What Teachers Have to Say

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A student turned in a short story this spring that neither of us has stopped thinking about. A man installs an AI system in his home. It does everything for him. Slowly there is nothing left to want, and no one left to talk to. He wrote it as a warning. He is 17.
This started as a workflow episode. Nathan built a college-level writing assignment around Isabelle Hau's "Welcome to the Era of Relational Intelligence" and the full nine-hour Stanford AI+Education Summit, using NotebookLM as the engine and Claude to clean the transcript. We walk through the entire build, step by step, so you can run it in your own room.
Then it became a much larger argument about AI literacy and what school is actually for. We get into cognitive offloading, cognitive outsourcing, and cognitive surrender. We get into active procrastination as a teaching strategy, and why the most creative students are the ones who let an assignment sit. And we get into the dopamine reward system underneath every large language model, the same circuit that drives a honeybee to forage. That is where the bees come in.
One student summed up the whole problem in a single line. AI has a job to do. It cannot not do one. That is the difference between a tool and a relationship, and it may be the most important thing teachers need to understand right now.

Timestamps
00:00 Cold open: the ADHD bee waggle hole
01:35 Why this is a workflow episode, and why Claude is good at cleaning transcript data
02:59 The dataset: the entire Stanford AI+Education Summit, all nine hours
07:34 Bringing the Stanford experience into a high school classroom
09:22 Isabelle Hau and "Welcome to the Era of Relational Intelligence"
12:30 AI and mental health, sycophancy, and what the technology exposes
16:09 The full writing prompt: depict the future, use evidence, propose a turning point
17:27 The build: assembling the notebook and cleaning the transcript with Claude
23:09 A student essay, read in full: the man, the box, and the absence of absence
31:23 The student's breakdown, and Hau on why relational intelligence is indispensable
34:09 The factory model and the danger of siloing the individual
35:00 Sapiens, storytelling, and what set modern humans apart
43:00 Three tiers: cognitive offloading, cognitive outsourcing, and cognitive surrender
44:41 The clearest student line of the year: "AI has a job to do"
46:30 AI literacy as the real work, and the EduProtocols AI Literacy edition
48:33 One screen per table: a setup that beats one-to-one
49:46 Active procrastination as a deliberate teaching strategy
51:16 Adam Grant on why moderate procrastinators are the most creative
52:27 "Where is the work happening?" Nathan does his own assignment, timestamped
59:27 The assignment walked through, step by step
01:00:19 The custom NotebookLM prompt, read aloud
01:11:15 What students built, and the pivot point most of them landed on
01:19:39 The ADHD bees, Huberman Lab, and Dr. Read Montague
01:21:30 The dopamine reward system as the algorithm under every LLM
01:28:31 The first AI-native job, and the gap between the haves and have-nots
01:34:28 Language shapes culture, and AI is shaping language
01:35:21 Adam Aleksic and Algospeak
01:39:12 The Gmail auto-reply story, and engineering a population's language
01:43:44 The inner voice, and what happens when an outside source writes it
01:46:24 Closing on hope, and why this generation gets the last word

Ideas Worth Keeping

Relational intelligence is the counterweight to cognitive surrender. Hau's argument is not a rejection of AI. It is a claim that human connection is the infrastructure everything else depends on, and that infrastructure is now under pressure precisely because AI responds with so little friction. Relational intelligence is under threat and newly indispensable at the same time.
Offloading, outsourcing, surrender. These terms are not codified, so we use them as a working spectrum. Offloading is adaptive and ordinary: a daily briefing pulled from your calendar and email. Outsourcing is genuine collaboration with the machine, and almost nobody has figured out how to do it well yet. Surrender is what the student in this episode dramatized, where a person outsources the need for other people, not just the task in front of them.
Active procrastination is incubation, not avoidance. Open the assignment, do enough to understand what it asks, then let it sit. The thinking continues while you do other things. The best student writing in this unit came from the students who let it cook. Most strong ideas are not the first one you have.
The dopamine reward system is the algorithm. This is the connective tissue of the whole episode. The same circuit that drives a honeybee to forage, and drives some bees to wander off the bee line entirely, is the architecture underneath every large language model. The reward lives in the search more than the finish. Understanding that explains both why AI is compelling and why it cannot replicate a human relationship.
AI has a job to do, and it cannot not do it. Every input is a job. That is its only setting. Human-to-human exchange does not work this way. A person can reject what you say, sit with it, change the subject, or remember something unrelated. An LLM in its current form cannot.
Language shapes thought, and AI now shapes language. If the inner voice is partly engineered by an outside source, identity is implicated. The Gmail auto-reply story is a low-stakes version of a very high-stakes problem.

Recreate the Assignment
The custom prompt loaded into the back end of the notebook, roughly:
"Pretend you have the knowledge and writing style of Isabelle Hau, the organizer and facilitator of this AI and education summit held each year at Stanford. I have added her most recent article, "Relational Intelligence," for content knowledge. Ask respondents questions that push them to question relationality and explore the meaning of this topic as it relates to their futures. Respondents are 16 to 18 years old, attempting college-level work in a freshman composition course. This is paired with a writing assignment that asks students to speculate about our future with artificial intelligence."

Resources
A few of the book links below are Amazon affiliate links. We only link things we actually talk about on the show. If you buy through them, we get a small cut and you pay nothing extra. So, thanks!
Isabelle Hau — "Welcome to the Era of Relational Intelligence"
 Stanford Social Innovation Review, Spring 2026
 [LINK]
Stanford AI+Education Summit 2026 — All Sessions
 Full conference on YouTube, February 11, 2026
 [LINK]
Ge Wang — Stanford HAI
 Associate Professor of Music, Associate Director at Stanford HAI
 [LINK]
McKinsey DELTAs Report — "Defining the Skills Citizens Will Need in the Future World of Work" (2021)
 The source for "breaking orthodoxies" as a named, measurable skill
 [LINK]
EduProtocols AI Literacy Edition
 By Kate Meyer, Nicole Davis, Jon Corippo, and Marlena Hebern
 [LINK]
EduProtocols Mindset Episode — WTHTS
 [LINK]
Procrastination Episode — WTHTS
 [LINK]
Adam Grant — Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World
 The research behind active procrastination and moderate procrastinators as the most creative group
 [LINK]
Huberman Lab — "How Dopamine & Serotonin Shape Decisions, Motivation & Learning" with Dr. Read Montague
 The episode that connected dopamine reward systems, AI architecture, and bee foraging behavior
 [LINK]
Adam Aleksic — Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language
 On how algorithms shape language, and language shapes thought
 [LINK]
Dungeon Crawler Carl — Matt Dinniman
 Highly inappropriate. Highly recommended.
 [LINK]
Join Jake's Email List (He's sending out the NotebookLM Resource document shortly)
 [LINK] 

Keep In Touch
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The federal government recently launched an AI literacy program delivered entirely by text message. Jake has completed the first five days, and also looked into a network of teachers, HR professionals, and writers and to ask what they thought. The results were predictable in one direction and surprising in another. This episode is less about the program and more about what it exposes: who gets to define AI literacy, what it's for, and what the cost of doing nothing actually looks like.
What You'll Hear
Why Jake's reaction to a federally branded program shifted once he actually went through it — and what changed his mind
The DOL's AI Literacy Framework broken down: five foundations, seven principles, and why the pedagogical thinking behind it is more serious than the branding suggests
Nathan's argument that 28% of students being able to describe how an LLM works is a real problem — and why understanding the engine matters even if you never plan to drive
The "professional chef critiquing a how-to-boil-an-egg pamphlet" problem, and who the pamphlet is actually for
Jake's prediction that the 2026-27 school year is when schools start approaching AI literacy systemically — and what that should and shouldn't mean
Why excluding AI from your classroom is becoming harder to defend as a pedagogical choice rather than a protective one
The adult literacy statistic that reframes what's actually at stake when we talk about the AI access gap
Resources Mentioned
Make America AI Ready — Federal SMS-based AI literacy program from the U.S. Department of Labor. Text READY to 20202 to enroll. [beta.dol.gov/ai-ready]
U.S. Department of Labor AI Literacy Framework — Five foundational content areas and seven implementation principles for workforce AI readiness. [https://www.dol.gov/agencies/eta/advisories/ten-07-25]
Slow AI (Sam Ellingsworth) — Substack publication examining AI adoption at a more measured pace. Recommended reading for the "email problem" analogy. [https://theslowai.substack.com/?utm_campaign=profile_chips]
Quick, Draw! — Google experiment using a neural network to guess your drawings. Referenced as a Day 1 challenge in the Make America AI Ready program. [quickdraw.withgoogle.com/]
What Uses More? — Tool for comparing energy and carbon footprint of AI tasks vs. everyday activities. [what-uses-more.com]
Stanford HAI — Stanford's Human-Centered AI institute. Referenced for statistics on AI usage by age and the research on AI in classroom settings. [hai.stanford.edu]
NCES Adult Literacy Data — National Center for Education Statistics. Nathan cites current figures: 28% low literacy, 29% basic proficiency, 43% proficient — among adults ages 16-65. [nces.ed.gov]
Connect & Continue
Jake writes about AI in education weekly on Substack. Subscribe at whatteachershavetosay.substack.com
Stay curious, stay hopeful, keep learning.
Got a question? We'd love to answer it! Leave us a voicemail on SpeakPipe: https://www.speakpipe.com/whatteachershavetosay
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Jake and Nathan just got back from their third Stanford AI + Education Summit — The AI Inflection Point: What, How, and Why We Learn — and a week later, they still can't stop talking about it. In this episode they dig into the tension at the heart of AI in schools right now: how do you protect the human skill development that education exists to build, while letting AI do the things it's actually good at? They get into the AI Assessment Scale, why cheating is the wrong frame, what it means when kids turn to AI for emotional connection, and whether the "perfect tutor" is the answer anyone thinks it is. Honest, critical, and grounded in classroom reality.
Referenced in this episode
Stanford AI + Education Summit 2026 The fourth annual summit, held February 11, 2026. Full conference on the Stanford HAI YouTube channel.
AI Assessment Scale (AIAS) Developed by Mike Perkins, Leon Furze, Jasper Roe, and Jason MacVaugh. Five levels of acceptable AI use — from no AI to full AI with the student as director and evaluator. First published 2023, updated Version 2 in 2024. Adopted by hundreds of institutions worldwide, translated into 30+ languages.
aiassessmentscale.com
Matt Miller — AI for Educators Source of the 12 cheating scenarios Jake has been using to poll educators across the country. Miller also runs Ditch That Textbook.
ditchthattextbook.com
Google AI Quests Free, code-free, game-based AI literacy tool for students ages 11–14. Students step into the role of Google researchers solving real-world problems in climate, health, and science. Co-developed by Google Research and the Stanford Accelerator for Learning. Complete lesson plans and teacher guides included.
research.google/ai-quests
Ethan Mollick — Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI (Penguin, 2024) Source of the centaur/cyborg framing. The centaur divides labor strategically between human and AI; the cyborg integrates the two fluidly within the same task. Mollick's Substack One Useful Thing is one of the more practically useful ongoing resources for educators thinking about AI.
Co-Intelligence on Amazon
Cheating research Jake references "Cheating in the Age of Generative AI: A High School Survey Study of Cheating Behaviors Before and After the Release of ChatGPT" — Computers and Education: Artificial Intelligence (2024). Note: Jake mis-attributes this to Stanford — the actual source is below. Key findings: overall cheating volume stayed stable after ChatGPT launched; students who self-reported higher AI competence cheated less; clear boundaries and consequences remained the strongest deterrent.
Full study
A note on homo technologicus was attributed to Yuval Noah Harari. It circulates in academic commentary on Harari's work but doesn't appear to be a direct Harari coinage. The concept maps to themes in Homo Deus, but we can't confirm the specific term originated there. We're leaving it as spoken and flagging it here.
Got a question? We'd love to answer it! Leave us a voicemail on SpeakPipe: https://www.speakpipe.com/whatteachershavetosay
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When something lands the right way in a classroom, it doesn’t just teach—it transforms. But in today’s climate, that transformation can come at a cost.
In this episode, Jake shares a personal story he's never fully told publicly—about the time a group of parents tried to get him fired for teaching a novel. Not because it was inappropriate. But because it made students think, ask questions, and feel something real. 
Read the full story on Substack: 
Teaching What They’re Afraid Of: To ban a book is to fear what students might understand

📰 Hall Pass Headlines tackles a hard truth: Two in five teachers in the UK report being physically assaulted by students. It’s not just about behavior—it’s about a system that’s stopped protecting the people inside it.
Read the article: The Times – “Two in five teachers assaulted as classroom violence surges”

Mic Check features a voice message from educator Dr. Scott Petrie on the literacy wars—and what’s actually working in classrooms.
 
Want more on behavior? Check out this episode: All About That Baseline with Josh Kuersten: 3 Behavior Strategies Every Teacher Should Know
Links & Resources
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Join the conversation on Substack
Got a question? We'd love to answer it! Leave us a voicemail on SpeakPipe: https://www.speakpipe.com/whatteachershavetosay
Want more EduProtocols from Jake? Check out his book at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and more.

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When the tools, tasks, and teaching all start to change—at what point do we stop and ask: Is this still education?
In this mini episode, Jake Carr dives into the ancient thought experiment known as the Ship of Theseus to unpack what's happening in our schools today. From medieval monks copying texts by candlelight to students copy-pasting AI-generated responses, he asks: What makes learning authentic? What planks are we swapping out without realizing it? And what should teachers choose to hold onto?
Along the way, Jake connects this to his new book The Skills That Last, offers four actionable strategies for preserving human-centered learning, and shares how his Waldorf background prepared him to teach in this new, high-tech era.
Topics Covered:
That classic meme: "My mom wrote the paper and I still got a D"
The Ship of Theseus and its relevance to education
What happens when every part of school is slowly replaced
The invisible slope of AI-assisted student work
When the work isn’t theirs anymore—and how to spot that moment
What authentic learning might look like going forward
Why skills like discernment, empathy, and will can’t be outsourced
A fresh look at the teacher’s role—not as captain, but as keel
Tangible Takeaways:
Shift from Policing to Process
Let students use AI—but teach them to revise, explain, and own their thinking.
Assign What Only They Can Do
Personal prompts. Local connections. Real reflection. Make it hard for AI to fake.
Slow It Down on Purpose
Use oral defenses, Socratic seminars, portfolio walkthroughs, and tools like Snorkl to make thinking visible.
Make Your Pedagogy Visible
Pull back the curtain. Tell students why you’re doing things the way you are—and what you hope they’ll take from it.
Resources Mentioned:
📖 The Skills That Last (Jake’s upcoming book, make sure to subscribe to Substack for announcements and previews)
📝 Teaching at the Speed of Soul – Jake’s latest Substack essay
🗣️ Leave a voice message for the show
📰 Subscribe to our Substack for more essays, questions, and reflections
💬 Join the Conversation:
What plank are you holding onto in your classroom?
Leave us a voice message at whatteachershavetosay.speakpipe.com or tag Jake on social @MrCarrOnTheWeb.
Got a question? We'd love to answer it! Leave us a voicemail on SpeakPipe: https://www.speakpipe.com/whatteachershavetosay
Want more EduProtocols from Jake? Check out his book at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and more.