Is all the beekeeping, baking and leatherwork just escapist fantasy or the start of a radically human approach to work?

- by Joshua Habgood-Coote

Read on Aeon

A visual proof that the sum of all positive odd numbers up to 2n – 1 is a perfect square.

Artificial intelligence is often promoted as a way to make teachers more effective by helping them write lesson plans, generate classroom materials and provide feedback to students in seconds. But one of the first randomized trials testing AI in real classrooms found that it can also undermine learning. Students whose teachers were given access to an AI teaching assistant felt less motivated to learn.

The damage was especially pronounced among students whose teachers were already weaker instructors, as measured by their performance before the experiment began. Their students also scored lower on standardized final exams, the researchers found.

“Teachers, just like students or coders, might be using AI as a crutch,” said Alp Sungu, lead author of the study and an assistant professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. “Instead of doing the actual work, they’re using AI to delegate the task, and that lowers the quality of their teaching.”

A draft of the study, “Generative AI Can Harm Teaching,” was released online in June and has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal. It echoes Sungu’s widely discussed 2024 research on how students’ use of AI is harming learning. 

“Students use AI as an answer machine, not as a tool for learning, and therefore it harms learning,” said Sungu. “Here, I think teachers are potentially using AI as a material generating machine for homework, lecture notes, lesson plans, syllabus. Instead of improving their own output, they’re using AI as a replacement with very minimal interaction, and therefore the quality of output is not good enough.”

Related: Faster solutions, lower test scores: How AI is eroding math skills

Sungu’s experiment, conducted with fellow University of Pennsylvania researchers, including educational psychologist Angela Duckworth, followed 193 teachers and more than 2,800 middle and high school students in a private school chain in Turkey during the spring of 2025. 

Teachers were randomly assigned either to receive access to a ChatGPT-based teaching assistant customized to Turkey’s national curriculum or to continue teaching as usual. Over 10 weeks, teachers primarily used the tool to generate lecture notes, assignments and exams.

Students whose teachers had access to the AI tool rated their classes as less enjoyable, less interesting and less important than students in the control group. The decline in intrinsic motivation was modest, but larger among students of those teachers who had already been heavier AI users before the experiment began.

Average academic achievement did not change overall. But among teachers whose students had lower marks before the experiment — a proxy for lower-performing teachers — student achievement and confidence both declined. Academic achievement was measured through externally administered standardized exams, ruling out the possibility that these teachers had different grading standards.

The study cannot explain exactly why teaching quality deteriorated. Researchers did not observe classrooms or analyze the AI-generated materials teachers used. But Sungu suspects that teachers may have been giving up one of their most effective tools. 

“When you start using AI-generated material, you’re losing your personal voice,” said Sungu. “It might be technically good enough, but it doesn’t really carry your own style. If everything is very uniform, it just becomes a bit more boring.”

One possible explanation for the weaker academic performance among students of low-performing teachers, Sungu said, is that stronger teachers treat AI output as a first draft, revising and adapting it to their classrooms. Weaker teachers, he suspects, may be more likely to use AI-generated material as is.

Related: AI gives more praise, less criticism to Black students

This study is not a clean comparison between teaching with and without AI. Teachers in the control group were free to use other AI tools, making this a comparison between access to a customized AI assistant and whatever teachers chose to do on their own. If anything, Sungu said, these findings might be understating the risks of teachers relying heavily on AI-generated materials.

Still, Sungu cautions that it would be a mistake to conclude that “AI is terrible and will ruin education.” He sees a different lesson: Access to AI technology alone does not improve teaching. 

The challenge is to help teachers use AI in ways that preserve human judgment and creativity. That will require teacher training programs, guardrails and better interfaces. 

“As of right now, how teachers are using it organically, there is something to be worried about,” he said. 

Sungu says he personally uses AI in his university teaching to create interactive games and polls that would otherwise take too long to build.  “When I first get the output, it just looks great,” he said. “And then, if I don’t immerse myself in it, the examples, the numbers don’t make sense. I end up spending an equal amount of time to improve the output or calibrate it to my class.”

“It’s not a time saver,” he said.

Contact staff writer Jill Barshay at 212-678-3595, jillbarshay.35 on Signal, or barshay@hechingerreport.org.

This story about AI in teaching was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters.

The post Teachers save time with AI. Their students may pay the price appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

A current ongoing quest in my life is to find a place that sells table grapes that are actually good, rather than just fine. I had a grapes spot in Waterloo, and if I can't find one in Toronto I will die mad forever.

I like food, and I spend time and resources on it generously. I splurge on good eggs, and in-season produce, and fancy tea. I scope out restaurants, and specialty grocers, and apple varietals. There are currently four kinds of balsamic vinegar in my pantry.

So you can call me a little snobby about food. And, in a typical week, I drink three or four bottles of Soylent.

The Soylent on one of my pantry shelves, next to a loaf of exquisite sourdough from one of the best local bakeries, and a small fraction of my tea stuff.

Some people are confused by this; they ask how can I stand to eat "bad" food when I enjoy "good" food so much. They sometimes imply that I'm supposed to be better than this. But I think this is silly.

As a tenant of a human body¹, I require a certain number of calories and macronutrients and micronutrients on an ongoing basis in order to continue functioning. And I am not so wealthy in terms of time and resources that I can afford to make every single meal as delectable as I would like. When things are going well in life, I can probably manage one good meal a day.

Half of a recent picnic spread

But that still leaves another meal or two that I must eat, every single day. So, like the rest of you, I also grimly scrounge. I make sandwiches that are not actually the best sandwiches I know how to make, because I'm optimizing them for things in addition to taste, such as "under twenty dollars in ingredients", "can be thrown together in the morning in less than an hour and without making a giant mess in the kitchen", "does not require one to hit up three separate specialty grocery stores for ingredients", "can be put in my bag for the commute and last until lunch", and other such humiliations. I eat an upsetting number of office worker slop bowls. I even sometimes have girl dinners that are bad, instead of good.

Frankly, this is very rarely worth it in terms of cost or convenience compared to Soylent. A bottle of Soylent, all in and delivered to my door, is a little under $6. I have a hard time (princess that I am) conceiving of a $6 meal worth eating. Soylent is not what I would consider a meal worth eating either, but that's the point — I would never use Soylent to replace a meal that I would otherwise enjoy. Soylent replaces the other joyless meals I must eat anyways.²

And Soylent has many virtues! Each bottle of Soylent is four hundred calories, enough to make me full. It is portable and shelf stable. It is easy to consume and tastes entirely fine³. And it contains a freakish amount of vitamins and minerals, which grants me an otherwise-inadvisable amount of latitude in making and eating the meals I actually want to eat.

Because I have Soylent for a double digit percentage of my meals, I never have to worry about using iodized table salt instead of the nice sea salt or eating enough bananas to get potassium. I can be luxuriously, deliciously sybaritic in my gustatory habits, without it affecting my bodily health or functions.

I have had a grand week in the high summer where all I ate was Soylent and grilled vegetables and did not touch a single carb. I have had weeks in depressive fog where all I ate was Soylent and snack foods and tea by the tubful. If I have a truly gluttonous meal planned, I can somewhat offset its health impacts by replacing more meals with Soylent the days before and after.

I am living a beautiful life where all my vegetables are whores.

Every dollar and hour and sodium microgram that I don't spend on a mediocre Tuesday sandwich can be reallocated to the peaks. It is because Soylent exists that this reallocation can happen in the first place.

Soylent stabilizes. Soylent takes care of me by creating a floor that I cannot sink below. Blessed be to Soylent, the best wire mother a gal can ask for.

Here’s the recipe: a paper book, a slow voice, and a room where nobody can hide. Thirty years ago, that was just called class. Now it reads as radical, and the professors running it are experimenters testing the variable of friction.

As educators, we spent twenty years optimizing friction out of school. Shorter readings, smoother interfaces, answers just a search away. Remove the obstacles, the thinking went, and learning flows. I won’t pin the whole decline on the smoothing; phones, a pandemic, and two decades of test policy left their marks, too. But the record is in, and it isn’t kind. Students can decode every word and yet lose the thread of a long argument. They arrive at college, Rose Horowitch reported in The Atlantic in 2024, “bewildered” by the expectation of finishing whole books. (The word belongs to Columbia’s Nicholas Dames.) Does this bother you as much as it bothers me?

So, a counterculture is forming around one insight: some friction is not an obstacle to learning; some friction helps to produce the learning. A paper book is harder to skim, which makes it easier to actually read. Reading aloud is slower, so the difficult sentences and passages can’t be skipped. Working through a text together makes confusion public, and public confusion is survivable. For PublicSource, Jamese Platt profiled Pittsburgh faculty who read passages aloud, line by line, and have students write their own questions before class begins. No one can hide in the silence; that’s a skillful design.

Cognitive science got there thirty years ago. In 1994, the UCLA psychologist Robert Bjork named the pattern desirable difficulties, and the lab results since have leaned lopsided in one direction. Studying that feels easy, rereading the highlighted page, produces memory that fades by Friday. In contrast, studying that feels like a struggle, generating an answer from scratch, wrestling with a passage before being told what it means, produces understanding that stays. Ease is a feeling, not a learning outcome. The students who feel most fluent quickly are often learning the least.

The methods are more precise than paper, good; screens, bad. At the University of Pittsburgh, the sociologist Hillary Lazar pairs stronger and weaker readers in what she calls a one-room schoolhouse, so that comprehension happens out loud, between people, rather than failing silently in private. Call it what it is: the exact effort that reading requires, measured out, and stirred back in by hand.

Here’s my claim, stated plainly. The effort was never the bug; it was the mechanism. Take the difficulty out of reading, and we don’t get easier learning. We get the look of reading without the cognition that made it worth anything.

One objection deserves a straight answer because, no doubt, friction can be a barrier. For instance, the dyslexic reader needs the audiobook, and the working parent needs the flexible format. The boundary that matters runs between the friction in access and the friction in the text. Clear the first completely, but guard the second, because the productive struggle is what helps us learn.

And one caveat the movement’s admirers tend to skip: nobody has published outcomes data on these classroom practices. There are decades of laboratory evidence for the principle, a handful of professors applying it on purpose, and data I’m watching for, but that is not here yet.

Still, I find this counterculture hopeful—and I don't get to say that often on this beat, where most of what crosses my desk is decline. The story of rediscovering deep reading is a bright spot precisely because it isn't a platform. It won't scale or break like one, either. Good. Let the tech titans go target something other than a core function of civil society.

Deep reading was never going to come back by removing effort; it comes back by designing the right kind of effort, and perhaps more importantly, by valuing that effort. The professors who went old-school looked most closely at where we are and decided that the way forward runs through the difficulty, not around it. Even though the ingredients look like 1990, the recipe is the most forward-looking thing on campus: a paper book, a slow voice, and a classroom where nobody can skip the thinking.

A question for the comments: what’s one piece of useful friction, in reading or anything else, that you’d put back if you could?

Read deeply,

Dr. Genevive

I like Angela Collier’s videos about physics and I was delighted to discover this 18-minute one…

…because it’s a great continuation to the thread about the complexity of Microsoft Office I shared recently.

Collier talks about why physicists prefer LaTeX to Word. LaTeX is sort of a nerdy HTML that predates HTML. It looks like this…

…and given how nerdy HTML already is, you might imagine this is a power-user tool that’s chiefly about power and control. But Collier makes the argument that there are some things that LaTeX makes much easier:

• there is absolutely no need (or peer pressure) to spend time styling the document by choosing fonts, colors, etc.,
• there is no “live preview,” and making a PDF is a separate step similar to compilation in coding – which means it doesn’t constantly occupy your mind,
• GUIs can slow you down because the keyboard is faster than the mouse,
• LaTeX doesn’t give you a lot of control over positioning, which is better than giving you only a semblance of control over positioning (this is the TikTok meme Collier alluded to briefly).

This is really interesting because it goes right to the core of the uncomfortable truth: naïve design decisions meant to make things easier might achieve the opposite. I shared the ForkLift example where the team didn’t understand what made the previous version great, and more recently the animation that could slow people down.

(Of course, there is also the issue of typographical craft of LaTeX documents set in Computer Modern, but let’s save this for another time.)

Also, the video starts with Collier apologizing for potentially making the audience feel dumb in a prior video. I don’t think it’s a joke, and I found it thoughtful and refreshing.

#attention #complexity #enshittification #flow #youtube