Cinemorphosis

Tag: teaching

  • 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.

  • The Kryptonite Effect of Screens in Education

    The Kryptonite Effect of Screens in Education

    In her Atlantic essay “What Happened After a Teacher Ditched Screens,” the author examines a belief so widely accepted it rarely gets questioned: that more technology automatically improves learning. Dylan Kane, a seventh-grade math teacher, bought into that belief for over a decade. His students worked on Chromebooks, navigating a custom-built math site while monitoring software kept them from drifting into games or distractions. It was a tightly managed digital ecosystem—efficient on paper, persuasive in theory.

    Then Kane pulled the plug.

    This wasn’t a minor adjustment; it was a small act of rebellion. Nearly ninety percent of school districts now issue laptops or tablets, sold on the promise of “personalization”—the idea that technology can tailor instruction to each student’s needs, close learning gaps, and adapt to different cognitive styles. It’s an elegant theory, especially attractive to those whose reputations and revenue depend on merging education with technology.

    But in Kane’s classroom, the theory collapsed under the weight of actual human behavior. Screens didn’t personalize learning; they colonized attention. Students stared at them the way gamblers stare at slot machines—fixed, hypnotized, and detached from the room. Class discussion withered. The teacher’s voice, once the organizing force of the classroom, lost every round to the glowing rectangle. When attention becomes a zero-sum game, the screen doesn’t negotiate. It wins.

    Kane’s frustration deepened when he read Jared Cooney Horvath’s The Digital Delusion, which argues that increased technology use correlates with declining student performance. So Kane ran an experiment: he removed the Chromebooks for a month. What he discovered was not subtle. Students began paying attention again. Participation returned. Assignment completion jumped from 45 to 62 percent. Writing equations by hand—slow, deliberate, mildly inconvenient—forced students to see their own thinking unfold. The inconvenience turned out to be the point. Learning, it seems, benefits from friction.

    I’ve been teaching college writing for over thirty-five years, and I’ve seen my own version of this “kryptonite effect.” Smartphones siphon attention. Laptops become portals to games, sports, and anything but the task at hand. I’ve watched students drift out of the room without leaving their seats. The screen doesn’t just distract; it competes, and it usually wins.

    And yet, my experience isn’t a simple indictment of technology. Between 2018 and 2019, I ran a structure that worked. We met twice a week: one day for lecture and discussion, the other as a writing lab. During lab sessions, students wrote on desktops or their own laptops, working through scaffolded assignments. I read their drafts in real time, helping them revise thesis statements and sharpen arguments. The dynamic shifted. I wasn’t a distant lecturer; I was a coach moving from desk to desk. Students completed work on campus instead of procrastinating at home. Completion rates improved, not because of the machines themselves, but because of how they were used.

    The pandemic ended that model. My courses shifted to a hybrid format—one meeting a week—and the lab disappeared. I’ve been reluctant to surrender precious face-to-face time to silent writing sessions. But I’m beginning to wonder if I’ve been too cautious. If Kane is right about the power of attention, perhaps the most effective use of class time is not more talking, but more doing.

    What Kane’s experiment ultimately reveals is not that technology is useless, but that it is context-dependent. A math classroom, built on sequential problem-solving, may suffer when screens fracture attention. A writing classroom, structured around drafting and revision, may benefit from them under the right conditions. The mistake is not using technology. The mistake is treating it as a universal solution.

    If I were back to teaching two days a week, I wouldn’t hesitate. One day for discussion. One day for writing in a lab. Not because technology is inherently good, but because, in that setting, it serves the work instead of sabotaging it.

  • Lecture Drift Syndrome and the Vanishing Classroom

    Lecture Drift Syndrome and the Vanishing Classroom

    My students have been reporting a peculiar academic phenomenon: the two-hour class that contains no discernible lesson. In its place stands a performer—a professor intoxicated by the belief that a self-indulgent monologue is effective teaching. Convinced they possess the sacred “gift of gab,” they proceed to use it like a leaf blower in a library.

    And gab they do.

    They narrate their dreams with the seriousness of a Jungian symposium, decoding every symbol as if the subconscious were filing quarterly reports. They recount contractor disputes with the dramatic tension of courtroom testimony. They offer serialized updates on family feuds, restaurant conquests, tropical vacations, and medical procedures so vivid they border on malpractice to describe. They even resurrect their collegiate glory days, in which they allegedly outwitted professors and classmates alike—a mythos delivered with the confidence of a man who has never been fact-checked.

    Meanwhile, the classroom undergoes a quiet evacuation.

    Not physically—students remain seated, dutiful, nodding at appropriate intervals—but cognitively, the room is abandoned. One student is deep into a novel. Another is solving calculus proofs. Several are toggling between sports highlights and sports betting apps, hedging their attention the way day traders hedge risk. Text messages fly. Homework from other classes gets completed. What was scheduled as instruction has been repurposed into a supervised study hall with a live podcast no one asked to attend.

    The professor, of course, notices none of this.

    This is the defining pathology: two monumental blind spots. First, the inability to recognize that the monologue is not merely irrelevant but actively draining—an intellectual sedative administered over two uninterrupted hours. Second, the delusion that presence equals engagement, that a room full of bodies must also be a room full of minds.

    It is neither.

    What we are witnessing is an academic epidemic: Lecture Drift Syndrome. A condition in which a class session slowly detaches from its stated purpose and floats into the open sea of anecdote, confession, and self-display. The syllabus becomes a relic. Time warps—two hours pass, yet nothing has been learned. Themes dissolve. Structure collapses. The lecture doesn’t end so much as it dissipates.

    In the end, the classroom is no longer a site of instruction.

    It is a stage occupied by one man talking—and thirty students elsewhere.

  • Colonel Lockjaw and the Cosplay Watches of the Soul

    Colonel Lockjaw and the Cosplay Watches of the Soul

    If I had to confess to one of my worst flaws, it would be this: I’m a virtuoso at diagnosing other people’s defects and a coward when it comes to inspecting my own. I can spot hypocrisy at fifty paces, write a character analysis of your blind spots, and deliver a withering critique of your moral laziness—while remaining blissfully obtuse about the same diseases raging in me. It’s not insight. It’s evasion. Instead of interrogating my own failures, I distract myself by putting others on trial.

    The hypocrisy deepens because I despise people who refuse self-interrogation. Over the years I’ve kept my distance from plenty of them—friends, colleagues, acquaintances—because their lack of self-awareness felt repellent. I judged them for their blindness without noticing I was practicing the same sin with better vocabulary. My watch hobby was an early case study in this delusion. I spent years buying grotesquely oversized timepieces—wrist-mounted monuments to masculine cosplay. In my private fantasy, I was Sean Penn starring as Colonel Lockjaw. In reality, I was a middle-aged man dodging a mirror. Why confront a crisis of purpose when you can drop five hundred dollars on a costume watch and call it identity?

    Eventually I sobered up—sold the ridiculous pieces, learned what real watches are, and cleared out my collection the way a dieter purges Doritos and Twinkies. But the damage was done: I’d wasted three years of a hobby because I refused to ask what my compensation phase said about me. I demanded self-interrogation from everyone else. I granted myself a permanent exemption. Do as I say, not as I do—the oldest creed of the unexamined life.

    That failure has been haunting me lately, triggered by a memory from thirty-five years ago: an English Department meeting that turned into a circus. I was a young instructor, terrified of tenure committees and power hierarchies, sitting quietly while the veterans argued about whether personal narratives belonged in college writing. One professor—let’s call him Foghorn Leghorn—was a legendary drunk who showed up to meetings in a black leather bomber jacket and a cloud of whiskey fumes. With disheveled silver hair and black horn-rimmed glasses, he declared that personal narratives were “sissy” assignments and that students needed “real-life” skills like argument and analysis. Susan, a colleague with more backbone than the rest of us combined, said that autobiographical writing gave students something called “personal enrichment.” Foghorn exploded. “What the hell does that mean?” he barked. “Personal enrichment? What the hell does that mean?” Susan backed down—not because she was wrong, but because there’s no winning an argument with a belligerent man auditioning for his own demolition.

    Back then, I kept my mouth shut. I was young. I was a lecturer on a non-tenure track. I was scared. But in the decades since, I’ve had time to think about Susan’s phrase. Personal enrichment. What does it mean—and should I, as a writing teacher, care? The answer is yes, and yes again. Personal enrichment is the cultivation of skills no standardized test can measure: moral clarity, self-honesty, the courage to look at yourself without flinching. In other words, self-interrogation.

    I learned that lesson early in my career without knowing what to call it. Around the same time Foghorn was grandstanding, I assigned a definition essay on passive-aggressive behavior. Students had to begin with a brutal thesis—passive aggression as cowardly hostility—then unpack its traits and finish with a personal narrative. I wanted them to stop admiring dysfunction as cleverness. The best essay came from a nineteen-year-old whose beauty could’ve launched a sitcom. She wrote about her boyfriend, a man who looked like life had given up on him. He was unemployed, proudly unwashed, and permanently horizontal—camped in her parents’ living room like a hostile occupier. He drank her father’s beer, ate his food, parked himself in his chair, and stank up the furniture with equal enthusiasm. Her parents hated him. Especially her father. And that was the point.

    She resented her father’s authority, so she punished him the only way she knew how—by sabotaging herself. Romantic self-destruction as revenge. When we discussed the essay, she told me something I’ve never forgotten: writing it forced her to see her behavior with unbearable clarity. She kicked the boyfriend out. Then, clumsily but honestly, she confronted her father. A personal narrative—mocked by my alcoholic colleague—did what no grading rubric ever could. It changed a life.

    Fifteen years later, I assigned another narrative, this one inspired by Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. I asked students to write about a moment when tragedy forced them to choose between self-pity and courage. The finest essay came from a young mother who’d been abandoned by her own mother at two years old. She grew up with a hole in her heart, then gave birth to a daughter and decided she would be the mother she never had. In loving her child, she learned to love herself. I’ve taught for nearly forty years. Her story has moved me more than anyone’s.

    That’s why I assign personal narratives more than ever. Not just because they resist AI shortcuts, but because they demand moral inventory. And here’s the final irony: Foghorn Leghorn—the loudest critic of self-examination—was the man who needed it most. Last I heard, he’d burned down his kitchen while making dinner, lost his family, and was holed up in a cheap hotel drinking himself toward oblivion. The mansplainer who sneered at Susan ended up a tragic footnote in his own cautionary tale. I hope he found sobriety. If he did, it began where it always does—with honest self-interrogation.

    As for me, I’ll keep assigning personal narratives. I’ll keep asking students to look inward with courage. And I’ll keep reminding myself that the hardest essays to write are not on the syllabus. They’re the ones you compose silently, about your own life, when no one is grading you.

  • The Sleepwalking Student: Why Friction, Not Optimization, Reawakens Learning

    The Sleepwalking Student: Why Friction, Not Optimization, Reawakens Learning

    Academic Anhedonia is what it feels like to keep advancing through your education while feeling absolutely nothing about it. The assignments get done. The rubrics are satisfied. The credentials inch closer. And yet curiosity never sparks, pride never arrives, and learning registers as a faint neurological hum—like an appliance left on in another room. You move forward without momentum, effort without appetite. AI language machines make this easier, smoother, quieter. The result is not rebellion but compliance: efficient, bloodless, and hollow.

    When I started teaching college writing in the 1980s, this condition didn’t exist. Back then, I suffered from a different affliction: the conviction that I was destined to be the David Letterman of higher education—a twenty-five-year-old irony specialist armed with a chalkboard, a raised eyebrow, and impeccable timing. For a while, the bit landed. A well-placed joke could levitate a classroom. Students laughed. I mistook that laughter for learning. If I could entertain them, I told myself, I could teach them. For two decades, I confused engagement with applause and thought I was winning.

    That illusion began to crack around 2012. Phones lit up like votive candles. Attention splintered. Students weren’t bored; they were overclocked—curating identities, performing themselves, measuring worth in metrics. They ran hot: anxious, stimulated, desperate for recognition. Teaching became a cage match with the algorithm. Still, those students were alive. Distracted, yes—but capable of obsession, outrage, infatuation. Their pulses were fast. Their temperatures high.

    What we face now is colder. Around 2022, a different creature arrived. Not overstimulated, but under-responsive. Years of screen saturation, pandemic isolation, dopamine-dense apps, and frictionless AI assistance collapsed the internal reward system that once made discovery feel electric. This isn’t laziness. It’s learning-specific anhedonia. Students can assemble essays, follow scaffolds, and march through rubrics—but they do it like sleepwalkers. Curiosity is muted. Persistence is brittle. Critical thinking arrives pre-flattened, shrink-wrapped, and emotionally inert.

    The tragedy isn’t inefficiency; it’s emptiness. Today’s classrooms hum with quiet productivity and emotional frost—cognition without hunger, performance without investment, education stripped of its pulse.

    If there is a way forward, it won’t come from louder performances, cleverer prompts, or better optimization. Those are the same tools that bleached learning in the first place. Academic anhedonia cannot be cured with stimulation. It requires friction: slow reading that refuses to skim, sustained writing that will not autocomplete itself, intellectual solitude that feels mildly wrong, and work that denies the cheap dopamine hit of instant payoff. The cure is not novelty but depth; not entertainment but seriousness. Struggle isn’t a design flaw. It is the design.

    To interrupt academic anhedonia, I use an AI-resistant assignment that reintroduces cost, memory, and embodiment: The Transformative Moment. Students write 400–500 words about an experience that altered the trajectory of their lives. The assignment demands sensory precision—the one domain where AI reliably produces fluent oatmeal. It insists on transformation, which is what education is supposed to enact. And it drags students back into lived experience, away from the anesthetic glow of screens.

    I offer a model from my own life. When I was sixteen, visiting my recently divorced father, he asked what I planned to do after high school. I told him—without irony—that I intended to become a garbage man so I could finish work early and train at the gym all day. He laughed, then calmly informed me that I would go to college and join the professional class because I was far too vain to tell people at cocktail parties that I collected trash for a living. In that instant, I knew two things: my father knew me better than I knew myself, and my future had just been decided. I walked out of that conversation college-bound, whether I liked it or not.

    I tell them about a friend of mine, now a high school principal, who has been a vegetarian since his early twenties. While working at a deli during college, he watched a coworker carve into a bleeding slab of roast beef. In that moment—knife slicing, flesh yielding—something inside him snapped shut. He knew he would never eat meat again. He hasn’t. Transformation can be instantaneous. Conversion doesn’t always send a memo.

    My final example is a fireman I trained with at a gym in the 1970s. He was a recent finalist in the Mr. California bodybuilding contest: blond shag, broom-thick mustache, horn-rimmed glasses—Clark Kent with a bench press habit. One afternoon, after repping over three hundred pounds, he stood before the mirror, flexed his chest, and watched his muscles swell like they were auditioning for their own sitcom. “When I first saw Arnold,” he said, reverent, “I felt I was in the presence of the Lord. ‘There stands the Messiah,’ I said to myself. ‘There stands God Almighty come to bring good cheer to this world.’”

    He wasn’t speaking only for himself. He spoke for all of us. We wanted to be claimed by something larger than our small, awkward lives. Arnold was the messiah—the Pied Piper of Pecs—leading us toward the promised land of biceps, triceps, and quads capable of crushing produce.

    I assign The Transformative Moment because I want students to recreate an experience no machine can counterfeit. I want them to remember that education is not credential management but metamorphosis. And I want them to interrogate the conditions under which real change occurred in their lives—what they were paying attention to, what they risked, what it cost.

    Transformation—actual forward movement—is the antidote to anhedonia. And it cannot be outsourced.

  • How Real Writing Survives in the Age of ChatGPT

    How Real Writing Survives in the Age of ChatGPT

    AI-Resistant Pedagogy is an instructional approach that accepts the existence of generative AI without surrendering the core work of learning to it. Rather than relying on bans, surveillance, or moral panic, it redesigns courses so that thinking must occur in places machines cannot fully inhabit: live classrooms, oral exchanges, process-based writing, personal reflection, and sustained human presence. This pedagogy emphasizes how ideas are formed—not just what is submitted—by foregrounding drafting, revision, discussion, and decision-making as observable acts. It is not AI-proof, nor does it pretend to be; instead, it makes indiscriminate outsourcing cognitively unrewarding and pedagogically hollow. In doing so, AI-resistant pedagogy treats technology as a background condition rather than the organizing principle of education, restoring friction, accountability, and intellectual agency as non-negotiable features of learning.

    ***

    Carlo Rotella, an English writing instructor at Boston College, refuses to go the way of the dinosaurs in the Age of AI Machines. In his essay “I’m a Professor. A.I. Has Changed My Classroom, but Not for the Worse,” he explains that he doesn’t lecture much at all. Instead, he talks with his students—an endangered pedagogical practice—and discovers something that flatly contradicts the prevailing moral panic: his students are not freeloading intellectual mercenaries itching to outsource their brains to robot overlords. They are curious. They want to learn how to write. They want to understand how tools work and how thinking happens. This alone punctures the apocalyptic story line that today’s students will inevitably cheat their way through college with AI while instructors helplessly clutch their blue books like rosary beads.

    Rotella is not naïve. He admits that any instructor who continues teaching on autopilot is “sleepwalking in a minefield.” Faced with Big Tech’s frictionless temptations—and humanity’s reliable preference for shortcuts—he argues that teachers must adapt or become irrelevant. But adaptation doesn’t mean surrender. It means recommitting to purposeful reading and writing, dialing back technological dependence, and restoring face-to-face intellectual community. His key distinction is surgical and useful: good teaching isn’t AI-proof; it’s AI-resistant. Resistance comes from three old-school but surprisingly radical moves—pen-and-paper and oral exams, teaching the writing process rather than just collecting finished products, and placing real weight on what happens inside the classroom. In practice, that means in-class quizzes, short handwritten essays, scaffolded drafting, and collaborative discussion—students learning how to build arguments brick by brick instead of passively absorbing a two-hour lecture like academic soup.

    Personal narrative becomes another line of defense. As Mark Edmundson notes, even when students lean on AI, reflective writing forces them to feed the machine something dangerously human: their own experience. That act alone creates friction. In my own courses, students write a six-page research paper on whether online entertainment sharpens or corrodes critical thinking. The opening paragraph is a 300-word confession about a habitual screen indulgence—YouTube, TikTok, a favorite creator—and an honest reckoning with whether it educates or anesthetizes. The conclusion demands a final verdict about their own personal viewing habits: intellectual growth or cognitive decay? To further discourage lazy outsourcing, I show them AI-generated examples in all their hollow, bloodless glory—perfectly grammatical, utterly vacant. Call it AI-shaming if you like. I call it a public service. Nothing cures overreliance on machines faster than seeing what they produce when no human soul is involved.

  • Everyone in Education Wants Authenticity–Just Not for Themselves

    Everyone in Education Wants Authenticity–Just Not for Themselves

    Reciprocal Authenticity Deadlock names the breakdown of trust that occurs when students and instructors simultaneously demand human originality, effort, and intellectual presence from one another while privately relying on AI to perform that very labor for themselves. In this condition, authenticity becomes a weapon rather than a value: students resent instructors whose materials feel AI-polished and hollow, while instructors distrust students whose work appears frictionless and synthetic. Each side believes the other is cheating the educational contract, even as both quietly violate it. The result is not merely hypocrisy but a structural impasse in which sincerity is expected but not modeled, and education collapses into mutual surveillance—less a shared pursuit of understanding than a standoff over who is still doing the “real work.”

    ***

    If you are a college student today, you are standing in the middle of an undeclared war over AI, with no neutral ground and no clean rules of engagement. Your classmates are using AI in wildly different ways: some are gaming the system with surgical efficiency, some are quietly hollowing out their own education, and others are treating it like a boot camp for future CEOhood. From your desk, you can see every outcome at once. And then there’s the other surprise—your instructors. A growing number of them are now producing course materials that carry the unmistakable scent of machine polish: prose that is smooth but bloodless, competent but lifeless, stuffed with clichés and drained of voice. Students are taking to Rate My Professors to lodge the very same complaints teachers have hurled at student essays for years. The irony is exquisite. The tables haven’t just turned; they’ve flipped.

    What emerges is a slow-motion authenticity crisis. Teachers worry that AI will dilute student learning into something pre-chewed and nutrient-poor, while students worry that their education is being outsourced to the same machines. In the worst version of this standoff, each side wants authenticity only from the other. Students demand human presence, originality, and intellectual risk from their professors—while reserving the right to use AI for speed and convenience. Professors, meanwhile, embrace AI as a labor-saving miracle for themselves while insisting that students do the “real work” the hard way. Both camps believe they are acting reasonably. Both are convinced the other is cutting corners. The result is not collaboration but a deadlock: a classroom defined less by learning than by a mutual suspicion over who is still doing the work that education is supposed to require.

  • How to Resist Academic Nihilism

    How to Resist Academic Nihilism

    Academic Nihilism and Academic Rejuvenation

    Academic Nihilism names the moment when college instructors recognize—often with a sinking feeling—that the conditions students need to thrive are perfectly misaligned with the conditions they actually inhabit. Students need solitude, friction, deep reading and writing, and the slow burn of intellectual curiosity. What they get instead is a reward system that celebrates the surrender of agency to AI machines; peer pressure to eliminate effort; and a hypercompetitive, zero-sum academic culture where survival matters more than understanding. Time scarcity all but forces students to offload thinking to tools that generate pages while quietly draining cognitive stamina. Add years of screen-saturated distraction and a near-total deprivation of deep reading during formative stages, and you end up with students who lack the literacy baseline to engage meaningfully with writing prompts—or even to use AI well. When instructors capitulate to this reality, they cease being teachers in any meaningful sense. They become functionaries who comply with institutional “AI literacy policies,” which increasingly translate to a white-flag admission: we give up. Students submit AI-generated work; instructors “assess” it with AI tools; and the loop closes in a fog of futility. The emptiness of the exchange doesn’t resolve Academic Nihilism—it seals it shut.

    The only alternative is resistance—something closer to Academic Rejuvenation. That resistance begins with a deliberate reintroduction of friction. Instructors must design moments that demand full human presence: oral presentations, performances, and live writing tasks that deny students the luxury of hiding behind a machine. Solitude must be treated as a scarce but essential resource, to be rationed intentionally—sometimes as little as a protected half-hour of in-class writing can feel revolutionary. Curiosity must be reawakened by tethering coursework to the human condition itself. And here the line is bright: if you believe life is a low-stakes, nihilistic affair summed up by a faded 1980s slogan—“Life’s a bitch; then you die”—you are probably in the wrong profession. But if you believe human lives can either wither into Gollumification or rise toward higher purpose, and you are willing to let that belief inform your teaching, then Academic Rejuvenation is still possible. Even in the age of AI machines.

  • Why College Writing Instructors Must Teach the Self-Interrogation Principle

    Why College Writing Instructors Must Teach the Self-Interrogation Principle

    Self-Interrogation Principle

    noun

    The Self-Interrogation Principle holds that serious writing inevitably becomes a moral act because precise language exposes self-deception and forces individuals to confront their own motives, evasions, and contradictions. Rather than treating personal narrative as therapeutic indulgence or sentimental “enrichment,” this principle treats it as an instrument of clarity: when students articulate their behavior accurately, dysfunctional patterns lose their charm and become difficult to sustain. The aim is not confession for its own sake, nor a classroom turned talk show, but disciplined self-examination that collapses euphemism and replaces clever rationalization with honest reckoning. In this view, education cannot operate in a moral vacuum; teaching students how to think, argue, and write necessarily involves teaching them how to see themselves clearly. In the AI Age—when both cognitive labor and moral discomfort can be outsourced—the Self-Interrogation Principle insists that growth requires personal presence, linguistic precision, and the courage to endure what one discovers once illusion gives way to understanding.

    ***

    Thirty years ago, I assigned what now feels like a reckless little time bomb: a five-page extended definition essay on the term passive-aggressive. Students had to begin with a single, unsparing sentence—passive-aggressive behavior as an immature, cowardly, indirect way of expressing hostility—then unpack four or five defining traits and, finally, illustrate the concept with a personal chronicle. The goal was not linguistic finesse. It was exposure. I wanted students to stop admiring passive aggression as coy, clever, or emotionally sophisticated and see it instead for what it is: dysfunction with good PR.

    One essay has stayed with me for three decades. It came from a stunning nineteen-year-old who could have easily assembled a respectable boyfriend the way most people order coffee. Instead, she chose the town slob. He was twenty-six, unemployed by conviction, and committed to the craft of professional bumming. He was proudly unwashed, insufferably pungent, and permanently horizontal. He spent his days in her parents’ living room—drinking her father’s favorite beer, eating his snacks, parking himself in his favorite chair, and monopolizing the television like a hostile takeover. He belched. He cackled. He stank. And all the while, his girlfriend watched with satisfaction as her father’s misery fermented. She resented her father—another strong-willed soul who refused to bend—and rather than confront him directly, she opted for a scorched-earth tactic: ruin her own romantic prospects to punish him. Bite my nose to spite your face, weaponized.

    I remember her sitting across from me in my office as I read the essay, half-imagining it as a dark sitcom pilot. But there was nothing cute about it. When we talked, she told me that writing the essay forced her to see the ugliness of what she was doing with unbearable clarity. The realization filled her with such self-disgust that she ejected the boyfriend from her parents’ house and attempted, awkwardly but honestly, to confront her father directly. The assignment did two things no rubric could measure. It made her interrogate her own character, and it precipitated a real, irreversible change in her life.

    Thirty years later, I’m still unsure what to make of that. I’m gratified, of course—but uneasy. Is it my job to turn a writing class into a daytime talk show, where students inventory their neuroses and emerge “healed”? Is moral reckoning an accidental side effect of good pedagogy, or an unavoidable one?

    My answer, uncomfortable though it may be, is that a writing class cannot exist in a moral vacuum. Character matters. The courage to examine one’s own failures matters. Writing things down with enough precision that self-deception collapses under its own weight matters. Whether I like it or not, I have to endorse what I now call the Self-Interrogation Principle. Students do not come to class as blank slates hungry only for skills. They arrive starved for moral clarity—about the world and about themselves. And when language sharpens perception, perception sometimes demands change.

    I’m reminded of a department meeting in the early nineties where faculty were arguing over the value of assigning personal narratives. One professor defended them by saying they led to “personal enrichment.” A colleague—an infamous alcoholic, who sulked at meetings in his black leather jacket, appeared to be drunk at the table—exploded. “Personal enrichment? What the hell does that even mean?” he shouted as his spittle flew across the room. “Just another woeful cliché. Are you not ashamed?” The woman shrank into her chair, the meeting moved on, and the words personal enrichment was quietly banished. Today, in the AI Age, I will defend it without apology. That student’s essay was enriching in the only sense that matters: it helped a young adult grow up.

    I am not proposing that every assignment resemble an episode of Oprah. But one or two assignments that force honest self-examination have enormous value. They remind us that writing is not merely a transferable skill or a vocational tool. It is a means of moral reckoning. You cannot outsource that reckoning to a machine, and you cannot teach writing while pretending it doesn’t exist. If we are serious about education, we have to teach the Total Person—or admit we are doing something else entirely.