You’re Not Just Teaching. You’re Pioneering.

Think less faculty lounge, more basecamp at the edge of civilization.

If you teach right now—right now, in 2025, with ChatGPT humming in your students’ pockets and the old education rulebook smoldering in the trash—you’re not just an educator.

You’re a pioneer.

You’re standing at the edge of a seismic shift in how humans learn, think, and create. Most of us didn’t sign up for this, but here we are: faced with the choice to cling to yesterday’s methods or start charting new territory. And if you’ve got even a flicker of curiosity left in you, this moment isn’t terrifying—it’s thrilling.

Let’s stop pretending this is business as usual. Our students are already getting help from AI—whether they admit it or not. They’re submitting essays co-written with large language models, running data analysis with tools they barely understand, and skipping readings because a bot summarized it for them. So what?

I’ve lost count of how many academics are clutching their pearls, calling for resistance like AI is some invading army—when really, it’s just the next damn tool we need to learn how to use better.

The world they’re heading into requires them to use these tools. Not like extras. Like limbs.

Our job isn’t to punish or police that. Our job is to help them learn how to learn in a world where intelligence is no longer scarce. That’s the challenge. That’s the privilege. We get to reinvent what it means to teach—and learn—in an age when anyone can access a genius assistant 24/7. How exhilarating is that?!

It’s not about banning AI. It’s about pushing students to think harder, question deeper, create smarter. And yeah, sometimes that means throwing our lesson plans out the window and building something new from scratch (I’ve done that a dozen times this past year, sometimes at the last minute btw). It’s messy. It’s uncomfortable. It’s real.

So if you’re still here—still showing up, still wrestling with this madness—you’re not falling behind.

You’re ahead of the curve.

You’re part of a tiny, scrappy crew of modern-day educational explorers figuring out what comes next. It’s uncertain. It’s exhilarating. It matters.

Grab your compass. Let’s go.