17 May 2026
The classroom is not a factory
Efficiency is a seductive metric for schools. It is also the wrong one, and AI makes the temptation sharper.
When a tool promises to save time, the honest next question is: time for what? In a classroom, the answer is almost always “for the human parts.”
Why this matters now
The pace of change is the hard part. Tools that felt like novelties a year ago now sit in the middle of ordinary work — in lesson plans, in homework, in the way a ten-year-old looks something up. That speed is exactly why a shared, patient vocabulary is worth the effort.
None of this requires you to become an engineer. It requires something more useful and more scarce: the willingness to stay curious in public, and to admit the parts you don't yet understand.
You cannot teach a subject you are still afraid of. So we start by making it ordinary.
A few things to hold onto
- Ask what a word actually points at before you argue about it.
- Prefer examples to definitions — a good example survives the next model.
- Notice when a claim is about the technology and when it is really about people.
The short version: clarity is a public good. When more of us can name what we're looking at, the whole conversation gets calmer, more specific, and far more useful to the people who have to make decisions.
If this is useful, its companion is our living lexicon