I.

My drive to become a teacher didn’t quite center on my love for the genre I teach: English Language Arts. I wanted to have a job that impacted the intellectualism of America. This is like, of course, the pinnacle of hippy-dippy idealism, which is definitely my M.O. and my hubris.

But becoming an English teacher supplanted this sort of grand idealism as my top motivator for two reasons:

1. It is difficult to become an English teacher, let alone increase the “intellectualism of America,” without getting pretty good at reading. And by reading, I mean reading deeply: knowing what’s there, what could be there, and what isn’t there. This is humbling.
2. And then when you start studying reading, like super hardcore, you start thinking like a writer. And then you realize, man, writing and reading are both just this magical technology. And both just might do the thing I came her to do.

Since those moments of realization, I’ve mostly been a writing teacher. And that’s why AI has been such a thing for me in the last couple years. Writing is such a wonderful active mode of thinking, and we spend so much time getting students to finally believe that (as I didn’t when I was their age) that the worry over AI is kind of a #1 English Teacher Crises.

It’s strange that I love writing so much because I used to hate it so much.

I mean, you can increase the intellectualism of America by being any sort of high school teacher, but I chose English teacher because I at least liked reading.

I read a ton of pop culture authors when I was younger–Michael Crichton, Tom Clancy, Patricia Cornwall, etc.–and not so many in-school texts. So I never thought of myself as a good reader. But in college, when I read Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates by Tom Robbins, I was exposed to the type of creativity that the art of language and story can produce.

I had always thought of contemporary novels as the opposite of classics: modern texts meant easy writing, plot over flowery prose. But as I got into good modern texts–White Noise by Don DeLillo being the pinnacle–I could see how modern literature could really make me question the “right now” as well as the classic ruminations of what it is to be a human living with many other humans whilst being on a lonely life-inhabited planet in a bare solar system far, far away from other solar systems, let alone ones with life on them.

Writing had always been a chore. The only thing that motivated me was a deadline. I finished many an essay the night before. I saw an English teacher as more reading teacher than writing, and I worried a bunch about the writing part.

I have always felt an imposter at the art of writing. I used to feel the same about drumming. I played in many bands, but I had never been taught how to drum. Even though I was pretty punk rock as a teenager, I somehow pushed all of that DIY aesthetic aside in my own insecurities, letting some sanctioned path or way of artistic gatekeeping that doesn’t exist keep me from inhabiting an identity I sorely wanted. It could be why I never allowed myself to be viewed as someone who could write. It could also go back to Tom Robbins, too, who reminded me that one could break all of the rules and show a view of humanity that really jived with my own ways of thinking. And there is that linkage: when you read widely and deeply, and you appreciate something, your senses gain in perception and you find yourself through others. And one thing you must find is what writing can do.

In terms of writing, perhaps I had not read as well as I thought I had. I didn’t started seeing behind the curtain until I was paying more attention. Or maybe it was really just a lack of confidence? Regardless, when you actually do that thing you appreciate, things open up to depths previously unaccounted for. And if you write, with a mindset to be heard, to be interesting and insightful, you notice better reading as well.

So I began craving depth in my reading habits(and later, thankfully, lightness; there is a necessary place for pulp in any art), and I was continually astounded how much surrounded me. When one discovers Borges and Calvino, it’s a wonderful thing. But when you experience those who have been inspired by them–it’s overwhelming. Despite that, I continually returned to the classics and even discovered a healthy magazine habit reading with the help of The New Yorker and Harper’s. And then nonfiction enveloped me and still does today.

Three years into teaching–remember, I got into the profession because I wanted to do something good for my community–my new beliefs in reading and writing had become something that I knew was essential for any democracy.

I bring this up because in my worries about AI and the ways my students could circumvent the writing process in my classroom in the last couple of years, I forgot that AI is also a problem for reading. And it was “A Phaedrus Moment” by Rob Nelson that put this bug so recently in my brain.

II.

We have all read about the anecdote of Socrates being totally wrong about the technology known as “writing.” I have read the anecdote a ton in the past ten years (and used it myself in conversation and in writing). The anecdote has been used a lot in downplaying worries about new technologies. It goes like this: Socrates warned us that relying on written text is going to get people in trouble, and boy was he wrong!

But as Rob Nelson and Alan Jacobs point out, that’s a simplistic reading of the anecdote. I mean, Socrates is Plato’s hero in Plato’s written works.

What Socrates is really pointing out is that each new tool has tradeoffs, and we should analyze them for such. It is true that written works cannot enter into an active and personal dialogue with each of its readers. And it is also true that writing something down can make memorization less important in some regards.

This is why I’m even more worried about AI than before.

Yes, the internet was an amazing thing that brought tons of information to the world, but it also highlighted that text is not a standalone tool that only does good. Text has been used for misinformation for thousands of years, but it was never so accessible than when the internet hugged the world. What we thought, erroneously, was that the good information would automatically win against the bad information, like some automatic meritocratic battle of truth. That did not happen. Why? Well, look at who is reading the writing: humans.

Yes, written text is a wonderful thing. So is the internet. So is AI. With written text, I can get as close as one possibly can to understanding an intimate mode of thinking of someone who is possibly 1,000 years older than me. With AI, I can summarize a ton of information. Even enter into a sort of Socrates-like dialectic, though it would be erroneous to see AI as a Socrates-like interlocutor.

I’m sure if you were to analyze reading habits pre-internet, there were stark reading bubbles, which makes it even more astounding today that with such access, we are yet indulging in our own bubbles, made algorithmically or wrought by our own design.

But the main truth is that we can’t have the reading without the living. This is wisdom. I often look back at my own life in shock at how late I realized what reading and writing, something we do constantly throughout our years of schooling, took so long to understand. It’s an infantilizing thought at its worst. But then again, I am also constantly amazed at how much I make I-should-know-better mistakes after living decades as a human being, especially someone who is obsessed with information and story and the ways they are built, so much so that I have chosen it as a profession and keep choosing it every year. My own flawed life should be a blunt red flag: wisdom is very hard fought. It is also very difficult for humans to ably understand when we don’t have wisdom. One of my favorite quotes is a Socrates quote that seems to have many different translations and more context than what it simply advocates: “I know that I know nothing.”

Neither reading nor AI automatically gives wisdom. But they set us up for wisdom, though this requires practice. Or maybe we should call it “an education.” After all, you must, in the apropos words of the knight guarding the holy grail in Indiana Jones in the Last Crusade, “choose wisely.” And if you know that line, you know that Indiana Jones only got there through his brawn and his education. And his rival, Walter Donovan, though an antique collector, only ever read Indiana Jones’s father’s notebook, an abbreviated version of information. And we all know what happened to him.

We can also look at Indiana Jones’s archetypical originator, Odysseus, a famous 2,000 year-old character who will once again reemerge in the public eye on screens everywhere via Christopher Nolan. Odysseus is certainly more wily than Indiana Jones. He solved the 10 year-old Trojan War with creativity–the Trojan Horse. But he had no formal education. Writing didn’t exist in his time. One wonders if his Odyssey could have been prevented if his already prodigious wisdom had a literary education filled with many accounts of what hubris could do to us humans. Then again, humans be humans. Everyone and all.