A long, long time ago, the world was created.
We can calculate exactly how long ago, some billions of years ago—actually, I can ask an AI model to figure it out for me: 13.8 billion years ago, Claude says, to be precise—in our timescale of "years," but that doesn't really matter. That's a number too astronomically large to be meaningful to us in any intuitive way.
How about when we were born? That's a much closer timeframe, but I think it's still too long ago to be super meaningful to us. I think many of us track time in much smaller phases. For me, I think of my time as an undergraduate as one "phase," and it gets hard to remember the time before then super clearly, even if it was just a few years ago.
Likewise, not too long after I started undergrad in fall 2023, AI started to become more and more dominant, both in the broader world and the classrooms I found myself in. I could see it and feel it as a TA and grader for computer science and math courses, and the way my peers viewed and discussed their assignments in my own classes.
At the same time, I was in the middle of taking the Core humanities and social science sequences, where I was reading many philosophical texts discussing the nature of consciousness, social organization, and the moral choices of the individual. In a crisis of AI in education, why not turn to the texts that I've been reading for six semesters to see if they can provide some guidance?
This was the idea that sparked this project. Over the course of the year, I interviewed a handful of professors, went back to the Core texts I have been reading as well as a few others, and thought deeply about my own experiences of AI in education to produce a few essays on different subjects related to AI and education.
I want to emphasize that these essays primarily reflect my own experiences, and in many ways, are akin to journal entries. I thought it was important to contrast the often stilted feel of AI writing with much more raw, stream-of-consciouss-style writing in my own essays.
I certainly don't have all the answers, and I can't give definitive advice, but each of these essays offer a slightly different perspective of what moving forward might look like in an era of AI in education. I hope you enjoy the essays for what they are and get something out of them.
I'd like to particularly thank Profs. Debra Borkovitz and George Vahamikos for their aid both advising me on this project and discussing their own class experiences in detail. I'd also like to thank Profs. Kyna Hamill, Sophie Klein, and Maria Gapotchenko for our discussions on AI in the classroom, as well as Profs. Brian Walsh and Marie McDonough for being my other Core course instructors. I really appreciate how Core has so many instructors who are so thoughtful about AI, pedagogy, and everything else both relating to these texts and the teaching and learning experience.
I recommend you read my project proposal next, which is the first thing I wrote for this project. You can then read the other essays in any order, but I recommend you leave Tidal Wave for last. I should also note that Keeping AI out of the Classroom was originally given as a live speech at the AI Free Classroom symposium.
Core Texts Referenced
- GenesisCC101Core Humanities 1: Ancient Worlds
- InfernoCC102Core Humanities 2: The Way: Antiquity and the Medieval World by Dante Alighieri
- The PrinceCC201Core Humanities 3: Renaissance, Rediscovery, and ReformationCC221Making the Modern World: Progress, Politics, and Economics by Niccolo Machiavelli
- The Essays: A SelectionCC201Core Humanities 3: Renaissance, Rediscovery, and Reformation by Michel de Montaigne
- Don QuixoteCC201Core Humanities 3: Renaissance, Rediscovery, and Reformation by Miguel de Cervantes
- Discourse on Method and MeditationsCC201Core Humanities 3: Renaissance, Rediscovery, and Reformation by René Descartes
- FaustCC202Core Humanities 4: Enlightenment, Romanticism, and Modernity by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
- Groundwork of the Metaphysics of MoralsCC202Core Humanities 4: Enlightenment, Romanticism, and Modernity by Immanuel Kant
- Second Treatise of GovernmentCC221Making the Modern World: Progress, Politics, and Economics by John Locke
- The Division of Labor in SocietyCC221Making the Modern World: Progress, Politics, and Economics by Émile Durkheim
- The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of CapitalismCC221Making the Modern World: Progress, Politics, and Economics by Max Weber
- Discipline and PunishCC222"Unmaking" the Modern World: the Psychology, Politics, and Economics of the Self by Michel Foucault
Other Acknowledgements
I built this website using Next.js and host it on Vercel. I used this template as a starting point for the website.
I used Claude Code to program some of the elements of this site; I used Ideogram to generate the image at the end of Tidal Wave. No other AI tools were used in the development of this project.