On Teaching - Kahlil Gibran
A timeless speech about what a teacher is.
Lately, I have been writing a lot about AI and what it means for us teachers. Stay tuned for many posts after some final edits, on my personal blog.
It’s a challenge for educators because LLMs were just dropped into our students’ laps with exhortations, manna from heaven and promises that are just “pie in the sky”. There are uses, yes - but as with so much of technology, it wasn’t developed from the ground up, education was an afterthought - a market to plunder, not a soil to nurture. There are very few use cases for “frictionless speed” in education. Read Kundera’s “Slowness” for a meditation on the subject.
“The degree of slowness is directionally proportional to the intensity of memory. The degree of speed is directionally proportional to the intensity of forgetting.”
― Milan Kundera, Slowness
I’ve been seeing so many AI hypsters in ed-tech, one week promote using AI lesson plans, the next week giving talks on “Humanizing education in the age of AI”. It makes my head spin. I’ve spent most of my teaching career guiding teachers through the curriculum development process and now, all of a sudden so called “experts” in education are saying, “Never mind all that - just push a button!” It’s a carnival and its wrong. I look at old videos of Sam Altman hustling his “Loopt” snakeoil and I don’t believe for a second he has the welfare of our future generations in mind. More like this guy. In my time in the tech world, I’ve dined and rubbed shoulders with these lizard men enough to know.
Following up on my post of last week about Nel Noddings and the ethics of care, I’d like to again say, “Yes, Virginia, there is such a thing as a teacher.”
Kahlil Gibran says it well. The role of a teacher isn’t to inculcate, provide answers or babysit. It is much more and our role, so human role is to be treasured and fought for. We awaken, we keep alive the spirit of inquiry. We are motivators, psychologists - as one treasured mentor of mine put it. It’s why students will always remember their “good” teachers.
I’ll leave it at that - but it is a good speech to digest when you have time. Get the free text and reflection activity in the Lesson Library.
