Hey Human

Once I was working with a group of teacher leaders–imagine a room full of those teachers who are the unsung heroes of their buildings, never seeking to promote to principal or coach or central office, but always figuring out the newest, most innovative ways to work with kids. The ones who always have kids in their rooms at lunch or after school 3D printing something or creating a community garden or saving the world.

The task for this day is not important, but it did involve creating visionary plans that would be shared with a public audience at the end of our time together. One thing about teachers is that there is a good proportion of us who tend towards perfectionism, and perfectionism is a surefire way to short circuit creativity and cause a lot of frustration.

As we were working through the unproductive struggle of this day, I uttered a quote I had heard somewhere that was rattling around in my brain: “Comparison is the thief of joy.” I was told the Buddha said it. Quote investigator has other ideas about this. I guess it’s one of those nuggets of wisdom a person is tempted to attribute to a truly admirable source. I said it in this room at this time because the teachers were very concerned they weren’t measuring up on this task, while our goal as facilitators was to invite creativity and collaboration. The phrase was taken up over the next few days, with teachers reminding one another of it in times of need. The next time I saw them, a sweet teacher had created a wooden magnet with her kids and gifted it to me. I still look at it every day.

I’ve been thinking about this quote again as another school year unspools in front of us. When I was first noodling on AI adoption and I led my first AI task force, I felt very strongly that we should anchor ourselves in our pedagogical values. If we know what our purposes are for schooling, for our community, for our students, then we can strategically, ethically, and intentionally innovate with AI as part of that overall commitment to what’s best for kids and teachers.

For all the AI hype that we are personalizing every experience, the truth is that schools are a site of collaboration and cooperation. So it made intuitive sense to me that beginning with the already negotiated educational visions that districts had in place would be a fruitful way to approach the work.

But the technoboosters out there have a different approach: to be the best. The first. To move fast and break things. In education, we are often chasing down the business sector, and we know how the experiment turned out there: it’s an utter failure. Even MIT says so.

In the rush to be the best, to be “world-class” and “cutting edge” we lived into the comparison, rather than into the joy. New technology can be fun. There is some delight to what other humans were able to create. And tools like Generative AI work best when they are in the service of goals that are anchored in values like cooperation, trust, ethics, collaboration, and the greater good. Schools have no business entering the scrum of competition to show off to their neighbors how “innovative” they are. That’s a joyless errand. And any teacher who has seen the way joy and community can transform a classroom will tell you: it’s also a fool’s errand.

And that brings me to another aphorism, this time from Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanac: “Experience keeps a dear school, yet fools will learn in no other.” We should be learning from what came before, from the wisdom of earlier innovations, from the absolute failure of personalized educational products over the history of schooling. Or even from the resounding failure of GenAI adoption into the business sector. And yet…we just don’t. And it will be an expensive loss–a theft of time, resources, and joy.