I teach high school English. I write about books, about the classroom, and about what happens to both when a machine that can produce competent prose shows up in the middle of them.
The argument I keep making, in one sentence: the useful response to AI in education is neither panic nor surrender, but fluency — knowing what to hand off, what to keep, and how to tell whether what came back is any good. Everything on this site is some version of working that out.
A furrow is what a plow leaves behind: a line cut deliberately into ground that was doing fine on its own. It's also what shows up on your forehead when you're actually thinking about something. Both meanings apply here. The work I care about — reading closely, writing something true, teaching a seventeen-year-old to do either — is slow, effortful, and not obviously efficient. That's the point of it.
Which is exactly why I'm not interested in the version of this conversation where AI is either the end of literacy or a productivity miracle. It's a tool with a particular shape. Learning that shape is a skill, and skills can be taught. So I've been teaching it.
More about me on the about page.
