How This Teacher Feels About All This AI Stuff

The path forward needs to be one of imagination

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The Important Work is a space for writing instructors at all levels—high school, college, and beyond—to share reflections about teaching writing in the era of generative AI. We hope to spark conversations and share ideas about the challenges ahead, both through regular posts and through comments on these posts. If you have comments, questions, or just want to start a conversation about this week’s post, please do so in the comments at the end of the post.

This week’s post is by Marcus Luther. Marcus is in his second decade of teaching high school English, and is also the co-founder of The Broken Copier, a newsletter and podcast that aims to center teacher voices and perspectives in conversations around education. With writings and interviews featured in Edutopia and The Cult of Pedagogy, Marcus tries his best to share strategies and reflections from his perspective as a full-time teacher. You can reach him on Bluesky.

If you’re interested in sharing a reflection for The Important Work, you can find all the information here. Your reflection does not have to be about using AI in the classroom—we are interested in any way that you’re thinking about the important work these days. If you’ve redesigned assignments to avoid using AI, if you have strong feelings about when and how AI should or should not be used in the classroom, if you do something that you think works very well without AI, we want to hear about that too. —Jane Rosenzweig

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I don’t have any strategies to share in this post around implementing or engaging with AI in the classroom. No successes of what has worked well, or “here’s what I learned” failures. Although I have been writing about my experience teaching pretty much from the day I stepped foot in the classroom thirteen years ago—including currently for The Broken Copier newsletter that I started a few years back—I have mostly been an outside observer amidst this whirlwind that has been the emergence of AI in education.

I’ve been reading and watching and listening while keeping AI at arm’s length from my own classroom.

For that reason, I’m not trying to draw any lines in the sand, either, as far as what should or should not be taking place in the classroom with AI. I mean, to be honest, despite the significant amount of hours I’ve invested on my own time to try and get a better grasp of all things artificial intelligence and its potential in the classroom, I haven’t figured out much at all.

But watching it all happen? I’ve felt a lot of things as a classroom teacher and I wanted to take the time today to reflect on all those feelings.

Because I don’t think I’m alone, and I think naming those feelings as a teacher matters.

To begin, I feel curious.

From the moment ChatGPT went public, it was fairly clear to me that this would prove to be seismic in education. Back in December 2022, I wrote that my level of concern about the “paradigm shift” that ChatGPT foreshadowed was a 12/10, and looking back now in 2025 I don’t think that’s an overstatement at all.

I feel like I’m probably in the 1% as far as teachers who love to talk pedagogy beyond work hours. I’ve spent exorbitant time tracking the development of AI, reading way too many

Ethan Mollick

posts (one of the earliest and most prolific voices around AI) and considering the potential benefits as well as inevitable consequences of the intersection between this technology and our education landscape.

I’ve had the privilege of talking to folks like

Marc Watkins

(Director of the Mississippi AI Institute and author of the must-read Rhetorica blog) and

John Warner

(author of the excellent More Than Words: How To Think About Writing in the Age of AI). And like many teachers, I’ve been learning second-hand from those chronicling their own experimentation with AI in the classroom like Brett Vogelsinger, a full-time English teacher with a new book coming out called Artful AI in Writing Instruction that I cannot wait to dive into.

While still somewhat skeptical, as a teacher I recognize that I am often at my best when I’m simultaneously a learner. Change is a constant in education (which is a good thing!) so it is critical to remain open-minded, I think, around the ways this new technology can change what the classroom is for students.

(This is also where my curiosity walks hand-in-hand with immense gratitude for the teachers who are openly sharing their experiences with AI, both positive and negative, so that we can learn collectively about what the best path forward might end up looking like.)

Photo by Jens Lelie on Unsplash

But I also feel overwhelmed.

As a classroom teacher, the vast majority of my day is spent in the classroom teaching. What little additional time is afforded is quickly filled with planning, grading, reaching out to families, etc. There is no “pause” button on the classroom, as just doing the work to make the classroom a good, purposeful place is a job that already has me investing time far beyond the hours I’m compensated for.

Enter AI.

Yes, this is a technology that can potentially impact almost every aspect of education, but that “potential impact” is for now a matter of experimentation and exploration; the guidance and resources around AI in many of our teaching contexts are much more limited; and the technology itself is fast-evolving, so that time invested to understand one tool or strategy may very well find itself outdated by the time it is implemented.

And that’s setting aside very real ethical concerns around the technology itself around intellectual property, environmental sustainability, and algorithm bias that, even as I type out, don’t feel like the things you should just set aside as an ethical educator.

Yet the message I’m encountering pretty much everywhere I look these days? That I should be integrating AI and, in some cases, that to do otherwise is to let down my students.

So, yeah, I feel overwhelmed. Considerably so.

And I also feel frustrated.

Despite frequently feeling overwhelmed, as someone trying as much as possible to stay curious about what AI could look like in the classroom, I continue to read and explore as many resources and strategies as I can.

But if I’m being 100% honest, the main emotion I tend to feel after doing this?

A resigned, deepening sense of frustration as a teacher.

First of all, I am frustrated for students. I’m too often seeing students being held arbitrarily or inconsistently accountable—often for the very things that adults are doing with little-to-no transparency. In this education landscape of shifting norms and myriad expectations around AI, students are having to dodge landmines at every turn. This is a landscape we’ve created for them as educators, and the consequences are very much on us.

I am also frustrated with the way “maximizing efficiency” has somehow been elevated to the paramount value in many conversations. Learning is messy and, as

Josh Brake

noted recently, “There is no salvation to be found in efficiency.” Nevertheless, the proliferation of AI in pursuit of increased productivity has come to feel like our 21st-century Gold Rush in education, metaphorically and, at times, quite literally.

Admittedly, too, I am frustrated by the fact that teachers are too often sidelined from these AI conversations, as they seem to be dominated by those no longer in the classroom or school building while teachers are rarely afforded the time and space to authentically participate in this important conversation.

So yeah, I feel lots of things: curious, overwhelmed, and definitely frustrated.

But I also feel an increasing sense of conviction.

In Emergent Strategy, adrienne maree brown wrote, “We are in an imagination battle.”

For me, this precisely captures how I feel with all things AI in the moment: I feel like there are too many participants in the conversation who have too little imagination of what the classroom can be.

This is ironic, of course, as technology often seems to carry with it the connotation of creativity and imagination—but when I read and learn about what’s happening with AI right now in education, it more than anything feels quite limited.

(Or, as Tressie McMillan Cottom opined with a flourish recently in the New York Times, “it all feels pretty mid to me.”)

There is a story of hope and potential that we can tell about our classrooms, yet so much of this AI discussion seems to operate with a deficit mindset around our students and what our current classrooms are capable of—led too often by folks outside the classroom who have lost sight of what is possible with a classroom community.

I feel lots of things, yes, but most of all? I feel stronger than ever that the path forward needs to be one of imagination, and we need to insist that any conversation with AI honors what the classroom already is and stays hopeful about what it can become.