Struggling Freshmen? Have a Fake A and Call It a Day
Hiding freshman grades treats the symptom of a student mental health crisis while ignoring what's actually causing it, and strips away the incentive to push through hard classes in the process.
Hiding freshman grades treats the symptom of a student mental health crisis while ignoring what's actually causing it, and strips away the incentive to push through hard classes in the process.
From personalized instruction to removing the blank page for kids who've never had a way to show what's in their heads, this is where AI actually earns its place in the classroom, and why that matters most for the kids with the least.
Cheating, plagiarism, screen time, equity, privacy: the fears about AI in schools are real, but most of them aren't new. AI didn't break education, it just shone a spotlight on problems that were already there.
A room full of educators went quiet when I suggested assignments shouldn't have a word count. That reaction is the real subject of this post: the "well, this is how we've always done it" mindset that's slowing AI adoption in the classroom, and why it's worth pushing past, carefully.
Last week I presented a keynote at the Adobe ColdFusion Summit 2026. The team created this (admittedly somewhat over the top) intro video for me.
What's behind the spiraling cost of higher education? Administrative bloat? Athletics spending? Fancy dorms? All of those are real. But they're symptoms, not the cause.
I am sitting on a flight heading from Las Vegas, and I am feeling utterly overwhelmed.
The UK is moving toward banning social media for under-16s and they're probably right to do it. But if parents think that means the problem is solved, we're in bigger trouble.
A professor recently wrote an opinion piece pushing back on the trend of evaluating higher education purely through the lens of earning potential. His argument: college is about more than money. That's a genuinely important point, and I don't want to dismiss it. But.
A while back I wrote a post titled "Should We Still Teach Kids To Code?". The answer was yes. A lot has happened since then, and "vibe coding" is now all the rage. So, does that change my recommendation?