Cinemorphosis

Tag: education

  • How I Earned a 4.0 at an Educational Daycare Center

    How I Earned a 4.0 at an Educational Daycare Center

    Contrary to the stereotype of the dimwitted musclehead grunting his way through life on canned tuna and narcissism, I earned straight As in high school. The achievement sounds impressive until one examines the intellectual rigor of the institution awarding those grades. Like many public schools of the era, my high school had been academically diluted to the point that a 4.0 GPA carried roughly the same prestige as successfully operating a vending machine.

    One of my classes was called “Money Matters,” a title suggesting perhaps a sophisticated introduction to economics, finance, or capitalist theory. In reality, we spent the semester learning how to balance a checkbook and calculate simple household budgets using arithmetic so elementary it barely rose above first-grade math. Entire afternoons disappeared into worksheets featuring percentages and fractions designed less to challenge the intellect than to sedate it gently. The class felt less like education and more like institutional babysitting with fluorescent lighting.

    Even then I sensed something unsettling beneath the surface: the school system was not especially interested in cultivating thought so much as containing adolescents for eight consecutive hours while their parents worked and briefly recovered from the psychic exhaustion of raising them. Public education functioned as part classroom, part warehouse, part state-sponsored parental relief program. The unspoken social contract seemed obvious: Send us your children all day and we will supervise them long enough for you to survive suburban adulthood.

    Then there was “Popular Lit.”

    The title itself implied engagement with literature, but the course possessed all the academic seriousness of a motel lobby magazine rack. There were no lectures, no discussions, no tests, and no evidence that intellectual life had ever visited the room. For the entire semester, we were instructed to read any three library books we wished and submit three one-page book reports. The astonishing part was that reading the books appeared entirely optional. Students scribbled incoherent nonsense onto the forms, fabricated plots outright, or submitted what looked like fever-dream hallucinations written five minutes before class. It made no difference. As long as paper changed hands, an A materialized.

    The teacher presiding over this educational necropolis was a woman in her sixties who seemed to regard student interaction as an unfortunate workplace hazard. Each day she instructed us to perform “quiet reading” while she sat at her desk reading magazines, paying bills, clipping her fingernails, and radiating terminal disengagement.

    She had the spectral appearance of someone slowly dissolving under fluorescent lights. Her skin was ghoulishly pale. Long strands of dyed black hair hung around her face in greasy disarray. Her lipstick was so dark it resembled bruising, and beneath her eyes hung swollen bags suggesting decades of insomnia, cigarettes, disappointment, or perhaps all three simultaneously. Regardless of temperature, she wore heavy wool coats infused with the stale odor of old sweat, dust, and bodily exhaustion.

    Had you encountered her wandering the campus without context, you would not have guessed she was an educator. You might have assumed she was a homeless drifter scavenging for half-eaten cafeteria burritos near the dumpsters behind the gymnasium. Yet there she sat, entrusted with shaping young minds while silently retreating from humanity one magazine clipping at a time.

    My classes were so intellectually anemic that I often felt I had accidentally enrolled in a continuation school for juvenile delinquents who had been court-ordered to remain indoors until adulthood. Nothing about the curriculum suggested that the faculty envisioned us becoming lawyers, professors, scientists, or members of any recognizable professional class. The educational ambition seemed far more modest: teach us to obey instructions, arrive places on time, avoid armed robbery, and eventually settle into some blue-collar occupation or low-wage service job without setting anything on fire.

    The atmosphere carried a quiet institutional fatalism.

    Even the teachers seemed aware that the entire operation functioned less as an incubator of intellect than as a containment strategy for restless suburban adolescents. One afternoon, I overheard a teacher mutter to a colleague in the hallway with all the weary cynicism of a defeated bureaucrat: “We’re training them to become burger-flippers.”

    The remark should have depressed me. Instead, I found it oddly irrelevant.

    The teachers’ low expectations, their contemptuous resignation, their assumption that only a tiny remnant of us might someday attend college—all of it bounced harmlessly off my adolescent delusions because higher education was never central to my grand design in the first place.

    I had no dream of becoming a respectable professional.

    I intended to become an international bodybuilding celebrity.

    While the school system quietly prepared students for shift work and manageable disappointment, I was privately envisioning a far more glorious future in which I would win Mr. Olympia, achieve worldwide fame, and operate a lavish tropical health club somewhere in the Bahamas where bronzed tourists and muscle celebrities would sip protein shakes beneath swaying palms while admiring my development under ideal Caribbean lighting conditions.

    In other words, while the school trained future burger-flippers, I was preparing to win the Mr. Olympia to set me up for a lifelong career in tanning oil and narcissistic transcendence.

  • Lost in the Gasbaggerate

    Lost in the Gasbaggerate

    Scripture, if you strip it of incense and italics, offers a blunt warning: don’t build your life on display. Ostentation is not a virtue; it’s a leak. It drains whatever substance you have and then pretends the shine is the thing itself. I think about that now, with the benefit of hindsight and a modest inventory of regrets, and I return to my early twenties at Jackson’s Wine & Spirits in Berkeley, just down the road from the well-coiffed calm of the Claremont Hotel.

    Jackson’s was a holding pen for the overqualified. My coworkers were armed with advanced degrees—literature, linguistics, anthropology, chemistry, physics, philosophy, musicology—and a shared conviction that the adult world had failed them first. Institutions were beneath them. Corporations were vulgar. Authority was for other people. So they took their talents to the wine rack and poured them into attitude.

    They sold Bordeaux and Belgian ales with a cultivated disdain for both product and purchaser. Customers were a nuisance; humanity, a disappointment. The house philosophy could be summarized in a single phrase, delivered with a raised eyebrow: “service with a smirk.” Irony was their armor and their currency. They wore it everywhere.

    What I didn’t see then—but can’t miss now—is how perfectly this posture trains a man in gasbaggery. It rewards the performance of intelligence over the practice of it, the pose of superiority over the discipline of work. You learn to talk rather than to build, to signal rather than to serve. You become fluent in contempt and call it discernment.

    It felt like elevation. It was, in fact, a form of drift—polished, articulate, and entirely unmoored.

    Over time as we drifted into complacency and lost awareness of our arrogance and folly, we became unwitting members of the Gasbaggerate: a self-appointed guild of eloquent overtalkers who mistake endurance for insight and airtime for authority. Its members gather—physically or online—to exchange monologues disguised as dialogue, each contribution longer, louder, and more self-satisfied than the last. They pride themselves on nuance but deploy it like a garnish, sprinkling just enough complexity to justify their verbosity while never approaching a conclusion that might end the performance. In the Gasbaggerate, listening is considered a quaint hobby, brevity a moral failing, and the highest form of achievement is to leave a room convinced that something important has been said, even if no one can quite recall what it was.

    During the wine store’s slow hours, we would display our commitment to the Gasbaggerate by discussing the philosophical curiosities of Nietzsche, the musical excesses of Wagner, and the literary conundrums of Kafka. In many ways, the job had become my comfort zone. It offered me no challenges, yet at the same time, it afforded me the delusion that I was smarter than most people. Whatever I lacked in finances, I compensated with excessive self-regard. Over time, it became clear to me that the longer I worked alongside these proud misfits, the more certain I would become incurably unemployable. 

    I was drawn to the idea of becoming part of my co-workers’ elitist tribe. Though I had nearly completed my master’s degree in English, I never felt like a good fit for academia. I rarely read what professors had on their syllabi. Instead, I would read what I wanted to read, regardless of its relevance to the class content. I could barely sit still during class. I became restless, fidgety, self-conscious, and prone to social anxieties. It was rare that I ever listened to the professors’ lectures. My mind tended to wander about random worries–my bleak romantic prospects, the lack of airflow inside the classroom, my loathing of driving in traffic to get to the gym after classes, and the absence of high-protein food in my house. I didn’t even like the physical presence of the university with its modern sculptures on the lawns, plaques dedicated to a variety of stodgy luminaries, and the fluorescent-lit classrooms reeking of industrial disinfectants. When people asked me what I majored in, I told them, half-seriously, that I was majoring in “Get the Hell Out” because my discomfort with college compelled me to rid myself of academic life as soon as possible. 

    In contrast, I was comfortable being a professional slacker at the wine store. Cultivating my irony and sarcasm with my coworkers and the regular customers was my Happy Place. In the lax work environment, I was confident I could go on indefinitely. My paycheck would be too small to buy new cars or pay for medical insurance. Still, the superior physical and spiritual health I could enjoy from “not selling out to the mainstream” would be worth the risk of having to pay out of pocket for the occasional dose of antibiotics. 

    In my mid-twenties, I was content to spend the rest of my life being a slacker clerk at the wine store, throwing a Nerf football ball to my co-workers through the aisles of Chianti and Beaujolais, and expounding on the mysterious writings of Jorge Luis Borges, Alberto Moravia, and Miguel de Unamuno. 

    Then one day in the late summer of 1987 I was kicked out of my comfort zone and became the Accidental Professor when my friend Mike Elizalde’s father, Felix Elizalde, a top administrator at Merritt College, begged me to teach for his college when none of his real English professors would get off their asses and teach a special Bridge Program at Skyline High School.  “But Mr. Elizalde, I don’t know anything about teaching. I don’t even have a credential.” The chancellor of community colleges said, “No problem,” and I heard his dot matrix printer in his office churning out my California Community College Teaching Credential. I stared at the document like Luke Skywalker seeing for the first time the glowing saber. 

    Of course, the freshly-printed credential didn’t magically transform me into an actual college professor. This became evident one afternoon while working at the wine store and pouring Braren Pauli merlot to a Cal Berkeley professor in the wine bar. I anxiously confided with him that I was terrified about my new job as a college instructor and the dread I felt for having absolutely no idea what I should be doing in the classroom. With a mane of gray lion’s hair and matching beard, the scholar sipped his merlot, studied me carefully, and told me, “Being a professor is the same as being a carpenter. You bring your materials to the classroom and you and the students build structures together. There will be many occasions when the students won’t want to be in the classroom and they will resist everything you say. Though silent, their collective presence will create an air of hostility in the room. You will have the strong impression that you are talking to yourself and a part of you will die inside. This is where your professionalism kicks in. Through sheer ego and professionalism that demands that you get through the course objectives, you have to ignore their indifference and execute your craft the way a carpenter would build a house.”

    Thirty-five years later, I would like to tell him that I never forgot his advice, but I would not tell him the part where on some occasions I would plow through a lecture that was received by the students with implacable indifference, drive home questioning the purpose of my existence, collapse on my bed, curl into the fetal position, and cry myself to sleep.

    The Berkeley scholar proved to be right. The best philosophy was to show up to class prepared, brimming with the confidence from that preparation, but be prepared for the students to be disaffected and disengaged at times for reasons that had nothing to do with me but everything to do with their personal concerns: a distressing romance, an aching hunger, money problems, family disputes. Forces were affecting my students’ interest levels that I could not control. If I were to survive as an instructor, I had to acknowledge this brutal fact; on some occasions, I had to be prepared for the ego sting of disengagement and feeling I was talking to myself in a room of thirty-five people, then power my way through the class objectives even when I didn’t feel popular and “loved.” The sooner I realized the classroom was about them and their concerns, and not mine, the better off I would be.

    Being a successful instructor meant more than being a carpenter. It also meant finding ways to remove my Selfish default setting and entertain the radical proposition that I was not put on Earth to be loved but rather to be of service to others. But to be successful at a job that almost came to me as a freak accident, I would have to struggle to remove depart from my role as a navel-gazing narcissist performing as a know-it-all at a dead-end job. 

    Had Felix Elizalde not administered a well-timed kick to my posterior in 1987 and pushed me into teaching at Merritt College, I might have perfected the art of professional drift—clocking in at Jackson’s, polishing my ego to a high gloss, and mistaking self-display for a life. That alternate version of me required no great catastrophe. It was the path of least resistance, paved with vanity and lightly dusted with delusion.

    We love to credit ourselves with vision, ambition, the mythology of the self-made man. It’s a flattering story: lone hero, steady climb, destiny fulfilled. My life refuses to cooperate with that narrative. It looks less like a conquest and more like a rescue operation—dependent on other people’s interventions, good timing, and the occasional lucky shove in the right direction.

    Remove those external corrections—none of which were earned by my sterling character—and I suspect I would have settled into a comfortable swamp of mediocrity, happily narrating my own importance while achieving very little. I would have been busy talking, less busy becoming.

    That’s the part we don’t advertise: how close most lives are to going quietly off the rails. Not in flames, but in drift. Extinction doesn’t always arrive as catastrophe. Sometimes it shows up as a man who never quite got started and never quite noticed.

  • Gasbaggery Has an Expiration Date

    Gasbaggery Has an Expiration Date

    Yesterday I stepped into a small knot of colleagues in the corridor, that narrow strip of campus where ideas briefly outrun the clock. We traded jokes about the recent Canvas collapse in which all our attendance, grading records, and lesson plans evaporated due to hackers demanding ransom money; we congratulated ourselves for having our lectures safely parked on Google Slides, and circled the usual anxiety about AI—this new auditor that has wandered into the classroom and begun asking uncomfortable questions about our usefulness. The conversation had the easy rhythm of habit. No one spoke as if I were leaving.

    So I reminded them: I’m close to sixty-five with forty years of teaching under my belt. I have one year to go.

    S shook her head as if I had announced a mild illness. I shouldn’t retire, she said. I thrive on the friction of the place—the chatter, the debate, the daily collision with students. I am a gasbag extraordinaire. Besides, she added, men don’t retire well. Men don’t cultivate friendships the way women do; they don’t maintain the networks that keep the emotional weather from turning bleak. 

    I admitted what I already know. I have two friends. I see them rarely enough to qualify as seasonal.

    “I’m an appetizer,” I said. “People enjoy me in small doses.”

    S dismissed that with a wave. “No. You’re a sprawling Las Vegas buffet.”

    The hallway erupted with laughter. It was a generous line and a dangerous one. Flattering, because it confirmed what I trade on: conversation, wit, the ability to animate a room. Terrifying, because buffets are not known for cultivating long-term friendships, and I have no second act of friendships waiting in the wings.

    Oddly, the exchange reinforced my decision to retire in spite of my good physical health. Staying on the job to stave off loneliness is a poor reason to keep a desk. It erodes dignity and, eventually, the quality of the work itself. A classroom deserves more than a man using it as a social life raft.

    The conversation ended the way these corridor encounters always do—with a sudden glance at the time and a polite tearing-away, each of us sprinting back to our assigned rooms before we become late versions of ourselves. Those moments are rare and bright—half a dozen a year, if that—and they carry a dangerous illusion: that their warmth can be stretched across an entire calendar.

    They can’t.

    I will miss them. I will miss the quick intelligence, the laughter, the feeling that something alive is happening just outside the classroom door. But a handful of good conversations a half dozen times a year does not justify postponing an ending that has already announced itself.

    I could stay three more years. I would be sixty-eight, still having the same conversation in a slightly older voice. My challenges would not change; only the date would. Delaying the inevitable is not a strategy. It’s a habit.

    So I’ll leave while the hallway still feels like a gift—and before it becomes an excuse.

    All those years of campus gasbaggery must have lifted me—socially, psychologically, perhaps even spiritually—in ways I can’t quite quantify. What I can measure is my dependence on that lift. I’ve grown accustomed to the daily inflation: the classroom as stage, the captive audience, the steady drip of relevance. Remove that, and I’m left with the unnerving question of what remains when the applause stops.

    Now I find myself at a crossroads that isn’t really a crossroads at all. I can learn to construct a new life—quieter, less theatrical, possibly more honest—or I can cling to the old one with the desperation of a man hugging a sinking ship, all while calling it dignity. That second option has the appeal of familiarity and the stench of denial.

    So let’s not pretend this is a choice. Retirement is not a whimsical lifestyle pivot; it’s a forced course correction, a deviation imposed by time whether I approve or not. I’m frightened, yes—but fear, unlike tenure, does not come with the option of renewal.

  • A Society That Has Sacrificed Interiority for the Next Dopamine Hit

    A Society That Has Sacrificed Interiority for the Next Dopamine Hit

    In “Has College Gotten Too Easy?”, Joe Pinsker notes a curious inversion: grades rise as the quality of student work declines. He borrows a distinction from a Harvard sociologist—“easy” can mean lighter material or looser grading—and suggests the latter is doing most of the work. From where I sit, it’s both. Around 2010, as reading skills began to erode, writing instructors quietly trimmed the syllabus. Fewer essays, fewer books, and almost nothing long. The last time I assigned The Autobiography of Malcolm X, a 500-page climb, the backlash was volcanic. Students weren’t being asked to read; they were being asked to endure. It felt less like instruction and more like pitting a white belt against a black belt and calling it pedagogy.

    Something fundamental shifted at the same moment. The smartphone didn’t just arrive; it reprogrammed. We moved from readers to watchers. As readers, we practiced interiority—the habit of turning language inward until it took root. Sentences weren’t skimmed; they were inhabited. Ideas weren’t collected; they were argued with, revised, made to answer to memory and conscience. Interiority is not mere comprehension; it is a private workshop where meaning is built, not downloaded.

    Around 2010, that workshop closed early. In its place came what I’ll call dopaminergic exteriority: attention pulled outward by a conveyor belt of novelty—short videos, endless scroll, perpetual interruption—until thought has no time to cohere. The mind becomes a relay station for images, optimized for reaction rather than reflection. The inner dialogue thins to a whisper; the feed does the talking.

    The consequences show up in the classroom. Interiority tends to produce patience, skepticism, and a tolerance for difficulty—the raw materials of maturity. Exteriority produces the opposite: impatience, certainty without evidence, and a preference for the quick hit. Ask for Moby-Dick and you’ll get a highlight reel about “the great whale” in thirty seconds. The novel becomes a rumor; the rumor earns the grade.

    Institutions adapt. They always do. Assignments shrink. Expectations soften. Grades inflate to meet the new baseline of attention. Students, understandably, demand high marks for low friction; colleges, increasingly, oblige. The result is not a conspiracy but a convergence: a curriculum calibrated to the scroll.

    We tell ourselves this is access, flexibility, modernization. There’s some truth in that. But there’s also evasion. A watered-down education is what you get when a culture trades interiority for the next stimulus. We begin to prefer performance to thinking, identity to argument, and ease to effort. We stop reading the world and start skimming it.

    None of this is irreversible, but it is cumulative. Interiority is a practice; it returns when practiced. Assign the long book again. Require the sustained argument. Give students something that resists them. Not because difficulty is virtuous, but because without it, the mind never learns to stay.

  • Prove You Offer Something AI Cannot, or Become Obsolete 

    Prove You Offer Something AI Cannot, or Become Obsolete 

    After nearly forty years teaching college writing, I can say this without ceremony: AI didn’t knock—it walked in and rearranged the furniture. We weren’t ready. Now we’re scrambling to answer basic questions we once took for granted: What is our role? What, exactly, is our job? How do we evaluate a student’s work when the student can outsource the thinking? And how do we defend the value of higher education—especially the Humanities—to a public that is already drifting away?

    The backdrop isn’t kind. We face a culture that reads less and skims more, chasing quick hits of stimulation instead of sustained thought. The cost of college keeps rising while the promise of stable, predictable employment grows less certain. In that context, debates about AI feel less like speculation and more like triage. The question isn’t whether AI will reshape higher education; it’s how deeply and how quickly.

    In that vein, I read Jay Caspian Kang’s essay “Why the Future of College Could Look Like OnlyFans” with particular interest. Kang highlights the argument of Hollis Robbins, who offers a blunt standard for survival: universities justify their existence only if they provide access to faculty whose expertise exceeds what AI can deliver. Strip away the academic language, and the message is stark: prove you offer something AI cannot, or become obsolete.

    Robbins pushes the point further. In a classroom saturated with generative AI, she predicts a severe contraction—potentially eliminating a large share of faculty positions. Courses built around foundational, repeatable skills—the kind often taught in the first two years—are the most vulnerable. Specialized fields, particularly those grounded in rare knowledge or deep cultural expertise, are far less exposed. The more interchangeable the instruction, the easier it is to replace.

    That leaves instructors like me in an uneasy position. I’ve spent decades teaching literacy and critical thinking—the very skills that AI now performs with unnerving competence. If Robbins is right, those of us in broad, introductory disciplines face the sharpest edge of change. The specialists may endure. The rest of us may be folded into what she envisions as a rapid and unforgiving contraction.

    This isn’t a distant possibility. It’s a present demand. Adapt—or be edited out.

  • The Day I Logged Off the AI Panic Machine and Walked at the Beach

    The Day I Logged Off the AI Panic Machine and Walked at the Beach

    I teach college writing, which means I’ve spent the last four years staring at the AI question the way a man stares at a fire he suspects might jump the fence. When ChatGPT arrived, it didn’t knock politely. It crashed into the room like a UFO and rearranged the furniture. Since then, I’ve read what feels like a small library’s worth of essays—predictions, warnings, elegies for the essay itself—and contributed a few of my own, because that’s what we do: we metabolize disruption by writing about it.

    But there comes a point when the analysis stops clarifying and starts echoing.

    I’ve reached that point. My brain has filed a quiet injunction: no more. Not just a break from AI, but a break from reading about how exhausted everyone else is by AI. The discourse has become a hall of mirrors—each reflection slightly more fatigued than the last.

    I’ve been here before. In 2010, I had newborn twins, which is another way of saying I was living inside a low-grade emergency. The market offered guidance—books, podcasts, earnest experts—but I wanted none of it. I was already doing the job. Additional commentary felt like a second shift. Experience was loud enough; analysis was just noise layered on top.

    Both episodes point to the same condition: Applied Reality Rejection—the refusal to consume secondary discourse when you’re already neck-deep in the primary experience. When you’re in it, more talk about it doesn’t help. It dilutes.

    And here’s the part the essays rarely admit: reading about AI doesn’t soothe AI anxiety. It compounds it. Each think piece arrives like a fresh weather report announcing the same storm in slightly different prose.

    So I’m choosing friction of a better kind. I play the piano until my attention steadies. I pick up kettlebells and let gravity argue with me for a while. I walk the beach and let the horizon do what no article can—put scale back into the day. The analog world doesn’t theorize; it recalibrates.

    That was the remedy with the twins, too. Not another podcast on sleep training, but a walk, a dumb TV binge, a sweaty hour in the garage. Relief came from stepping out of the commentary loop, not diving deeper into it.

    Which is why, when I see another AI essay queued up from The Atlantic or The New Yorker, I feel a familiar tightening—and then I close the tab. Not out of contempt, but out of preservation.

    I’ve heard enough echoes. It’s time to drive two miles to Catalina Avenue and take a walk at the beach.

  • The Business Model of Suffering and Abuse on Reality TV

    The Business Model of Suffering and Abuse on Reality TV

    We were discussing their current essay assignment: an excavation of cruelty masquerading as inspiration in the TV show The Biggest Loser. The facts alone read like satire written by a misanthrope: contestants more than 200 pounds overweight were pushed through eight-hour training days, incinerating close to 8,000 calories while being rationed roughly 800. Add caffeine pills, a chorus of screaming trainers, and the steady drip of public humiliation, and you have less a fitness program than a stress test for organ failure. That none of the contestants died feels less like good management and more like statistical luck. That millions watched—enthusiastically—says something unflattering about us.

    I show them Fit for Life documentary, which functions as a kind of aftermath report. Former contestants speak with the clarity that only distance provides. They describe trauma, yes, but also something more complicated: the show gave them structure, purpose, a narrative. It brutalized them and, perversely, steadied them. Most gained the weight back. Some now lean on GLP-1 drugs, their appetites chemically negotiated into submission. But all of them remember the same thing—the mercilessness was not incidental; it was the engine.

    I asked my students why I had assigned this essay. What, exactly, were they supposed to uncover?

    At the micro level, we peeled back the familiar myths. The cult of self-discipline—so comforting in its simplicity—lets us ignore biology, environment, and the sheer stubbornness of appetite. Bodies become symbols: power or failure, virtue or laziness, depending on who’s looking. We noted the obvious but rarely confronted statistic—most Americans are overweight—and the uncomfortable reality that GLP-1 drugs may be the only intervention that consistently works at scale.

    Then the room shifted. One student volunteered that she was on a GLP-1. The first weeks were a gauntlet of nausea and vomiting, but now the drug—Mounjaro—had quieted her hunger to a whisper. Thirty pounds gone in two months. Another student offered a counterpoint that landed harder: her father had been one of the exceptions. The drug didn’t help him lose weight. It helped him lose kidney function. As she spoke, she mentioned he was now on dialysis. The room absorbed that in silence. Miracle and risk, side by side, no clean narrative available.

    So we zoomed out.

    To design a show that courts physical danger and guarantees humiliation—for ratings, for merchandise, for the grotesque satisfaction of watching someone crack—is not an accident. It’s a business model. That’s the first kind of evil: deliberate, calculated, fully aware. Cynical evil. The producers know exactly what they’re doing. They understand the cruelty, and they monetize it.

    The second kind is quieter and more common. It belongs to the audience. Viewers sense the moral problem—on some level they know this is exploitation—but they file that knowledge away so it won’t interfere with their evening entertainment. They watch, they flinch, they keep watching. Call it willed ignorance. A cultivated habit of not asking questions that might ruin the pleasure.

    I told them, half-serious but not really joking, that if we were ranking things, cynical evil is a ten. Willed-ignorant evil sits comfortably at a seven—less flamboyant, more pervasive.

    Something clicked. The word evil—unfashionable, blunt, almost embarrassing in academic settings—cut through the fog. The discussion woke up. Students leaned in, argued, confessed discomfort, revised their positions in real time. The assignment stopped being an exercise and became a lens.

    That was the moment worth noticing. Sometimes you have to pull the camera back. Stop pretending the essay is about structure and sources and let students see the larger architecture: what the topic reveals about us, what it demands we confront, and why it matters that we do.

  • How It Feels to Grade 60 Original Essays Edited by AI

    How It Feels to Grade 60 Original Essays Edited by AI

    I assigned my students an essay that asked them to describe a place both ugly and formative—a crucible that hurt them and, in the same breath, made them. The submissions came back like a map of pressure points: a high school classroom that felt like a courtroom, a gym that smelled of rubber and dread, a mental health ward lit like an aquarium, a pre-op room where the clock ticked louder than courage, a soccer field that taught hierarchy and grace, a family home in El Salvador, a Korean farm where labor spoke in blisters. The content was theirs—specific, unborrowed, alive. But the sentences often arrived wearing a suspicious polish, the prose lacquered to a showroom shine. You could feel the editor in the room, invisible and tireless.

    I keep returning to a metaphor I can’t shake: AI is like a bodybuilder taking steroids for writing. Go in “natty,” and you present a muscular physique that is honest–well defined, maybe even impressive. Add the chemical assist and you step onstage thirty percent larger, veins penciled in, every line exaggerated into spectacle. 

    After sixty of these eye-popping essays, I felt the same deadening I get at a bodybuilding show. At first you admire the craft; then the sameness creeps in. The poses change; the effect doesn’t. Everything looks like everything else.

    This is my ambivalence, and it refuses to resolve. On one hand, AI hands students a language upgrade that would make a New York editor nod—clarity, rhythm, a vocabulary that lands. It’s as if they’ve been fast-tracked to a professional register. On the other hand, that very upgrade dilutes the experience. When strong language grows out of a human mind, it carries the friction of effort—the faint grit that makes it feel earned, inhabited. When it arrives laundered through a machine—the “stochastic parrot” Emily M. Bender warned us about—it can be dazzling and hollow at once, a chandelier with no wiring. The sentences glitter; the room stays dark.

    I’ve graded hundreds of essays for years and thought I knew the terrain—the tells of struggle, the leap from draft to draft, the moment a voice becomes unmistakably its own. Now I’m reading in a new jurisdiction with no settled law. I’m less a judge than a border agent, inspecting passports that all look freshly printed. Welcome to the literary Wild West: the gold is real, the essays are suspect, and every nugget asks the same question—where did you get this?

  • The Rise of the Cyborg Student and the Collapse of Learning

    The Rise of the Cyborg Student and the Collapse of Learning

    In her Atlantic essay “Is Schoolwork Optional Now?”, Lila Shroff describes a classroom that has quietly slipped its friction. Students entering high school around 2024 have discovered that schoolwork—once a slog of half-formed ideas, crossed-out sentences, and mild despair—can now be outsourced with the elegance of a corporate merger. With tools like Claude Code, they recline while a digital understudy attends class on their behalf, taking quizzes, drafting lab reports, and assembling PowerPoints with the glossy finish of a mid-level consultant angling for a promotion.

    Teachers respond with variety, as if novelty could outpace automation. More assignments, different formats, new prompts. It doesn’t matter. The students simply retrain their AI to shapeshift into whatever species of learner is required: the earnest analyst, the reflective humanist, the data-savvy pragmatist. The submissions arrive immaculate—coherent, polished, and suspiciously free of the small humiliations that once marked actual thinking.

    The problem is not that the work gets done. It’s that no one is being worked on. The transformation has shifted from mind to method. Students aren’t learning the material; they’re learning how to manage a machine that can impersonate someone who did.

    If that weren’t enough, the next escalation has arrived with a name designed to soothe your nerves: Einstein. This AI agent claims it can log into platforms like Canvas and complete an entire semester’s workload in a single day. It doesn’t just skim the surface. It watches lectures, digests readings, writes essays, posts discussion comments, submits assignments, and takes exams—leaving behind a digital paper trail so competent it borders on smug.

    Shroff decided to test the promise. She enrolled in an online statistics course and turned Einstein loose. Within an hour, it had completed the entire semester of work: eight modules and seven quizzes. She earned a perfect score. She also learned, by her own account, almost nothing. The grade was real. The education was imaginary.

    Einstein’s creator, Advait Paliwal, is a 22-year-old who speaks with the calm inevitability of someone announcing the weather. His argument is simple: this is a warning. Adapt or become decorative. Educators have responded with lawsuits and cease-and-desist letters, which he treats as polite acknowledgments that the problem is larger than any one person. If he hadn’t built it, someone else would have. And if you find Einstein alarming, he assures us, you should pace yourself—this is the beta version of the apocalypse. “There’s more to come.”

    Meanwhile, Silicon Valley is not retreating. It is accelerating, pouring resources into embedding AI deeper into the educational bloodstream. The irony is almost too clean: educators are losing control not only because the technology can’t be contained, but because they use it themselves. AI grades papers, drafts materials, streamlines feedback. It makes the job more efficient. It also quietly rewrites what the job is.

    The endgame is already visible. It has a name that sounds like a software feature but reads like a verdict: the Fully Automated Loop. AI generates the assignments. AI completes them. AI grades them. The student, once the point of the enterprise, becomes a spectator to a closed circuit of competence.

    We used to worry about students not doing the work. Now the work does itself.

    And when that loop closes, education doesn’t collapse in a dramatic heap. It hums. It functions. It produces results.

    It just stops producing people.

  • Teaching Without a Map in a Shifting World

    Teaching Without a Map in a Shifting World

    In “Teaching in an American University Is Very Strange Right Now,” Frank Bruni captures a tension that defines the modern classroom: how do you offer students hope without lying to them? His students at Duke University are coming of age in a moment that feels less like a transition and more like a rupture—truth is contested, institutions feel unstable, artificial intelligence is reshaping entire professions, and the political climate leans toward confusion and consolidation of power. Add to that a job market where careers in public policy, government, and nonprofits are shrinking, and the traditional pathways begin to look like dead ends.

    Bruni’s difficulty is not just emotional; it’s epistemological. The ground keeps shifting. The job market no longer behaves like a map you can study and memorize. It behaves like weather—volatile, unpredictable, and indifferent to your plans. Bruni and his colleagues find themselves in an unfamiliar position: experts who no longer trust their own expertise. When the mentors are unsure of the terrain, the act of mentoring starts to feel like guesswork dressed up as guidance.

    And yet, retreating into cynicism would be a dereliction of duty. Bruni insists on offering hope, but not the anesthetized version that avoids discomfort. His version of hope is anchored in reality. He tells his students that survival in this environment will not belong to the most credentialed or the most specialized, but to the most adaptable. The winners will be those who can pivot quickly, read patterns early, and anticipate what’s coming before it arrives. In other words, they must think several moves ahead while the board itself is being rearranged.

    This requires a shift in how students approach their education. The old model—bury yourself in your major, master the material, trust that the system will reward you—was always a partial truth. Now it’s a liability. Depth without awareness is no longer enough. Students need a wide-angle lens, an ongoing scan of the broader landscape: economic shifts, technological disruptions, political currents. The classroom can no longer be a refuge from the world; it has to be a vantage point from which to read it.

    Bruni’s message is unsettling, but it has the virtue of being honest. Hope, in this context, is not the promise that things will work out as planned. It’s the conviction that those who stay alert, flexible, and strategically aware can still find a way forward—even when the path refuses to stay still.