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. When faced with an issue, why not turn to the texts that I've been reading for six semesters to see if they can provide some guidance?
I believe that the presence of AI in the classroom has become a crisis. Specifically, I define "crisis" to be a situation where some sort of major change is required to address a change in circumstances. A pandemic, for example, is a crisis in the sense that it requires us to quarantine. I view the presence of AI in the classroom in a similar way, despite it being much more subtle.
My perception of AI in the classroom as a crisis is heavily driven by my own experiences, of course. I served on the course staff of CS112 for three semesters, and I got to observe firsthand how the rise in usage of AI tools affected our class environment and assignments. I found myself sitting at empty office hours blocks I was hosting, grading assignments that were obviously fully created by AI—and yet I had no way to decisively prove it—and watching as exam averages substantially decreased.
I observed what seemed like a dire state in my own classes too, as both participation in lectures and exam averages were very low, and I overheard students chatting with each other on their way out of class about how they used AI to complete their entire homework assignment. I remembered hearing older students tell me about packed office hours blocks with tens of students, and yet that wasn't what I was observing at all.
My classes started to begin with monologues about AI at the start of the semester, as professors tried to clearly articulate their AI policy, with no universal standard to work with. At the same time, the number of computer science majors entering BU (and other schools) has significantly decreased.
All of these realities led to a feeling of sweeping change held by me and many of my peers, which is why I describe the presence of AI in the classroom to currently be a crisis we need to work to address.
In short, the goal of this project is to try to think critically about and come up with changes to address the presence of AI in the classroom. While AI has affected a wide range of different aspects of life as well, the scope of this project is firmly within the classroom environment, particularly the undergraduate classroom environment that I have been in for the past three years.
Throughout the six semesters of Core courses I have taken, I have engaged with a wide variety of different texts. Some are more analytical—describing the way certain aspects of the world or of human society work—while others are more narrative-driven—presenting stories that cover a wide range of different themes.
Both of these types of texts have a place in my work. The more analytical texts can help frame and ground my argument, while the more narrative-driven texts can help give a metaphorical and symbolic language to work with that enriches the description of my perspective.
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-consciousness-style writing in my own essays.
While I call these works essays, their genre merits a bit of a closer discussion. The genre of my works sits somewhere between Descartes' meditations, Montaigne's essays, and blog posts. Keeping AI out of the Classroom, for example, reads much more like a meditation due to its repeated assertions and its more direct acknowledgement of the conscious mind. Tidal Wave, filled with anecdotes and a closer description of my personal experience reads more closely to a meditation as well. However, the other two essays, Core and AI? What These Texts Can Teach Us About How to Write and On AI and Computer Science Education, are much closer to Montaigne's style of essay due to their more formulated, topic-driven framing and content.
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, trans. Alter
- InfernoCC102Core Humanities 2: The Way: Antiquity and the Medieval World by Dante Alighieri, trans. Mandelbaum
- 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, trans. Screech
- Don QuixoteCC201Core Humanities 3: Renaissance, Rediscovery, and Reformation by Miguel de Cervantes, trans. Rutherford
- Discourse on Method and MeditationsCC201Core Humanities 3: Renaissance, Rediscovery, and Reformation by René Descartes, trans. Lafleur
- FaustCC202Core Humanities 4: Enlightenment, Romanticism, and Modernity by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, trans. Kauffmann
- Groundwork of the Metaphysics of MoralsCC202Core Humanities 4: Enlightenment, Romanticism, and Modernity by Immanuel Kant, trans. Grego & Timmermann
- 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, trans. Sheridan
I also reference three other texts not in Core:
- "The Constitution of the Athenians" by the so-called "Old Oligarch" of ancient Athens, which is a text I read while studying abroad in Athens in summer 2024. I used this translation by Marchant.
- The Clouds by Aristophanes, which Prof. Klein suggested I read after I interviewed her. I used the translation by Henderson.
- Building Thinking Classrooms by Peter Liljedahl, which Prof. Borkovitz referenced when I interviewed her.
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.