Turning 40, academic coaching, friendships, and AI hype? in education

[started this reflection a couple weeks ago, on an early morning Aeromexico flight from Chicago to Mexico City to celebrate my 40th trip around the sun. In between listening to a couple of podcasts...]

I'm on my way to Mexico City to celebrate my 40th for a few days with some of my closest friends. After a pretty satisfying breakfast from Ohare's Tortas Frontera by Rick Bayless, I lean back in my chair with a cup of shitty airplane coffee and fire up the podcast app. Ahhh, the good life. Few hours to myself with coffee and podcasts. This, my friends, is what it means to be on the cusp of 40. And it feels fucking great. Really, parents of young kids at any age, we all deeply know the joy of some quality time with our own body and our own thoughts don’t we…?

I haven't podcasted in a minute so I was curious to know what recent episodes from some of my favorite podcasts were available. I have a few in rotation that I really love. In no particular order... NPR's Codeswitch co-hosted by journalists Gene Demby and Lori Lizarraga puts out consistently good content on race and culture in America. I'm just a huge fan of Gene, I think he’s one of the smartest people on air. My academic podcasts (only have a couple right now and open to suggestions!) right now are Have You Heard by educational historian Jack Schneider and journalist Jennifer Berkshire (I'll come back to this one in a minute), and The Received Wisdom by Professors Shobita Parthasarathy and Jack Stilgoe, which focuses on intersection of science, tech, policy, and equity. I also love Edge of Sports with Dave Zirin, and Gold Minds with Kevin Hart, and recently I've gotten into Smartless, which is basically just a conversation between Jason Bateman from Ozark, Sean Hayes, and Will Arnett.  There are guest features but the essence of the show is the three of them talking and messing around, which I think is just sort of brilliant as the main point of a show or podcast. The "performance" is just them talking. Thats it. I love this because it sort of elevates the beauty of friendship and just good, sometimes smart and othertimes "smartless," always irreverent and hilarious conversations amongst friends. (Which is exaaaactly what I'm fixin to do for the next three days, plus tacos and tequila, minus the Hollywood and whiteness of Smartless...but I digress!) Anyway, the featured guest on this Smartless episode is actor/director Paul Giamatti, who I've always loved. Sideways and the movie about cartoonist Harvey Pekar are two really good movies that come to mind, and I thought he was outstanding as NWA manager Jerry Heller in Straight Outta Compton. And I’m late as hell but trying to get into the Billions series. 

This is all sort of a sideways (ha!) setup for something that I've wanted to write about here, especially relevant for those of us in academia but I imagine other professional contexts as well.  I recently have been trying out some professional academic coaching, thanks to a recommendation from my friend, the badass organizer and scholar of Black Studies in Education at Rutgers, Dr. Krystal Strong. My academic coach which I highly recommend, though I believe there’s a waitlist for, is Dr. Rich Furman.  Who I know I can't be the first to notice is Giamatti's doppelganger. I don't think internet pictures do this justice, but you just have to trust me on this one. Mannerisms and all. I'm being life-coached by Paul Giamatti yall !! I feel like I'm hanging out with Giamatti every session and it’s pretty sweet.

On a slightly more serious note, while I was skeptical at first, coaching is really helping me with writing productivity and just navigating life as a scholar/parent/person in the world. I'm currently working on my first book and I don't know where I'd be without some of the guidance I've received, ranging from practical tips to a larger philosophical reckoning with what I'm trying to achieve as a scholar and as a writer. I'll end up doing a whole post on this soon, but deciding to get an academic coach has been kind of a compromise with myself. I’ve resisted actual therapy for years, despite knowing better, even as I'm really interested and intrigued by the concept of it. I've sort of generally noticed that people who do therapy and are open about it are more interesting than other people. They are reflective and attentive in a certain way, tuned into themselves and their surroundings at a higher frequency. I recently watched and loved the documentary Stutz on Netflix, written and directed by Jonah Hill, which chronicles Hill’s relationship with his therapist, the psychiatrist Dr. Phil Stutz. And last winter I ripped through MIT professor Sherry Turkel's recent memoir The Empathy Diaries, about her life and esteemed career examining the social ills of technology. Great read! But the memoir was also in large part the story of how psychotherapy transformed her personal relationships as well as Turkel’s scholarship. But, still, my take on therapy is sort of like my take on being a vegan/vegetarian. I get that I should do it, that it makes perfect sense, that it’s good for me and for the world....but still, no thanks. That’s kind of been my posture, which by the way I fully realize squarely puts me in the "definitely needs therapy" category.  And at some point, I'll need to unpack all of this. In the meantime, I decided to give life/professional coaching a try, which I'd sort of describe as a bit of therapy mixed with customized career and professional counseling. In a coming post, I’ll circle back to the benefits of a professional/life coach, and how it’s helping me navigate this phase of my career as I transition from "early-career" to "mid-career" scholar.  But back to the podcast episode for a minute.. Giamatti is great as expected. His upbringing is interesting too, if unsurprising. His dad was a professor at Yale, going on to become the President of the university. His mother was also an educator at a private school. I appreciate how he owns his privilege but not in a groveling sort of way, discussing his achievements in high school in this context, and his moving on to Yale where he was a performing arts major, which is interesting to note as we continue to witness the full-scale assault on non-STEM majors in higher education.  "Art school" gave us Paul Giamatti and I guess I’m pretty grateful for that.

The last topic for this post is a short reflection on AI and public education, which I'll also return to in future posts. I mentioned earlier the education podcast “Have you Heard?" co-hosted by University of Massachusetts Professor Jack Schneider and journalist Jenn Berkshire. As the plane crossed into Mexico, I had time for one more show, and the latest episode on Have You Heard was all about AI and education, with guest Stanford education professor Larry Cuban. I’m linking here in case you’re interested in listening to the whole episode.

Cuban is one of the leading experts on the impacts of tech on public education in the US, among other areas of expertise, and is someone whose work I have admired and learned a lot from over the years. In the podcast episode, Cuban emphasized the importance of understanding historically how tech has impacted education. The key point in his remarks and in the conversation with the hosts was that all the noise about AI right now is well, just that, noise. "AI hype" as some call it.  First, the idea that AI is just the newcomer in a longer line of technologies that at one point in time were supposedly going to "upend" and transform education. From screen projectors to computer labs, and the recent and ongoing frenzy around virtual learning, AI falls into the pattern of exaggerated hype. Jack shared this great story about spending a bit of time recently in a preschool, observing many mundane acts such as a teacher wiping a kid’s nose. THIS is education. Wiping noses in pre-school, pats on the back, relationship building, humans, culture. Do we think AI Is going to transform all that?  Like what specifically about education will it change?  Or should it change?  The episode provoked these excellent and I think spot-on questions. I strongly agree with the point that a big part of the hype around AI in ed is premised on a deep lack of understanding about what education and learning is all about. But there were a few elements to the issue of AI and education that were understated in the podcast as well, in my reading. I agree, there is a lot of hype about its transformative powers. But what about the skeptical and critical takes on AI and education? Is that all rooted in hype as well? There are too many scholars, educators, and activists here to name, but I’m thinking of writers like Audrey Watters who authored the book Teaching Machines, which is a critical and historical look at personalized learning, and the blog Hack Education. And to the explosion of work on surveillance and education, to alarms around "cop shit" in education, and more broadly to the threat of AI technologies in reinforcing and reproducing systems of racism and sexism. (A big part of our work in the TREE Lab is about supporting youth to examine the impact of AI in their schools and communities). If we take the position that the AI hype is just hype, then that implicates both the arguments of AI proponents as well as the skeptics, both of whom agree with the idea that AI is going to have a verrryy nontrivial impact on education. These are exactly the kinds of topics I’ll be digging into as our academic quarter gets underway at Northwestern University. In the Fall quarter, I'm especially excited to be co-teaching a course on AI and public education with my PhD student Charles Logan, who in addition to being a former teacher and ed-tech specialist is also a leading voice on the dangers of edtech in the classroom. 

We are now closing in on Mexico City. I'm wrapping up this post, and shutting off the podcast app. I’m looking forward to seeing good friends I haven't seen in years. As a final thought, it strikes me that the friends who await me are all people I met in the context of K12 public education, or in college (Go Bruins!).  I don't think we talk enough about the role of schools and learning in cultivating and nurturing friendships. For me maybe the most significant "outcome" of my schooling experiences has been my friendships. As we look ahead to the future of education, will the advent of AI have any impact on friendships? Could it? Should it?  One of my friends did say he typed into ChatGpt "Help us plan 3 days of eating and adventure in Mexico City." But I don't remember what it replied, and I doubt we'll care enough to check.