This week, two educators trace what happened after a student said something that could have been dismissed as attitude but turned out to be something else entirely. One teacher heard it in the middle of a lesson on irony. The other heard it in a planning meeting for a brand new program. Neither could shake it, and both went looking for what it actually meant.

Melinda Medina has taught English and special education in Brooklyn for over a decade, and she knows what it sounds like when a student is struggling with a text. What she heard instead was a student who wasn’t struggling at all, just skipping the struggle altogether. She explains why that distinction matters more to her than plagiarism ever did, and what she now asks her students to do to counter the seemingly simpler path offered by AI.

An eighth grader’s question about the point of learning didn’t have an easy answer, so Beth Yirga went looking for one somewhere she didn’t expect, a room full of software engineers and tech executives who had never met a K-12 teacher. What she found there reshaped how she thinks about equity, identity, and what her students actually need heading into an AI-driven future.

Listen to the episode:

Protecting Student Cognition in the Age of AI by Melinda Medina

The K-12 Silo Won’t Survive AI, But Our Relationships Might by Beth Yirga

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