I teach English, and I have been doing this long enough to have opinions. Also, long enough to know which of them are worth defending.
Most of my working life is spent on close reading: getting students to slow down in front of a paragraph until they notice that the syntax is doing something the plot isn't. It's the least fashionable skill I teach and the one I stand by. It doesn't scale, it doesn't automate, and it's the whole game.
Then AI arrived in my classroom, not by invitation. My students were using it before anyone told them how to, and most were using it badly — not out of cynicism, but because nobody had shown them what good use looked like. The available responses seemed to be a detection arms race or a shrug. Neither was going to teach anybody anything.
So I built the course instead. Teaching AI Fluency is free, it's in two tracks (one for teachers, one for students), and it's built on the AI Fluency Framework developed by Rick Dakan and Joseph Feller with Anthropic. I wrote it with a great deal of help from Claude, which I mention because it would be strange not to.
I'm building a writing feedback tool for my own students, the kind that responds to a draft the way I would, rather than the way a grammar checker does. Whether that's a good idea is a live question I argue with myself about roughly weekly.
I'm one person with a set of opinions formed in one classroom. If something here is unclear, wrong, or just plain dumb, I'd genuinely like to know; it wouldn't be the first time I've heard such a thing. Write to me at mark.e.mitchell@gmail.com.
On the em dashes. There are a lot of them here, and I'm aware of what that's supposed to signify now. The em dash did two centuries of honest work before it got called as a witness. I'm not giving it up because a language model turned out to share my taste in punctuation, and I'd think less of myself if I did.
Anyway, punctuation is a lousy detector. If you want to know whether a person thought about something, read it for judgment — whether the argument goes anywhere, whether the examples are real, whether anybody stuck a neck out. That's most of the discernment module, and it works considerably better than counting dashes.
A note on the course license. The AI Fluency Framework is by Rick Dakan and Joseph Feller in collaboration with Anthropic, licensed CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. My course materials carry the same license: use them with your faculty, adapt them for your students, don't sell them.
