Artificial Intelligence (AI) doesn’t know what I know!

A love letter from a teacher to the profession and families she serves

I have never answered a parent e-mail message with an AI written message, and I never will. AI doesn't know what I know. I know that AI is powerful, and that by writing this post I may be solidifying my place as a relic; nevertheless, I press on.  I value the educational experience as a deeply human one. I believe that every question posed by a parent deserves a personally-crafted response. When the box pops up, asking if I want to rewrite my sentence or paragraph with CoPilot, I decline. My colleagues might call me kind. Hopefully thoughtful is a word they would use to describe me, but efficient, probably not. Thankfully, I work with those who are and try to learn from them daily in other ways, but not in terms of AI.

I have been an educator for more than thirty years, working in the private, charter, and public sectors. Even before finally earning my teaching license, as a high schooler, I worked at a local Parks and Recreation program with young children, followed later by summers as a nanny in Atlanta, a TAG math teacher in Williamsburg, and finally as a pre-school teacher for Child Find in Colorado. After finishing my degree, I taught nearly everything from elementary to middle to high school-aged students. I love all kids…mine and everybody else’s.

Twenty years separate these teacher photos, but the hope is ever present.

When I retire, whether it be in two years, or five, or ten, it will be from a profession that I have loved without border, without boundary. I take my work home. As a classroom teacher, I was always planning the next lesson, the next unit, thinking about the classroom dynamics, the configuration, the students I was worried about the most. The students I worried about the least who sometimes ended up making the hardest transition to college. I have attended graduations, weddings, baby christenings, memorials. Extreme joy and everlasting grief. Life. The first students I taught are now in their 40s.

My colleagues have been the best people on earth. They stayed up late planning units on the phone. They sat next to me during difficult divorce proceedings, right there by my family members, squeezing my hand. They carried me to the car when I broke my wrist at a roller-skating rink with students and stayed with me through the night. They have planned meaningful and fun professional development with me. They have presented training sessions with me at national conferences. They have traveled with me to other states to observe other schools, other programs. They have humored me when I want signs made by hand and not a computer program. During Covid, one colleague even got married in my backyard. We educators are an intrepid group, driven by this desire to serve the families of the next generation; we can’t do it without a huge supportive network. This work is hard and getting harder.

Like many fellow educators, I keep a “THIS IS WHY I DO WHAT I DO” basket. When it gets overly fully, I transfer the contents to a box and begin anew. When the work gets impossibly hard (imagine opening your e-mail to 20 new messages after a full day of teaching), I think about my basket.

My This is Why I Do What I Do basket occupies a prominent spot in my cottage.

Sometimes, when I get home after a challenging day, I read through a few of the treasures. Most are handwritten notes from students, some several loose-leaf pages in length. Some are photographs, some pieces of original art. Others are notes from parents and guardians, sometimes even grandparents, who wanted to acknowledge something that happened at school. It is enough to give me the boost I need to address these latest messages. I spend this time, because AI doesn’t know what I know.

AI doesn’t know that one little eight-year-old is devastated today because her friend brought two t-shirts back from last night’s Taylor Swift concert. Apparently, this is the day she learns she is the third best friend, and as the other little girls run into the restroom to change into their new prize, our eyes meet. I am not her classroom teacher. I am on an administrative team now, but my heart doesn’t ache any less. I kneel down to comfort her, as any mother would.

AI doesn’t know that the lovely parent who just sent a surprisingly rude message is going through a rough divorce. I sift back through those memories of my own divorce and stop my response mid-write. I pick up the phone and call her. We talk for almost an hour. She is so worried about her children, how she will keep the house, if the kids will be able to stay involved in the same expensive activities, they have become accustomed to. I cry a little bit when I hang up the phone, but for her, I am strong.

AI doesn’t know that this is the boy’s fourth school in three years, and that it will be weeks before he will talk to anyone. But I know, because the parent told me on a tour of the building. I think carefully about the teacher this child should be placed with.

AI doesn’t know that every morning, I watch one family with lots of children pause outside of each door, beginning with their kindergartner, to drop each sibling off with hugs and, “I love you’s.” I am always a bit sad for the oldest child, who doesn’t have their paparazzi to drop her off at the upper grades class.

AI doesn’t know that the 2^nd grader never eats his carefully packed Bento box lunch. He reads the note from him mother, written on a napkin, and smoothes it over his lap, but he does not eat a thing.

AI doesn’t know that the wild 4^th grader, the one who has trouble staying in her seat, is a nationally ranked gymnast. AI doesn’t know that she can solve complex math problems in her head without paper if she is allowed to move freely.

AI doesn’t know that one of my tween students once wept for days after telling me he had dreamt the night before for the first time in English…that he was so afraid of losing his birth language. I uttered one of the few phrases I had learned in his language to be used in such an instance. He laughed in surprise and at my pronunciation, but I could tell he felt a little bit better. AI doesn’t know that today he is fluent in both languages, and will one day set the world on fire with his bright ideas, fully expressed in two tongues.

AI doesn’t know that some of the parents I met today at Meet the Teacher, were taught by my sister in middle or high school. We look similarly, so we are sometimes mistaken for one another in the local community. AI also doesn’t know that she lives four miles as the crow flies from my house, 7.9 miles on the country back roads, or that my niece, also a teacher, is about twice that far away. We all teach in the same district.

I know teachers who have worked in the same building 10, 20, and even 30 years. The historical knowledge of the campus runs through their veins, a surging river of memory and hope. I am not alone in what I know that AI doesn’t. Ask any teacher. You’ll get an education. I am learning how to use AI to help me do other things, tasks, more quickly, but not the messages. If you get a message from me, it will be from me, and not AI. AI doesn’t know what I know.