AI's Impact on Education with Casey Cuny - 2024 Cal Teacher of the Year

0:10 Welcome back to the AI Power Podcast. I'm Gregory Allen, and today we've got something a little bit different. We've got Casey Cooney, who is the 2024 California Teacher of the Year. And he's going to give us an up-close and personal perspective on what's happening at the intersection of AI and education.

0:31 So, Casey, we're going to get a lot into your background, but first let me just say thank you for joining the AI Power Podcast.

0:37 Oh, thank you, Greg. It was an honor to hear you speak and then how it led to this. It's it's uh it's great to be here.

0:43 Yeah, so maybe we should just start by mentioning how you and I got connected. You were coming through Washington, D.C. as part of this California State University, I believe it was, delegation on what's going on in AI in the workforce. So, how does somebody like yourself, who starts out teaching in a classroom, uh, find themselves a part of this California delegation to Washington, D.C., talking about AI and education?

1:10 Yeah, I mean, ironically, it started on a podcast. Uh and then uh that podcast led to an invite to go speak at ASUGSV, then led to speaking on OpenAI Forum, and then a couple talks for Google, and then I kind of got on the radar with Cal States, and they invited me to join the AI uh workforce acceleration board as the K-12 representative to provide, you know, consultation and perspective on all of that.

1:34 And then I was actually in DC for as an advisor for the Smithsonian Education Summit, and it perfectly coincided with that uh event where I got to go to the Capitol with the Workforce Acceleration Board, uh, which I am really impressed with, honestly. And then got to hear you speak there in the uh in the basement of the Capitol.

1:50 Yeah, um, which was a great day for me too. And, you know, I was so glad to meet you there and hear your perspective. And now I kind of want to share that with the audience. So you have a very interesting perspective and a very interesting approach uh to teaching with AI, and you've been refining it as you go.

2:06 I definitely want to get there. But before, let's just talk with your basic background. Um, how did you get into teaching? What do you teach?

2:14 Yeah, so I teach English. I've been I've been a teacher for now 24 years uh in high school. I teach 10 honors English and then senior mythology. I've been teaching mythology for 20 years. That's a real passion of mine. Uh, but I also teach higher ed. I've been at National University for 13 years as a professor of ed.

2:29 And then I just now started working with ASU to develop their new California teacher credential. The reason I became a teacher was honestly because I was a I'm a childhood cancer survivor. And I had cancer in my eighth grade, ninth grade, and lots of stuff after that in the aftermath through high school.

2:44 Oh my gosh. And it was, and I got out, I got a business degree. I I I did all the internships, came to LA with a job at the studios.

2:52 But I just Wait, like like the movie studios, like Hollywood?

2:55 Yeah, I was in their marketing department, but I I felt so unfulfilled, honestly. I remember sitting in a cubicle thinking, like, this can't be why I got a second chance at life to convince people to see bad movies. Like, this can't be it. And I kept thinking back on my teachers, like the whole narrative of my past and how I had overcome that cancer, obviously my family and other people, but my teachers were so integral.

3:14 And then in the aftermath, what they showed me I could be capable of, because I was a pure athlete. That was all I did. And then that was taken, that was gone. And then they got me to, you know, I became student by president and I was in the plays and like all these things that I never would have done.

3:28 And I decided, you know, I was either going to thinking medicine or maybe teaching. And I started subbing at Van Nuys High, and I was hooked, and I've never looked back. So that's how I became a teacher.

3:38 That's amazing. I I wonder how many people can legitimately say that they left Hollywood to teach high school English and mythology. So I correct me if I'm wrong here, but I think the first time uh that you came to Washington was as a part of this California Teacher of the Year award. So obviously, California is the most populous state in America.

4:04 So to be uh rated as the best teacher that year is no small feat. Congratulations. But can you just help people understand like what exactly is this award? How does it happen? And then how did you find yourself in a room with, uh, if I'm not mistaken, President uh Joe Biden back in 2024?

4:24 Yes, yes. And and and and definitely not the best teacher because I don't even know what that means, you know? Yeah. Everyone's got their own style and craft and art to it. But I'm really was just selected to serve in many ways as a representative of teaching in the state of California. And and so, yeah, it's a very long process.

4:39 Uh in California, every state's a little different, but it was probably about a six-month process where I you've you every year we there's a teacher of the year for this school. And then I was selected as the district, and then it went down to LA County. And I honestly wasn't gonna do that. It was like eight essays, uh, about 25 pages worth of writing and on every facet of education.

5:00 And I, and it was my wife who was like, You're gonna do this for our boys, because I was like, they're not gonna pick me, but I did it, and then yeah, I got LA County Teacher of the Year, and then it just kept going. And then eventually the state came to my class, they watched me teach for two hours, uh, four former California Teachers of the Year, which was incredibly intimidating, and some people from the state, followed by about three or four interviews and Zooms and all that kind of stuff.

5:22 And then one day my phone rang on a Friday at six o'clock and it said Sacramento. And I thought, no, it can't be because it's too late. And I answered it, and it was Superintendent Tony Thurman telling me I was the California Teacher of the Year. And yes, the Bidens held a state dinner for us, which was just incredible.

5:40 Um, my my dinner mate was uh second gentleman Imhof, and we talked all about Los Angeles all night. So yeah, it was an incredible experience. I'm just you know humbled and grateful about the whole thing.

5:51 Well, uh, that's pretty amazing. So uh maybe, maybe you're reluctant to call yourself the the best teacher that year in 2024, but certainly you're a great teacher. And so just like help us understand like what's your philosophy of teaching. Uh now you're a part of this. I you said ASU, I assume that's Arizona State University, working on a credential for California state teachers uh around the entire state.

6:15 What's the philosophy of teaching that you're trying to impart? There's probably some tricks and techniques, but there's also probably this larger metaphilosophy.

6:23 Yeah, my metaphilosophy is it's all about rigor through relationships. So what does that mean? Yeah. So the the, you know, how how do you motivate a 15-year-old to give it their all? And all the new brain research we know, uh, there's some really interesting stuff out of UCLA called desirable difficulties that you have to things have to be difficult and there has to have to be some struggle for them to really stick.

6:46 And you really have to want to struggle to learn something deeply. It's why so many of us probably the things that we really deeply learned were probably later in life when you really were a little more independent and you wanted it, or you had some great teacher who motivated you to want to learn that history or that government or that calculus.

7:06 And so for me, it's all about building relationships. I think people think it's probably pretty easy to be a teacher, but I think it's really hard to be a great teacher. Um, it's so difficult. It's easy to be a terrible teacher to show up, right? But to be a great teacher is incredibly difficult. But you know, it's incredibly dynamic.

7:24 I mean, it's constantly moving. You're dealing with humans, and the content changes, the culture changes, the kids change, your every period is different. So it's it's a it's incredibly challenging. You're never perfect. I mean, it's every year I'm never happy, and it's a constantly, it's a it's a very dynamic uh thing.

7:41 So yeah, so that's my thing. And then the other thing too is that I the students teach me what to teach. So I don't have like a calendar and everything mapped out because that to me is insane. That that's me just I'm pouring information out and hoping they catch it. I really want to teach them, I have to understand them, and then uh they, you know, it's all it's a back and forth, it's a conversation.

8:02 Um, and that's kind of my philosophy. But yeah, it's a it's uh a lot more challenging than I think a lot of people might might uh expect. You know, we all sat in a classroom, you know, we were all indoctrinated in the existing system. So we think, oh yeah, you know, I've been there. But to run it and run it well, it's like you're an orchestra.

8:20 It's a lot like stand-up comedy too, honestly. So sometimes it doesn't land first period, but then by third period, my timing's right, you know, and it kills.

8:30 So that's interesting. Um, and I can definitely I definitely understand teaching as an art, but uh never until you just said that had I ever sort of conceptualized it as a performance art. But of course, uh that's exactly what it is with a lot of crowd work, uh, which is very hot right now.

8:46 It's and a lot of science. You know, you're doing a lot of analysis and you're having to synthesize a lot of material and and and things, and then you're constantly researching and learning to bring more in to keep it current.

8:57 So yeah. So we're gonna we're gonna jump into AI here in a second. But before we get that, I want you to sort of like set the stage for folks who listen to this podcast who may have been in high school five years ago, or they may have been in high school 35 uh years ago. What are the major challenges facing educators and students right now?

9:20 And I'm sure some of them are like permanent challenges, like being a teenager is hard, being on drugs is bad, but then others are much more focused on this moment in time, culturally, technologically, et cetera. So, you know, sort of set the landscape for us. What is the current moment in education really like?

9:38 Yeah, well, I graduated high school in 1994, so it's been a little while. And so I have seen this major evolution. And uh this group, this Gen Z is amazing. I mean, I I know some people bag on them. I don't think they realize these kids are brilliant. I mean, they're the the most brilliant kids I've seen.

9:56 They're incredibly tolerant. They're actually way more skeptical than people give them credit for. They constantly fact-check me. You know, another thing, they don't know AI at all. A lot of people assume they do. They're digital natives, but they're not AI natives. And they're really good with some tech.

10:13 But, you know, to use AI well, it's really not about tech expertise. It's vocabulary, creative thinking, architectural thinking, and they're not there yet. So, but they're, you know, they're they're hyper-aware, I think, because of social media about everything going on in the world. You know, I think when I was a kid, I had to sit down at six o'clock to watch like Tom Brokaw when it was on to even know what was going on.

10:34 You know, I don't, I didn't know about Kosovo when I was in high school, or even Nelson Mandela, really, until later. And uh, but they're like really hyper aware of everything that's going on. I think it's why they're a bit more anxious, a lot more anxious than I think I've ever seen. But they care. There's there's they really do want to change things.

10:53 It's a there's a passion in them that's uh that's very inspiring. So, Gen Z, they blow me away, but the challenges are very real. You know, I tell a story about this kid, Max. You walked up to my desk. We did this really cool activity with a big prompt I have that immerses them in a to learn double think, because I teach 1984.

11:09 And okay, so this is the the George Orwell double think.

11:12 Yes, yes. And uh it's a really cool prompt. It basically asks them like to pick a list of 10 things, what are you interested in in sports, movies, things like that. And then it it gives them a doublethink example, but they have to they have to articulate how it's different than just plain old hypocrisy.

11:25 Wait, so so for for for folks who maybe haven't read 1984 since high school, uh, walk us through, you know, what is doublethink and and what is this AI prompt and and why is it working, you think?

11:35 Yeah, so double think is the ide is this concept that we in a in a society often, especially a more authoritarian society, we have to hold two opposing concepts in our mind at the same time. You know, we are all free, but we're not, you know, and like things like that. Freedom is slavery, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

11:53 And then, you know, for the high school kids, one example we came up with the other was that like they're told every day mental well-being is so essential. But then they're also told at the same time, if you don't get all A's, you won't have a successful life. And so these two opposing ideas then make they control you, and you become controlled.

12:12 Uh, you lose your individuality and your freedom through double think. So it's a hard concept to teach. Like I have struggled really for years to teach that concept well, to have kids really understand it more than just some definition, but to actually, you know, integrate it uh so they really get it.

12:29 And this really worked. I mean, this prompt worked. They were able to go back and forth. Well, I'm circulating in the room. I'm not sitting at my desk. But this kid, Max, walks up, he's got a soccer ball under his arm, and he goes, Wow, that was like really cool. I learned a lot, Mr. CUNY, but I think AI is making me dumber in my other classes.

12:45 And I said, What do you what do you mean, Max? And he looked kind of nervous and he said, I just put my worksheet questions into it at home and I just write down what it says because I have so much to do and I gotta get to practice. And and I just I'm getting really worried that I'm really not learning anything.

12:59 And I'm looking at this kid, and as I said this to him, I realized how ridiculous this was. This 15-year-old, I said, Well, Max, you have to want to learn it. You know, you have to want to learn those difficult concepts. Right. And I think that's the real challenge we're facing right now, is the easier path has never been more accessible to them.

13:17 And we're asking teenagers to choose the harder path on their own.

13:21 Because I mean, it's effectively AI because literally you could just like take pictures of the PDFs at this point. So let's just say you print out their homework and they they go home with paper. They just take a picture on their phone and it can literally return all the answers filled in, all the work shown.

13:40 It's literally like push a button and your homework is done, and you can just copy. And, you know, copying your friend's homework has been a theoretical possibility since we were doing homework on stone tablets, but never has there just been like this temptation of take a device out of your pocket, push a button, and all the answers to your homework are there.

14:03 And your point about how kids have to want to learn seems pretty hard when that temptation's there all of the time.

14:12 Combined with that double think example of like you have to get A's. And if you don't go to an elite college, you know, where are you gonna go in life? And so this pressure and this pressure combined with, yeah, this amazing tool that will just do that homework for them. So I tell teachers everywhere, if it goes home, it will be AI'd.

14:28 And I know there are some people out there that say, oh, there's always been cheating. It's not, they're totally not on the ground. It is worse than I've ever seen. Yeah, you would always have a couple kids cheating, and I mean, you know, a good chunk. You know, they usually had older siblings or they had older friends, or you know, they're a little savvy.

14:43 And I always liked those kids, honestly. But now everyone is cheating. I mean, it is really unbelievable how rampant it is. I've done experiments where I I've let stuff go home and didn't know that they didn't know I had like a watermark in the uh in the prompt. And it's like 98%.

14:58 98% cheating on kids who, you know, maybe you think are fundamentally good, but their ability to resist that kind of temptation is just not gonna, it's not gonna happen. So, like, you know, you could have an honor code where everybody signs a statement that says they're not going to cheat, but and in your mind, it it's just not enough given the the ease of access and the strength of that temptation.

15:22 Yeah. And a lot of them don't see it as cheating. A lot of them see it as, well, I don't understand how to do this, and I have an AP world test and an AP chem test. And so, like, I mean, I just need to do this.

15:32 Yeah, like you're giving me busy work, and over here I've got the really high stakes thing. And so that's what I'm that's what I'm gonna focus on. Okay, so the this point you just made about how some of them don't even consider it cheating, I do think it kind of connects to the question of what skills do we want students to have, and to what extent is forcing them to have certain kinds of skills just stupid and wrong to the extent that part of what we're educating them to be ready for is the skills they're going to need in the workplace.

16:04 So if in the future those skills are going to be performed by AI, maybe they don't need their skills. So an analogy that you hear often in the public media narrative, and I'm curious, you know, where you see similarities, where you see differences, is the calculator. So we've had abacuses forever, we've had slide rules for a long time, but in the 1970s is when really high quality, really affordable pocket calculators became widespread.

16:35 And, you know, my sense is that initially there was some pushback on the idea that calculators had a role in education because they were just doing the work for the student, so the student wasn't learning. But by 1980, you have a big teacher's association of mathematics saying that like calculators should be issued to every student in the United States.

16:56 So, you know, is it the case that as calculators are to teaching math, large language model AI like ChatGPT is to teaching English? Where does that analogy work? Where does it break down?

17:10 Yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot of nuance to it. I don't know that I I love the analogy. I think it it fits in terms of the tech backlash that occurred with the calculator and then the later adoption. I think it also works in the sense that is that, you know, we were doing too much rote math and we weren't getting to high concept math.

17:28 And so to this point we were just making about the homework, I often joke around with teachers that the 15-page homework packet was never a good idea. So now that kids are cheating on it, it's like, well, okay, maybe that was, maybe we need to move on from that and get to a higher level stuff and and and maybe they're gonna do some of their own AI investigation at home, leveraging deep research with a notebook LM, and then come back into class, we're gonna have a Socratic seminar, you know.

17:52 So maybe we can push learning where we've always wanted it to go, which is into a high level of inquiry and critical thinking. So I think there is some analogies there, but but the calculator, I mean, it it did, you still had to understand math, right? I had a student last year who was gonna fail my senior mythology class, and I made a deal with his mom and with the counselors that he could come in and do one writing assignment in my room, uh, because I don't give homework at all anymore.

18:17 And then he would pass. And he's sitting there doing the assignment, the essay, and he looks up at me and he goes, Low key, Mr. CUNY. This is the first thing I've written in three years. Wow. Yes. And I looked up his grades, B's and C's. So I had a conversation with him, and he says, Well, yeah, I just cheated on all the homework, like literally.

18:36 And then if I bomb a test, it doesn't matter because I have enough points to buffer that. And so to me, that's different than the calculator. You couldn't just like go in with a calculator and pass, you know, a geometry test. You know, that that wasn't gonna work for you.

18:50 Yeah.

18:50 So I think it's there's some analogies to it, but it almost is more like the word processor to the calculator to me. This is a whole nother world. But, you know, again, there's so much opportunity with this too. Like, I I we're being a bit negative here. Like, there's so much opportunity with this to actually boost learning.

19:06 Like, I think it could be an offloader, but it also can be an amplifier.

19:10 Yeah. So I want to get to that amplifier for a moment, but I want the listener out there to kind of have a better sense of what it is that you want the kids to be able to do, to know, et cetera. So let's just say, like in the math analogy, right, people were learning computation. And that was a skill that they needed to learn.

19:33 And then we realized that there are pretty significant diminishing returns to developing an elite skill at computation, given that that's so easily automatable. And the way that that big national association of math teachers said is the fundamental goal that we want for teaching mathematics is to teach kids problem solving and learning, you know, the toolbox of mathematics and how to convert problems that they might encounter into mathematical problems that have solutions that are have relevant techniques, et cetera.

20:06 And I think that basically worked. I think that was a pretty positive story at the end of the day. So when you think about a student like the one you just described, who has not written anything in three years, so clearly is not developing the skill of writing. What is it that you want them to develop?

20:25 And how do you know if they've developed it? How do you assess them?

20:29 Yeah, I mean, I want them to develop the ability to analyze, to critique, to evaluate, to synthesize something new from large sets of material and data. I also want them to develop empathy and the ability to listen actively to others, uh, to take other perspectives and to find that complexity and then to be uncomfortable, to be comfortable being uncomfortable.

20:51 But no, you're right. I mean, I think that like, for instance, I had this like moment of existential crisis when I realized that I'll never have to teach my students how to make a good PowerPoint again. Because you can just ask Claude to do it or you can make this look nice to beautify it, right? But then it hit me that, like, no, that's okay.

21:08 Because like no one walked out of a presentation going, wow, that slides was mind-blowing, right? It was the person doing the presentation. And so now maybe I don't have to worry so much about, you know, showing them, don't put a block of text on your slide, but I can work on the the the what are the points that you should be making and what is the order of the points you should be making, and then your actual speaking, right?

21:29 So I think that we can move beyond a lot of that stuff and and writing. I actually think that good writing will be an even more valuable commodity in the future. Because, as you know, AI is a probability machine and it will give you the greatest average sentence. And and I think we've all had the experience in in our Gmail where we get the blue underline.

21:49 And you often go, yeah, that's I yeah, that was a passive sentence. I'll fix that. But oftentimes you go, no, if I do that, I'm gonna lose the tone, the inflection, what I was, the emotion that I was trying to. Convey in that sentence. And, you know, AI as great as it is, I don't think it's going to write a sentence that Flannery O'Connor could write, or it's going to write a sentence that Cormac McCarthy could put down on paper that is going to hit you in an emotional way.

22:12 So I think that we still want them to be writers. Now, if it if it elevates everyone to be an average writer of emails, but you're still going to need the CEO to write that groundbreaking memo, right, that's going to push change. And that writing skill is going to be incredibly valuable, I would argue, going forward as well.

22:29 But also just with prompting, you know, I have to, I do words of the week, like evaluate this or give me a comprehensive plan or optimize or extract or red team this, which they love, to get them to use language in their prompting because that is, as you know, essential to the whole thing.

22:47 So I think your point about writing, I view it a bit differently. And here is sort of my experience. So I used to work at Blue Origin, which is a space systems manufacturer founded and mostly owned by Jeff Bezos, who also founded Amazon. And if you know anything about Jeff Bezos' leadership style, he's obsessed with writing.

23:12 You are not allowed to present a PowerPoint to Jeff Bezos. He just won't sit through that meeting. He wants everything in a memo, typed, single-spaced, of not longer than six pages. So he's a re he really has built into Amazon and built into Blue Origin a culture of writing and reading. And the reason why he's banned PowerPoint is he said it is so much easier to hide the fact that you don't know what you're talking about, or there are big gaps in your analysis in PowerPoint, and much harder to hide that fact in writing, harder to hide that you're basically full of it when you're writing.

23:50 And in working for him, one of the phrases, I didn't come up with this phrase, I don't know who did, but how do I know what I think until I see what I write? Which is to say, the process of writing something is also a very structured approach to thinking. It sort of forces you to figure out how to think about an issue.

24:10 And so, you know, you you've said that you see so much promise in Gen Z, but at the same time, you've got these students who haven't written anything in three years, which to me sounds like apocalyptically bad. Because on the one hand, you know, even Plato and Socrates were decrying the invention of writing as an alternative to perfect memorization, which was the technique of their day when writing was becoming more popular.

24:37 But for me, you know, writing and thinking are two sides of the same coin. And it's it's really difficult for me to imagine that somebody can think clearly if they can't write clearly. And so my question then comes back here you said you're not assigning homework anymore, but how do you motivate your students to want to become good writers?

25:01 And then, frankly, how do you assess? How do you know that they become good writers at the end of the story?

25:07 Oh, I love this. We're gonna talk about writing. This is this is my my love. So yeah, I'm with you. I journal every day. I journaled before this podcast to kind of get my thinking going because I'm with you 100%. I I don't know what I'm thinking until I put it down in writing. And I, you know, of course, I have the dictation apps and all that, but it's different.

25:24 It's different when you write. So even with my students, I will do a synocratic seminar, right? And I'll have them, I'll have them handwrite now. I'm doing more handwriting, by the way, in the classroom than I have since the pandemic.

25:33 Interesting.

25:33 So I'll have them handwrite the first question, you know, their answer. But then when they have it, they think it's good. I will have them open a Chromebook and I have to give them the prompt I've discovered. At first, I was like, go talk to the LLM about it. And that was a disaster. So now I give them a prompt, which is like, here's the question, here's my initial answer, roughly, and help me unpack this.

25:55 What are the blind spots that I'm not seeing here? What are some nuances that I'm not taking into account? And uh, and then they have to go back and forth a little bit. And then we shut the Chromebooks and then we talk, right? And we do this through that Socratic seminar. Then I have them journal.

26:08 And and just uh for folks who are not familiar with this idea, can you explain what a Socratic seminar is?

26:13 Oh, so a Socratic seminar is a series of questions that lead to the big essential question of whatever the unit is or the big essay question. There's actually a technique called prior questioning technique at a Sonoma State, which is that you take the big essential question, like what's the value of life?

26:28 And then you backtrack that down to like, well, what is value? You know, what is what is what does it mean to say someone's life? What does that encompass? Uh, and you do backtrack all these these prior questions. And the way I do it, everyone does a little different, but I'm a little old school. I do it as Socrates.

26:42 I don't, I don't tell them anything, I just ask questions. So even so I ask them a question, they write their response, then we talk and kids share their responses. Other, we have to take notes on what everyone says, and then we I ask further questions, right? Sometimes just uh improvising in the moment.

26:56 And then we get to the next big question and we just kind of cycle through. And it's a basically like a scaffolded critical thinking session, because by the end, I've elevated everyone's thinking. You know, if I just gave them those individual questions to write at home, they would have lived in their little lane.

27:09 But by doing it together collectively, we just raise the thinking. But but then I get to the point where they have to journal to their thesis statement. So they have to journal out, usually handwriting or sometimes typed if I'm watching their screens, which I know we're gonna talk about. And then we get their thesis, but their thesis is handwritten.

27:24 And then I have them workshop that with their neighbors and and we spend a lot of time on that one sentence. And then, you know, last year was the first year of my entire career I didn't give a take-home essay. And it felt very uncomfortable. And so I empathize why a lot of English teachers, humanity teachers are are freaking out because this is existential.

27:42 So I had to shift. I started doing what I call one-page responses, which is like make a strong claim in that first sentence, which is really your thesis, and then prove it with evidence and elaboration and using rhetoric and rhetorical devices to do so. But I must say, I feel like I saw faster rhetorical development this last year because in many ways I was shrinking the aperture down and focusing on those skills of writing versus this giant big five-paragraph essay, which when are they going to write those ever again, likely?

28:10 So, yeah, so that's kind of how I do writing. I, you know, and you know, it's all to me, it's about the words and it's about the sentence. And I try to get down to that level and it's about revision. I'm really big on John McPhee. He has a great essay called Draft Number Four. He's a writing professor at Princeton.

28:23 I want a couple Pulitzers, he's huge in the nonfiction world. And that everything should go through four drafts. So I teach them that.

28:31 I I I just submitted a paper for for publication before we got on this call, and it was V30. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. So V Four would be an incredible achievement for me. Yeah.

28:43 Yeah. So I try to get kids to realize that if it's about effort, and then if I understand that every time I I draft, it will get better, then anybody can write. And that's kind of my goal is to get them to accept that and understand that. So then they will try. And you know, because kids will try if they think they can succeed.

29:00 So I'm much like a coach. I'm like a writing coach, is how I see it.

29:03 Yeah. Very cool. Okay. So we we've talked a little bit about how AI is making your life hard in terms of the students being unwilling to do any homework at 98% chance that they're just going to involve AI to have to do their homework if you send them home with it. But you have been really loud with a lot of exciting techniques on using AI for the good of the classroom.

29:28 And we talked a bit about that with like the doublethink prompt. But let's just say, you know, what are you trying to accomplish when you bring AI into the classroom? What are the techniques you're you're using and what's going well?

29:42unknown Yeah.

29:43 So we've we've long known in education that the most powerful way to teach is called formative assessment. And I always joke that they didn't have a marketing team because it's really formative teaching. And when you call it assessment, you feel like it's an event, but it's really a process. And I guess to describe it would be like it's it's about like putting your finger in the water to test the temperature all throughout the lesson.

30:01 So, like the opposite would be I'm going to teach you math for three weeks and then give you a test. And then I find out it's like an autopsy. Like I find out who failed, and I even know why they failed, but we're moving on to the next chapter. Right. Formatively would be all throughout that unit assessing whether that's maybe with little quizzes, but also just conversations.

30:19 But the key is me then adjusting my teaching. Like what I see on Monday should inform my teaching on Tuesday. But it doesn't happen very often. I've been an instructional coach for 15 years, and you just don't see it happen because it's cumbersome. You know, you take those exit tickets home, and if you got to take your kid to soccer practice that night, you're not going to look at them.

30:37 And it might take a week. And in kids' life, that's like an anniversary, and they don't remember. So I'm doing it mid-period now. So I'll have maybe put them on a Google form and have them answer a short answer question. Well, they put the Chromebooks away. I'm throwing that into an LLM and saying, identify the misconceptions for me.

30:56 What are the most common misconceptions? Find me some exemplars so that I can project those and we could talk about those as a class. And then let's brainstorm and thought partner on how I address those misconceptions. Now, very important. I'm still going to read those. And if I'm going to give them feedback, it's going to come from me.

31:11 I see a major problem right now with, you know, clicking the AI button and disconnecting teachers from students. But now I can like adjust mid-period and go, oh wow, 25% just didn't get that the bird in the woods that was singing to Julianne Winston is this symbol of freedom because the bird just sings to sing.

31:30 Wow, they missed that. Okay, now I can like adjust right now in the moment and catch that misconception, which is the most powerful way to teach. And it really just wasn't possible in the past to me. So we can pull that off.

31:41 Is this an AI story? Because it sounds like this is just a surveying story.

31:46 Yeah, but see, the AI is that thought partner. It's like the the AI does so well what I can't do well. And then I do well what the AI can't do, which is that human connection. But the AI can analyze large sets of data. And my new line is that narrative is numerical now.

32:03 I I see. So so basically, like previously, maybe 10 years ago, everybody would like have a clicker and they would, or they would just raise their hands when you say A, B, C, or D. Like, what do you think the bird means? But now you can ask the question in the Chromebook, what do you think the bird means?

32:22 And everybody writes you a sentence or two, and then the AI system can turn that into quantitative data that you could assess at a glance and refine your teaching technique. Did I get it right?

32:32 Yeah, and and the raising the hand never worked because you know, kids would wait to see who the smart kid would raise their hand and then they would raise their hand.

32:39 Yeah.

32:40 And multiple choice, you never know. You'd have detractors and things like that. But we always had to rely on multiple choice. But I but we always knew that short answer was like Jeff Bezos discovered, was better at getting to their thinking. And now I can do that. I can rely on that because I have to do that.

32:54 Okay, so so like one thing it can do is turbocharge your ability to in real time monitor how much your kids are learning, which I think is a really cool technique and opportunity. What else are you doing with AI?

33:11 Yeah, so I mean, with the kids, I'm teaching them how to quiz themselves. We have a lot of research on what's called in the literature, it's called retrieval practice. Retrieval practice is the best way to study is quizzing to learn. So I teach them how to use a prompt that will give them 20 questions, one question at a time, you know, that kind of stuff.

33:27 And just like what walk me through an example here. Like, say you're you're teaching 1984. What does retrieval practice and using AI for that look like?

33:37 Yeah, and this just be kind of for comprehension, but it would be like, you know, here you guys, you read that chapter, the PDF is in Google Classroom, so you can use it. Go give that to an LLM with this prompt that's gonna quiz you, and then you know, we'll come to school and take an actual test in the room.

33:51 Or podcasting. I mean, I have an incredible story actually about a kid who was very checked out on school. He, Clay was his name, and uh, he didn't like school, and he told me all the time he's a senior. And when we got independent reading books, he gets his book and walks by me and he goes, Hey, CUNY, maybe if I read this book, my dad will love me.

34:09 Ha ha ha. Yeah, and it broke my heart. And I went and looked him up and he had D's and F's and C's all through high school. He was in special ed and he was a basketball player, but other than that, he wasn't really into being there. We did the Socratic seminar after a podcast. So we'd read three myths.

34:24 I threw them all into Google Notebook LM, played the podcast, thinking maybe this will help some kids, you know, grasp the story.

34:29 Now, now wait, when you say played the podcast, is this a podcast that you recorded that uh Google Notebook LLM generated, or what's the story?

34:36 Yeah, yeah. So it's Google Notebook LM. So Google Notebook LM, you can give it any sources you can go to a hundred, I believe, and it'll make you a podcast. So it does these two voices that obviously are not they're not human, but they sound human. And it's really good. I mean, at first some people think it just summarizes.

34:52 No, it really does a great job of connecting and and synthesizing. And uh so we listened to that and then we started the seminar, and Clay's hand was shooting up all throughout the seminar. And the stuff he was saying was brilliant. And I watched all these other kids taking notes on clay. And afterwards I called him up and I was like, What was that?

35:10 And he goes, I don't know. I I just got it. And I said, get over here. And it took me five minutes to show him how to use it. I also said, Give me your book. I'm getting you an audio book. And he he runs in my room a week later and he's like, You won't believe it. I aced my econ test. I made a podcast from the study guide and the teacher slides.

35:27 And at the gym, I listened to the podcast and I just, I just got it. And fast forward, it was senior night basketball. I'm sitting there working the book because, like most teachers, I have like four jobs. And he's walking down the middle court with his parents as they're announcing all the seniors. And the the announcer says, Clay's proudest moment was just this last semester for the first time ever, he earned straight A's.

35:50 Blew me away. It really started to shift my thinking on this whole thing because it was like here was this kid who for so long I thought he was stupid because he couldn't access the material through reading for some reason. Like all the time.

36:00 And is this like a dyslexia story or or some other thing?

36:04 Or probably a combination of things. Yeah. But he didn't realize he had a superpower in his auditory learning because he was probably compensating for years with that. And this unlocked this for him. All I did was change the modality in which he was receiving the information, and it just changed his life, honestly.

36:20 He's now in college, and so that has changed a lot of my thinking. So I think we're actually still figuring out how we can use AI in education. I think as a teacher, it changes my workflow immensely. I mean, it gives me so much time back to do things that are only things I can do with my students. But in terms of the students, I think if we can find ways to unlock material and learning and high-level critical thinking and analysis like never before.

36:47 So one of the things that comes to mind for me is the sort of technology education scandal when I was in high school, we're talking the early 2000s when I was in high school. The scandal was Wikipedia and it was Sparknotes. So I don't know how many people out there know what SparkNotes is. I assume I assume it's still out there and impactful, although maybe AI has completely superseded it.

37:16 But Wikipedia in in the early 2000s was still sort of in its infancy. And you could, on the one hand, if you wanted to know the atomic weight of hydrogen, it's on Wikipedia and it's almost certainly right. But if you want to know a bunch of other stuff, it might be on Wikipedia and it might be completely wrong.

37:35 The Wikipedia that we know today as like a juggernaut that's generally pretty good on almost all topics, it wasn't there yet. But it was still really interesting. So teachers were like, stay off Wikipedia. Like, go to real sources, you know, you can't trust Wikipedia. And obviously, because it's the number two thing that comes up when you Google search anything, kids were using Wikipedia, sometimes with good results, sometimes with bad results.

37:59 And at the same time, there was SparkNotes, which, like Cliff Notes, would give you the summary of the literature book for your English class and would also talk about the themes, talk about the character development, talk about anything that you might plausibly be quizzed on in this book. And so it's like an alternative to doing the reading for that night's homework, is just read the SparkNotes, which were online unlike Cliff Notes and were available free, unlike Cliff Notes.

38:25 And so they were extremely widespread in use. And teachers sometimes said, it's totally fine to read the SparkNotes as long as you also read the book. Sometimes it was like a scandal, and they said, you know, if you use SparkNotes, you're a bad person and you're not learning anything. And I think ultimately educators came to embrace Wikipedia, not just because Wikipedia's quality kept going up, but because they recognized that the hyperlinks in Wikipedia, like the like the branching out into sources, was such a useful, you know, starting point for any kind of learning journey.

38:54 And they had they sort of learned how to coach kids. Here's what you can safely use Wikipedia for. I don't want to see it cited in the papers that you write, blah, blah, blah, blah. But like they ultimately developed a healthy relationship with Wikipedia and had a playbook for how to teach kids this is a safe use of AI that will actually help your education.

39:15 This is an unsafe use of AI, uh, or in my sorry, Wikipedia that's going to impair your education. So, you know, to the extent, do you have like a mental model in your own mind for what constitutes like, I'm using the word safe, which is probably overblown, but like a safe use of AI that's education enhancing versus a damaging use of AI that's getting in the way of education?

39:41 Like, what's your own mental model there?

39:43 Yeah, I think it is important to have a mental model. Like a I think of it like a framework in a lot of ways. Like I find it better to be human start, AI, thought partner in the middle, human finish, maybe AI evaluate polish. I love the prompt polish. I I used to think it was good for brainstorming. I'm pulling back on that.

40:01 I think that it is one thing if you come with a bunch of ideas and then say expand on those with me. But if a if a teenager especially sits down and says, like brainstorm ideas with this, then the AI is just giving it to them and they're not thinking. You know, I think it it we do have to work really hard to maintain that productive struggle that is essential to learning.

40:19 Yeah, productive struggle, I think, I think is a great line. And and just to give a very simple analogy, weightlifting in the gym, right? If it feels like you're lifting a sheet of paper, you're not going to get stronger. The struggle is precisely how you know that something meaningful is occurring.

40:38 Exactly. Exactly. It's the only way anything sticks in our brains. It's it's all those neural, those neural pathways, and there has to be some struggle to really, you know, build that myelin sheath around that neural pathway that will, you know, make that a long-term learning thing. So I look at my own son.

40:55 My own son is at San Diego State. He's going into his third year. He was his senior in high school when all this was starting. And I walked in his room and he was struck struggling in his microbiology class. And I he has two monitors, of course. And I said, Hey, go open up an LLM over there, open up ChatGPT and ask about that.

41:10 And he goes, Dad, that's cheating. And I was like, Well, not if you're gonna learn about it. Right. So I helped him get started at least, but now he's in college. He had an MIS class last semester, which is last year, which is like a uh kind of one of the weed out classes at SDSU and their business program.

41:25 And he's like, Oh yeah, I go to Claude and I ask it to give me a seven-day study plan when the midterm's coming up. Then I go to Google Notebook LM, I throw all the stuff in there, I build a podcast. I go to the gym, I listen to the podcast. Then I come home, I make a custom GPT with all the material in there, and whatever I didn't quite catch from the podcast, I now quiz myself.

41:44 And I take a break. Then I go back to it a couple of days later. I tell Claude everything I feel like I've learned and what I'm not getting, and then we revise the plan. And he goes in, and on the final, he scored a 96 and the class average was a 68. Wow. Yeah. And he's at the gym, right? While his friend was his roommate, uh was sitting there with the highlighter and the textbook, he said, and was like, I've been at this for three days and I'm so confused.

42:07 And, you know, so I feel like that was like before electricity and after electricity. Like there is a way to, if if kids know how to use it well, to strategically truly amplify learning. But then there's also a way to, like the story of the student who, you know, hasn't written in three years, to do nothing.

42:25 And that really worries me.

42:27 So I think, I think, like, tell me if you agree with this line, which I think might synthesize your your two stories. On the one hand, there has never been a better time to learn, right? AI can put the material in whatever modality you learn best. AI can monitor your progress and identify gaps in real time.

42:51 There has never been a better time to learn just about anything. But at the same time, there has never been an easier time for students to check out and not learn anything. And it's so weird that we're that we're at both of those moments at the same time.

43:07 Yes. And this is so important. I'm so glad I brought this up. How do you get that 15-year-old, that that kid Jake with the soccer ball under his arm, to want to learn? The only way that I've seen in the research, and in my own experience, is that they have to have a great teacher in their life or other adults who two things A, believe in them and explicitly tell them that, and then B, hold very high standards.

43:28 Yeah. And say, I'm gonna hold you to these high standards because I believe in you. And Dave Yeager from UT Austin wrote wrote a really good book recently about this, and he calls it the mentor mindset. But so my hope, and I don't know, I'm not holding my breath here, but is that there is a kind of revaluing of education because it, you know, you you have to be intelligent to use artificial intelligence.

43:48 Yeah.

43:49 And and so I'm hoping that maybe we can revalue this idea that we need great teachers in classrooms around the country. And the only way we're gonna get people of the you know, the best and the brightest to even consider. You know, you can't rely on altruistic cancer survivors over here to all go into teaching.

44:05 Uh, we need to make it competitive, you know, as a as a profession. And it, to be honest with you, isn't right now at all. You know, I have history teachers who are some of the best history teachers I know that drive Uber to pay bullets. Wow. How sad is that? If you got into the car and there's the person who blew your mind about the declaration of independence and they're driving you home from the bar that night.

44:25 That's depressing. And so my hope is that maybe we might start to shift our thinking on that because the AI is going to do all that computation, but you need a great human in the room who's going to connect with those kids to push that learning where it can go.

44:39 And that's the only way I see the way forward. I mean, this is your point about relationships at the beginning, which I thought was well put. There's one other use case of AI that we haven't talked about a lot yet, but I know you're doing some creative stuff here. So let's talk about AI and coding. Because in the business world, AI coding, AI programming is taking the business community and the economy by storm.

45:06 What's it look like for you in the classroom, even though you're an English teacher, not a computer science teacher?

45:11 Yeah, yeah. So, like two years ago now, almost about a year and a year and a half, I asked ChatGPT to give me a 30-day course to teach me Python coding. And I didn't do it to learn to code. I was actually thinking of writing an article about what it is to learn with AI. And I thought, I'm gonna just as an experiment.

45:26 I know nothing about Python. I've always heard it's pretty difficult. So I'm gonna see if I can truly just learn something with AI. I just wanted to experience that. And it worked by day 14. I was writing little programs and then I started coding. And then I of course all these tools came out like Cursor and then Claude Code and then Codex.

45:43 So I built my own app. It's it's up to about, I don't know, it's almost about 800,000 lines of code. It has 31, 31 unique AI agents, chains, harnesses, like the works. It just was selected as a finalist for the Milk and UPenn business competition. So I'm headed to UPenn in about three weeks to pitch for that.

46:02 And we've got a couple school districts that are who have piloted it. Teachers love it. It's been really amazing. It's been amazing.

46:08 Uh what's the what's the main function?

46:10 Yeah, it's called Wit AI, like Walt Whitman, W H I T, Witai.app. And uh it's a it's a teaching, it's AI for teachers. So what I was seeing was all these apps that were coming out, they're basically trying to replace the teacher, like put a kid on a chat bot. And I I kept thinking, like, when did we decide it was even a good idea to put kids on chatbots and replace that human element of teaching or removing teaching from the grading process?

46:32 So I built Wit to be the AI for teachers so that Wit lets me see what all students are thinking. Kind of what I was talking about earlier, where I can get that immediate, you know, insight. Yeah. But Wit does it is like super supercharges it. And it not only gives me the insight, it gives me mixed ability groupings based on the results and it gives me lesson ideas and it and all the agents are trained on the best research and education.

46:54 And so uh, so yeah, I went off and built this thing. It's been an incredible journey. I've learned so much. And that's why when people say, Oh, it's gonna make us lazy, I'm like, I don't see it. I have built something that is just wild to me that I've been able to pull off. And I see kids doing it too.

47:09 I have kids with zero coding background, did not take AP computer science, that are building apps, that are starting businesses, that are doing incredible things with AI. I would say it's a fraction, though, I think of the greater group. I mean, just recently I asked my class, first day of the semester here, a couple weeks ago, and I said, How many of you have used Claude?

47:30 And two hands went up out of 36 kids. And I'm like, What? Like, how is that even, you know? And I asked if they know what deep research is. Nobody. You know, so they don't know how to use it, but the ones that are learning how to use it are supercharged. I mean, interesting. Yeah. My son's the example, he built a full POC.

47:48 He had an internship at Pac Sun this summer, and he built a full POC website for their summer project, and they pretty much were blown away. And he has no coding background, but he built the whole thing with Next.js, used Vercell as his hosting and all this stuff. But he just learned how to use it by conversing with AI and learning and applying and using the AI to write the code for him.

48:11 That's pretty cool. So I think one thing embedded in what you said is, and this probably applies for both students and teachers when we're talking about the intersection of AI and education. And that's the difference between what's possible. And I think you and and some of the examples you mentioned are an example of the positive story frontier of the most beneficial uses of AI and education.

48:34 And my question is, how big is the gap between what's possible and what's common? And an example here would also be, you know, you mentioned Chromebooks in schools. I've heard uh and read in the media, this is not something I have a sophisticated expertise on, but I've heard in the media that when we put a bunch of Chromebooks in schools, the maximum possible beneficial use of that is enormous, right?

48:59 Uh they're they're using laptops to learn all kinds of information that they wouldn't normally have access to without like waiting two weeks for the book to be shipped to their library on and on and on. That's what's possible. But like the average outcome might be they just watch a lot of funny videos on YouTube and it's distracting them from their learning as opposed to enhancing their learning.

49:18 So taking that analogy to the AI story, you show what's possible. When you talk to other teachers, not just around California, but now because you're part of some of these working groups and committees around the country, what's common? What's really going on, both at the student level and at the teacher level?

49:37 Yeah, I mean, in the last 12 months, I've given 19 keynote speeches at schools and ran training. So it's been crazy. I've been traveling all around the country from Arkansas to Connecticut to Orlando to, you know, California to New York. And I think what's common is that teachers are grappling with it.

49:52 Teachers are trying to figure it out. But I don't see what you would call like power users. I don't see a lot of power users. You know, it's it's slow, but I think that, you know, when you say about possible, I just think that it's so important to remember that, you know, this guy, uh Angus Fletcher, he's an Ohio State professor.

50:07 He wrote Primal Intelligence. I got to see him speak, and he said something so brilliant that the AI is the is so much better at probability than us, but we do the possibility. It's the human brain that can imagine something. The AI is not gonna really do that as well. And so I think what's the future for us, the only constraint is our creativity.

50:27 You know, that's where we're getting. We're getting to where our only constraint is the creativity. The AI is gonna build us in terms of the digital world, anything we can imagine. But the question is then, what are we gonna imagine and how we're gonna imagine it and where is that imagination gonna go?

50:41 So I think we're about to see a real launch here. I think it's gonna take off because I think that the shift to AI is not a tech expertise thing. Like what I find fascinating, I don't know if you've seen this, but I find so many Gen Xers that use AI and love AI. Now, I don't think if you went back to 1995, you would have found a bunch of 50-year-olds all about the internet.

51:01 And, you know, it just wouldn't have happened. But this is a different kind of tech because it again is a vocabulary and a thinking thing, really in many ways, and a behavioral shift, you know?

51:12 That's great. I love this. Okay. A couple things I also want to uh pick your brain on. If you can spare another 10 minutes or so. Yeah. Okay. So one thing I'm thinking about is AI today, here we are in mid-2026. Uh ChatGPT launched in November of 2022. I remember when GPT 2 came out, which was before even the public facing Chat GPT, which had like a nice slick anybody can use it user interface.

51:42 And GPT 2, which I think was 2019, maybe, is like the stone age compared to where we are today in AI technology. And AI today is the dumbest it's ever going to be for the rest of your life. It's only going to get smarter. And so my question then becomes you know, how do you think your approach is going to have to change given continued technological progress?

52:12 How has it already changed, even, you know, in just in the past few years with AI getting better and better?

52:19 That's the big question, right? I mean, it blows my mind how fast it's getting better. I mean, just in the last two months when I've been messing around with Fable and 5.6 soul, it's mind-blowing what it can do compared to what it could do a year ago. But I will, I will say it still can't write a poem.

52:36 So again, to the people out there that are like, it's going to take away writers, like I just don't see it. I don't see it. You have to have that human experience in there. But no, I think, you know, you brought up this thing. It was really interesting when you spoke to us about how when steam plants, they would put the theme furnace, I think it's called, right, in the middle of the plant, because that made sense.

52:52 But then when electricity came around, everyone thought, oh, they have to put the electricity in the middle of the big electric motor in the middle of the factory, just like there was a big steam motor in the middle of the factory, as opposed to a bunch of little electric motors and a bunch of little machines all throughout the factory.

53:04 Yeah.

53:05 Yeah. So I think, you know, that I I see that as the biggest challenge right now is figuring out what are these systems going to look like? You know, there's a district in Connecticut, Westport, Connecticut, superintendent Tom Scarice, they're doing a really interesting thing. They're going to K through 12.

53:19 So, like they're teaching, they have a lesson in kindergarten that teaches the kindergartners like, this is a robot. Don't, don't talk to a robot about your emotions because it's a robot. You know, talk to humans. And then in third grade, they're working on questioning stems and critical thinking about and questioning and teaching the questioning through the in the brain to start building those habits of mind.

53:38 And they don't even touch AI until seventh grade. And so I think that is a, and in terms of education, uh, something we need to be looking at. But it's tough because where is this going to go? I mean, I think that there's this incredible way to consider it as this research partner and thought partner over here on the side where we could just really 10x research and learning to the humans, then creating the systems, the products, the solutions.

54:05 But we have this, you know, incredible assistant over here that's this intelligence, even though it's artificial, doing all this work for us. But I think that, you know, I wish I had a great answer. I think the answer is still emerging.

54:17 Very cool. Okay. So the reason I met you is because you came to Washington, D.C. as a part of this California State University AI workforce delegation. You're meeting with policymakers, you're meeting with government officials. Obviously, you know, you're not the whole delegation. There was a big group of folks.

54:38 But as you reflect upon all the conversations you had, as you reflect upon, you know, what we've talked about here today, what do you wish policymakers knew about the state of AI and education? And then I'm curious where you think the big stories in the media are getting it mostly right, and where you think there's a gap, something that they're missing that's important in the story that policymakers need to know.

55:02 Yeah, I would so I got to meet with my representative, uh George Whitesides, and we had a great conversation. And I think he's really thinking really well about this stuff. He sees the nuance of it, the opportunity, but he also sees that we're in a situation though where there's going to be a swath of kids that are gonna get through this era, potentially damaged by this.

55:20 And I think that's important to think about. But, you know, I think the race to AGI is not just in terms of the tech. I think we need to start thinking about the population. You know, we have other countries around the world that are educating in mass, who are educating because I think they see that.

55:39 Again, like I was saying before, you you need to be intelligent to use AI. And so I would urge policy makers to really, gosh, I would I wish it would happen. I don't know if it's gonna happen, right? Get together in a bipartisan way to actually like refocus on education.

55:52 Like we need a Sputnik moment in terms of you've uh you've given me permission. Sorry to interrupt you. You've given me permission to tell one of my favorite stories. So obviously, Sputnik in the uh early 1950s, the moment when the Soviets put the first man-made object orbiting the Earth in space, scared the hell out of the United States because we basically saw the Soviet Union as this big group of bad guys whose economy was growing like crazy at the time, and whose science and technological prowess now appeared to be exceeding our own in this really salient, visible, visceral, spiritual almost way.

56:33 They were surpassing this in science and technology. So a lot of big stuff happened after the Sputnik moment. NASA was created after the Sputnik moment. DARPA was created after the Sputnik moment. But my favorite thing that came out of the Sputnik moment was, I think it was called the National Defense Education Act, where we basically said this competition that we're in with communism is gonna take decades, and leadership in science and technology is gonna be foundational to it.

57:06 So we're going to like double the number of PhDs that this country produces, and we're gonna provide all these resources to overhaul math and science education across the entire country. And again, it was called the National Defense Education Act, not the, you know, goody two shoes like feel good about yourself education act.

57:29 Like this really mattered for the country in the highest possible stakes, in the middle of, you know, the almost nuclear hot war era of the Cold War. And I thought that was such an inspired decision that went on to have so many different uh implications. And so I often ask, what are we doing, you know, with our education system to actually point out that this really matters?

57:53 We actually do need to be thinking about it in national competitiveness terms, in national security terms, in every kind of terms you can imagine. It's not like we're just doing it because we want to be nice to our fellow citizens, although, you know, we should do that too. But we need them. We need them to succeed.

58:10 We need them to go on and be brilliant and successful. The country demands it.

58:14 I agree. I think the American education system, which I think is in many ways crumbling at the foundation right now, is a national security issue. And it's a national economic issue. I actually think it's kind of a false narrative that all the jobs are gonna go away. I mean, a lot of people I talk to that don't really see it that way.

58:30 That you'd have to have like nuclear power plants in every county to run all the power, right? That would do all that, right? And in many ways, what if it's not gonna do that? What if instead we could actually have more scientists, but every scientist is operating at 10x because they know how to use AI?

58:46 Then think of the medical advances that are going to happen, the energy advances that are gonna happen, which are all, as you know, then gonna filter into economic advances. And so I I'm with you 100% on that. I think, you know, we're in this weird thing about private or public education. I think it's so important just to call that out and say, why would a privately run education system even be a good idea?

59:06 It doesn't work very well. You know, you have to have a kind of public need, you have to have a public good. The bottom line is not going to be the the motivating force for a good education system because then the the students are the ones that are the losers in that situation, the children and the families.

59:22 So I think if we could just get that out of the way and just start talking about, okay, fine, whether it's private or public, let's make it better. Let's let's either incentivize teaching credentials or degrees or master's degrees from really good universities in a way that would push some people to give it a shot.

59:38 You know, we've got Gen Z who really cares. And they actually, I think, would consider it if they could make a living at it. It was viable.

59:46 Not be forced to drive Uber nights and weekends. Yeah.

59:48 Yeah. Like years ago, I realized I was gonna, this kid, I was gonna tell them they should be a teacher, and I paused and I thought, oh, that is so sad. Like this has been the most fulfilling thing of my life that I became a teacher. I'm so grateful. And I've had such an impact on thousands of people now at this point in my life, and it's been so powerful.

1:00:06 I've seen so many lives change because of the work that my fellow teachers and I do. And yet I wasn't gonna encourage a kid to do it. And that says a lot. That says a lot, you know, and I so I think that's a it's a cultural shift. Like you said about the sput in the thing, their heroes were astronauts, you know, you had to go be had to go to a degree to be an astronaut.

1:00:24 Now it's like social media content creator, but we need to shift that culturally. But I think policymakers could really start to look at incentives for nationwide master's degree stipends, for small payments for micro-credentials. You know, teachers don't want a lot, but teachers could, for a couple hundred bucks, to go get a micro-credential on how to use AI for education.

1:00:43 And if there was a nationwide push on that, you could quickly move people. And another thing to point out really quick is that a lot of times policymakers try to top-down improve education with textbooks or mandated curriculum and so forth. But I think AI changes the game because we could bottom up standardized grade teaching.

1:01:01 Because if every teacher is sitting there in the in the room with a really good AI that could go, you know, how do I really improve this lesson to increase engagement with my students? How do I do UDL? How do I do formative assessment with this? All this kind of stuff that maybe I wasn't paying attention in my credential class, but now I'm going to be able to do it.

1:01:20 Like we could actually really elevate education around this country. And I think you would see obviously a ripple effect across society with benefits.

1:01:27 Very cool. Well, Casey, this is a perspective and a lens on the AI story that I really don't often get, the sort of firsthand perspective in the trenches, to use another national security analogy here. I've really enjoyed the conversation. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

1:01:44 Uh, it's been an honor. I uh I'm a big fan, honestly. So this was really cool, and I really appreciate all the work you're doing.

1:01:49 Thanks. And if folks want to uh follow or learn more about your work, how can they do that?

1:01:54 Yeah, caseycuni.com uh is my website. Also LinkedIn. Uh find me on LinkedIn and maybe go check out Wit. Let me know your thoughts.

1:02:02 Cool.

1:02:03 All right, we'll call it there.