman sound convincingly mediocre.

    Stage Four is Personalization. The student sprinkles in anecdotes, classroom references, opinions, favorite expressions, and other scraps of individuality. These details function as synthetic fingerprints: evidence of a human author manufactured after the human author has largely been removed from the writing process.

    Stage Five is Detection Grooming. Anything that still looks suspicious gets another trip through the car wash. Sentences are regenerated. Paragraphs are simplified. AI markers are scrubbed away until the student believes the essay can pass as organically human.

    The result is a peculiar form of intellectual money laundering. One machine generates the contraband. Another washes it. Another rubs dirt back onto it for authenticity. The student supervises the operation and eventually submits the finished product as evidence of learning.

    To be fair, this process requires some labor. A student who completes all five stages may spend considerable time prompting, comparing, editing, personalizing, and grooming the finished essay.

    But this is not much of a deterrent.

    Even elaborate AI laundering demands only a fraction of the intellectual labor required to write an authentic college essay through multiple drafts. Genuine composition requires you to confront the blank page, generate ideas, discover what you actually think, find evidence, recognize weaknesses in your argument, reorganize paragraphs, abandon bad ideas, develop better ones, and rewrite sentences until they finally say what you intended them to say. AI laundering allows the student to outsource most of that difficult cognitive work and concentrate instead on disguising the outsourcing.

    The efficiency advantage is simply too great.

    That is why I see few countervailing forces capable of stopping the practice. We can prohibit unauthorized AI. We can lecture about academic integrity. We can deploy detection software. We can require process work. We can design more personalized assignments. All of these measures may help.

    But the economic logic of effort remains brutally simple: if authentic writing requires ten units of cognitive labor and convincing AI laundering requires two, a substantial number of exhausted, distracted, overcommitted, or simply opportunistic students will choose two.

    And the technology will keep improving.

    The great irony is that students may become increasingly skilled at producing essays that look exactly like the essays they are becoming less capable of writing.

  • The Bureaucratic Metabolism Principle

    The Bureaucratic Metabolism Principle

    One of the more disturbing observations in Annie Lowrey’s The Time Tax is the sheer scale of the administrative machinery Americans have constructed in the name of providing government services. Lowrey describes a federal apparatus supported by millions of contractors and expenditures measured in trillions of dollars. You might reasonably assume that an institution possessing such staggering resources would operate with the terrifying efficiency of a Swiss watch. Surely, if you feed enough money, personnel, computers, consultants, administrators, contractors, databases, task forces, oversight committees, and strategic initiatives into a system, eventually somebody will answer the telephone.

    You would be wrong.

    Something peculiar happens as bureaucracies grow. Rather than becoming progressively more efficient, they can become increasingly preoccupied with administering themselves. More employees require more managers. More managers require more departments. More departments require more coordination. Coordination requires meetings. Meetings generate initiatives. Initiatives require implementation teams. Implementation teams require assessment. Assessment requires data. Data requires software. Software requires contractors. Contractors require contracts. Contracts require compliance officers. Compliance officers require reports demonstrating compliance with the procedures established to monitor compliance.

    Eventually, you have constructed an enormous administrative perpetual-motion machine whose principal accomplishment is keeping itself in motion.

    Call this the Bureaucratic Metabolism Principle: the tendency of sufficiently large institutions to consume increasing quantities of their own resources simply keeping themselves alive.

    Personnel administer personnel. Departments coordinate departments. Contractors oversee contractors. Administrators supervise administrators. Committees establish subcommittees. Meetings generate follow-up meetings whose primary agenda item is determining what was accomplished at the previous meeting. Every new layer of complexity creates the need for another layer whose purpose is to manage the complexity created by the previous layer.

    The bureaucracy begins to resemble an enormous animal with an increasingly ravenous metabolism. At first, you feed it resources so that it can perform a useful function. But as the creature grows, more and more of what you feed it is required merely to sustain its enormous body. Soon it requires thousands of employees, millions of labor hours, sprawling computer networks, armies of contractors, server farms, consultants, compliance departments, and enough acronyms to construct a second English language.

    The organism no longer eats to serve.

    It serves in order to eat.

  • The Vicarious Retirement Effect

    The Vicarious Retirement Effect

    For the last few years, several colleagues about ten years younger than I am have been asking me the same question with suspicious regularity:

    “When are you going to retire?”

    At first, I wondered if they knew something I didn’t. Perhaps my teaching evaluations had collapsed. Perhaps students were complaining that the old man kept referring to something called a “newspaper.” Perhaps a secret departmental committee had concluded that I was blocking the natural advancement of younger faculty and was waiting for me to shuffle toward the exit so someone else could inherit my office.

    But that wasn’t it.

    They didn’t want to get rid of me.

    They wanted me to escape.

    More precisely, they wanted me to escape first.

    Call this the Vicarious Retirement Effect: the tendency of still-employed colleagues to become unusually invested in someone else’s retirement because his departure allows them to rehearse their own escape psychologically. The prospective retiree becomes an advance scout sent beyond the walls of the institution to determine whether civilization exists on the other side. Does the pension arrive? Can you afford groceries? Do you become bored? Do you lose your identity? Do you wander around Costco at eleven in the morning wearing sweatpants and staring blankly at rotisserie chickens? Or do you appear six months later rested, solvent, twenty pounds lighter, and glowing with the serene expression of a man who has not attended a committee meeting since May?

    My colleagues want data.

    I am the probe.

    If I successfully land on Planet Retirement and begin transmitting photographs of myself reading novels at ten in the morning while they are sitting through a presentation on Student Learning Outcomes, I will have established the existence of intelligent life beyond academia.

    Their hunger for escape seems to have intensified after COVID. Something happened during those strange lockdown years when millions of people stopped commuting and discovered that a surprising amount of professional life could be conducted from a spare bedroom while wearing shorts. The workplace, once regarded as an immutable fact of adult existence, suddenly became negotiable. Meetings that had previously required forty people to drive across town, locate parking, find a conference room, and spend ninety minutes breathing the same recycled air were reduced to little rectangles on a laptop screen.

    Then the campuses reopened.

    People returned carrying dangerous knowledge.

    They knew what it felt like not to be there.

    At the same time, teaching itself had changed. Years of smartphone saturation had not exactly produced a renaissance in sustained attention or recreational reading. Students accustomed to receiving information in fifteen-second bursts were now being asked to read twenty-page essays containing paragraphs that stubbornly refused to dance, sing, or display subtitles. Then generative AI arrived, offering exhausted students the opportunity to outsource the inconvenience of thinking altogether. Suddenly professors who had spent careers teaching people how to write found themselves reading enormous quantities of synthetic prose generated by machines that could produce five pages of grammatically polished oatmeal in approximately eight seconds.

    For some of my younger colleagues, this appears to have accelerated the retirement clock by a decade.

    They aren’t necessarily miserable. They still care about students. They still take pride in teaching. But I can sense an emerging reluctance to volunteer for the next great transformation of higher education. They survived the pandemic. They survived Zoom. They survived smartphones. They survived declining reading stamina, assessment initiatives, learning-management systems, administrative acronyms, and enough pedagogical reforms to fill an archaeological museum.

    Now AI has arrived carrying a flamethrower.

    At some point, even conscientious educators begin looking toward the next generation and thinking: You know what? You guys handle this one.

    COVID also produced another curious phenomenon among Californians approaching retirement age: the Great Zillow Migration.

    My colleagues began spending their lockdown afternoons browsing houses in Florida, Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico. They weren’t moving, exactly. They were conducting reconnaissance. A four-bedroom house in Albuquerque appeared on the screen for approximately the price of a detached garage in Southern California, and suddenly a person who had never expressed the slightest interest in New Mexico was researching property taxes, summer temperatures, crime statistics, and the distance from Santa Fe to the nearest Trader Joe’s.

    The fantasy was remarkably specific.

    They wanted to leave California without actually leaving California.

    They wanted the enormous affordable house in Arizona but also the Trader Joe’s. They wanted Texas prices but California produce. They wanted New Mexico solitude but a Costco within twenty minutes. They wanted a quiet desert neighborhood, central air-conditioning, excellent broadband, decent Thai food, and a yoga studio where the instructor had somehow been imported directly from Manhattan Beach.

    Give them those things and Albuquerque started looking like Tuscany.

    This is why my retirement has become strangely important to people who are still a decade away from their own. When they ask, “So, are you really retiring?” there is sometimes an unmistakable gleam in their eyes.

    They aren’t asking about me.

    They’re asking about themselves.

    They want to know whether escape is possible. They want someone they trust to cross the border first, establish a settlement, and send word back that the natives are friendly and the pension checks clear.

    So I will go.

    I will venture beyond the faculty parking lot into that mysterious territory where Mondays are indistinguishable from Saturdays and nobody knows what a Student Learning Outcome is. I will establish whether a man can survive without checking his college email. I will determine whether the human nervous system can recover from four decades of grading freshman composition papers.

    And if everything works out, I will send a message back to my younger colleagues:

    The air is good. The money arrived. Costco is open.

    Come when you’re ready.

  • The Final-Season Principle of Retirement

    The Final-Season Principle of Retirement

    There I was, deep in the weeds of retirement, hacking my way through forms, passwords, security codes, pension calculations, Medicare applications, and all the other administrative vegetation that grows between a working person and his freedom. Retirement was still two semesters away, but I had already learned that you cannot begin preparing for it too early. I had finally obtained what I had come to think of as my revenue-stream number—the monthly pension figure that answered the most fundamental question of retirement planning: Would I be rich? No. Would I be homeless? Also no. This struck me as excellent news.

    I called my best friend and colleague, Tom, to tell him.

    Tom is seventy-five, a wrestling coach and physical-education instructor, and he has no intention of retiring. For him, leading students through weight training, tennis, pickleball, and wrestling is as natural as breathing. You do not wake up one morning and announce that after careful consideration you have decided to stop respiration. Why, then, would you stop coaching? As long as there are students to train, weights to lift, balls to hit, and wrestlers to instruct in the ancient art of folding another human being into an ottoman, Tom sees no compelling reason to leave.

    I told him that my situation was different. My retirement was approaching. In June 2027, at sixty-five years and eight months, I planned to finish my final semester, turn in my grades, close the office door, and walk away.

    Tom rejected this immediately.

    I couldn’t retire, he told me. I was the only writing instructor teaching the athletes in a face-to-face freshman composition class every fall. The students trusted me. The counselors trusted me. The coaches trusted me. I was loved. I was valued. I was useful. Most important, I was apparently irreplaceable, a status every employee spends forty years secretly craving and then discovers at retirement to be administratively inconvenient.

    Tom offered a solution.

    “If you retire, I can make sure you still teach that one class. It’ll be easy. You drive to campus one day a week, teach the athletes for two hours, and do the rest online. Everyone loves you—the students, the counselors, the coaches. We can’t lose you. Think about it.”

    I did.

    At first, I thought it was a wonderful idea.

    Why wouldn’t I? The arrangement offered nearly everything flattering about work while eliminating much of what I disliked. I could retire while remaining partially unretired. I could keep the class I loved, work with people who appreciated me, maintain my connection to campus, collect some additional income, and preserve the pleasant fiction that an institution of higher education might collapse if I failed to appear on Tuesday morning.

    It was enormously seductive.

    But over the next several days, something became clear.

    I didn’t want another season.

    I began thinking about careers the way I think about television series. The best ones know when to stop. Breaking Bad ended. The Sopranos ended. The Wire, The Americans, and Succession ended. Their creators understood something that television networks, aging rock bands, professional athletes, and tenured professors sometimes have difficulty accepting: the existence of an audience does not obligate you to continue performing.

    There is dignity in recognizing the endpoint.

    Call this the Final-Season Principle: the best time to end a successful career is while the audience still wishes there were another season.

    This sounds obvious until someone offers you another season.

    Then the ego gets involved.

    People still love you. They still laugh at your jokes. Students still tell you that you’re their favorite professor. Coaches tell you nobody can replace you. Counselors want you back. Your friend calls and offers you the professional equivalent of a victory lap: one class, one day a week, two hours on campus. Come on. Just six more episodes.

    This is how shows get into trouble.

    The great television series end while we are still arguing that they could have continued. The unfortunate ones mistake affection for infinite demand. They survive on reputation, nostalgia, and the emotional capital accumulated during their prime years. Nobody wants to insult them. Viewers speak respectfully about what the show once meant to them. They praise the original cast. They reminisce about the magnificent third season.

    They just don’t watch anymore.

    A career can end the same way.

    I have seen professors remain on campus beyond their natural final season. Nobody tells them. Academia is too polite for that. Colleagues praise their extraordinary service. Former students express affection. Administrators present plaques. Everyone behaves with appropriate reverence.

    But something has changed.

    The professor is still standing at the front of the classroom, but the performance has lost some electricity. The material hasn’t changed much in years. Grading has become heavier. Preparation feels more burdensome. Technology becomes increasingly irritating. Meetings that were once merely tedious now feel like violations of the Geneva Conventions. The professor may still be perfectly competent, but competence is no longer the issue.

    The season has ended.

    There can be sadness in watching someone refuse to acknowledge this. After decades of being Professor, Doctor, Coach, Director, or Dean, retirement threatens something more frightening than lost income. It threatens relevance. If students no longer wait outside your office, if colleagues no longer ask your opinion, if your name disappears from the schedule of classes, an unsettling question presents itself: Who am I when the institution no longer needs me?

    So you sign up for another semester.

    And then another.

    You tell yourself the students need you. Perhaps they do. You tell yourself the department needs you. Perhaps it does. But somewhere beneath these noble explanations lurks another possibility: you need them to need you.

    That is precisely the ending I want to avoid.

    I am not leaving because I dislike my students. I love working with them. I am not leaving because I dislike the coaches and counselors. Their affection makes leaving harder. Nor am I pretending that I am incapable of teaching another composition class. I could do it.

    But I can feel the wear.

    My cognitive machinery does not turn quite as effortlessly as it once did. Grading feels heavier. Creating fresh material requires more energy. Performing in front of a classroom takes more out of me. And my tolerance for administrative absurdity—particularly the contemplation of Student Learning Outcomes inside the Byzantine catacombs of Nuventive—has declined to levels that may soon require medical intervention.

    More important, I want that energy for something else.

    Retirement isn’t merely the absence of work. It is the transfer of a finite resource. Every hour I spend grading an essay is an hour I cannot spend reading, writing, exercising, traveling, being with my family, or discovering what life looks like when it is no longer organized around an academic calendar. Energy becomes more precious as you age. Eventually you have to decide where you want to spend it.

    And at the moment, I need a considerable portion of mine merely to retire.

    There are still Medicare forms to complete, pension systems to coordinate, insurance dates to excavate, passwords to resurrect, documents to locate, appointments to schedule, and websites to enter with the grim concentration of a bomb technician approaching the red wire. I cannot fight the retirement bureaucracy while simultaneously grading freshman essays, creating engaging classroom content, and analyzing Student Learning Outcomes for a website apparently designed by the imperial bureaucracy of Emperor Justinian.

    Something has to give.

    It will be the job.

    So I will call Tom and disappoint him.

    I will tell him how much his offer meant to me. I will tell him that being wanted at the end of a career is an extraordinary gift. I will tell him that I love the athletes, the coaches, the counselors, and the peculiar little community we built together. And then I will tell him no.

    Because the Final-Season Principle contains a truth that becomes harder to understand precisely when people are begging you to stay: being loved is not a reason to keep working forever. Sometimes being loved is evidence that you have reached the perfect moment to leave.

    The show had a good run.

    It wasn’t canceled.

    I ended it.