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  • There Are Two Bees in Your Brain. AI Only Has One.

    There Are Two Bees in Your Brain. AI Only Has One.
    2026/06/15
    Send us Fan MailA 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.Timestamps00:00 Cold open: the ADHD bee waggle hole01:35 Why this is a workflow episode, and why Claude is good at cleaning transcript data02:59 The dataset: the entire Stanford AI+Education Summit, all nine hours07:34 Bringing the Stanford experience into a high school classroom09:22 Isabelle Hau and "Welcome to the Era of Relational Intelligence"12:30 AI and mental health, sycophancy, and what the technology exposes16:09 The full writing prompt: depict the future, use evidence, propose a turning point17:27 The build: assembling the notebook and cleaning the transcript with Claude23:09 A student essay, read in full: the man, the box, and the absence of absence31:23 The student's breakdown, and Hau on why relational intelligence is indispensable34:09 The factory model and the danger of siloing the individual35:00 Sapiens, storytelling, and what set modern humans apart43:00 Three tiers: cognitive offloading, cognitive outsourcing, and cognitive surrender44:41 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 edition48:33 One screen per table: a setup that beats one-to-one49:46 Active procrastination as a deliberate teaching strategy51:16 Adam Grant on why moderate procrastinators are the most creative52:27 "Where is the work happening?" Nathan does his own assignment, timestamped59:27 The assignment walked through, step by step01:00:19 The custom NotebookLM prompt, read aloud01:11:15 What students built, and the pivot point most of them landed on01:19:39 The ADHD bees, Huberman Lab, and Dr. Read Montague01:21:30 The dopamine reward system as the algorithm under every LLM01:28:31 The first AI-native job, and the gap between the haves and have-nots01:34:28 Language shapes culture, and AI is shaping language01:35:21 Adam Aleksic and Algospeak01:39:12 The Gmail auto-reply story, and engineering a population's language01:43:44 The inner voice, and what happens when an outside source writes it01:46:24 Closing on hope, and why this generation gets the last wordIdeas Worth KeepingRelational 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 ...
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    1 時間 37 分
  • Make America AI Ready: The Stove Isn't Going to Blow Up

    Make America AI Ready: The Stove Isn't Going to Blow Up
    2026/03/31

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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

    Want more EduProtocols from Jake? Check out his book at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and more.
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    1 時間 30 分
  • Scaffolds Were Always Meant to Come Down

    Scaffolds Were Always Meant to Come Down
    2026/03/04

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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

    Want more EduProtocols from Jake? Check out his book at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and more.
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    1 時間 32 分
  • Who Protects the Teacher?

    Who Protects the Teacher?
    2025/04/23

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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

    • Subscribe & review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify
    • 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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    14 分
  • The Ship of ChatGPTseus: Identity, Authorship, and the Soul of Learning

    The Ship of ChatGPTseus: Identity, Authorship, and the Soul of Learning
    2025/04/15

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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:

    1. Shift from Policing to Process
      Let students use AI—but teach them to revise, explain, and own their thinking.
    2. Assign What Only They Can Do
      Personal prompts. Local connections. Real reflection. Make it hard for AI to fake.
    3. Slow It Down on Purpose
      Use oral defenses, Socratic seminars, portfolio walkthroughs, and tools like Snorkl to make thinking visible.
    4. 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.
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    14 分
  • From Tijuana to Top of the Class: A Fifth Grader’s AI Story

    From Tijuana to Top of the Class: A Fifth Grader’s AI Story
    2025/04/08

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    A brand-new student walks into a San Diego classroom—fresh across the border, speaking only Spanish. No prep. No warning. Just dropped off mid-morning with a “good luck.”

    What happened next? It’s the kind of story that reminds us why AI, when done right, can be the ultimate scaffold.

    In this episode, Jake shares the real story of a fifth-grade student who used Snorkl’s AI-powered translation tools to not only access a classroom assignment—but outperform every other kid in the room. What happened when he got a perfect score? The class—and the conversation—shifted.

    Key Takeaways:

    • Why AI isn’t isolating students—it’s connecting them
    • How translation tools create equity and engagement
    • Why Lexile-leveling + shared vocabulary = real inclusion

    Want to share a story like Scott’s?
    Tap the SpeakPipe link or send us a text (yep, we’ve got that now). Let’s keep lifting up stories that show what’s really possible in modern classrooms.

    Subscribe, rate, and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify to help more teachers find the show.

    #AIinEducation #EdTechForEquity #TeacherPodcast #InclusionInClassrooms #StudentVoice #Snorkl #RealTalkEd #snorkl.app


    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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    10 分
  • AI is Swimming Across Education’s Moats — Are We Ready for What Comes Next?

    AI is Swimming Across Education’s Moats — Are We Ready for What Comes Next?
    2025/04/01

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    AI isn’t storming the gates of education — it’s swimming quietly across the moat.

    In this episode of What Teachers Have to Say, Jake unpacks how the traditional moats that once protected education — content, pedagogy, and institutional processes — are quietly eroding as AI reshapes the landscape. Inspired by a thought-provoking LinkedIn post by Steven Bartlett (FlightStory, Thirdweb, The Diary of a CEO), Jake explores how these shifts parallel what’s happening in business and asks:

    👉 Are we ready for what comes next?

    We’ll explore:

    • Why content has become a commodity — and what that means for the teacher’s role.
    • Why sticking to scripted programs and pacing guides won’t protect schools — and how real expertise is more critical than ever.
    • What new moats schools must build to stay relevant — from fostering authentic community to mentoring students in ways AI can’t replicate.

    But that’s not all. Jake also teases insights from his upcoming book with Dave Burgess Consulting, The Skills that Last: Preparing Students for an Unpredictable World, highlighting how curation, critical thinking, and mentorship are the key skills that will future-proof education.

    Ready to build stronger moats in your classroom?
    💬 Leave us a message on     SpeakPipe — your voice might be featured in an upcoming episode!

    🎙️ Subscribe, share, and stay curious.


    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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    18 分
  • EduProtocols Triple-Play: 3 Spins on a Classroom Classic to Defeat AI Anxiety

    EduProtocols Triple-Play: 3 Spins on a Classroom Classic to Defeat AI Anxiety
    2025/03/25

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    In this episode, Jake Carr discusses the impact of artificial intelligence on education and how a shift from control to connection can enhance teaching using a recent article by Carlo Iacono. He introduces the EduProtocols Triple Play, which includes adaptations of the Frayer Model to foster student engagement, collaboration, and reflection. The conversation emphasizes the importance of witnessing student growth and creating a supportive learning environment, ultimately advocating for a more human-centered approach in education.takeaways

    • AI is making teachers question traditional methods.
    • Connection, not control, is key in education.
    • The Frayer model can be adapted for deeper learning.
    • Witnessing student growth is essential for effective teaching.
    • Struggle in learning is a sign of progress.
    • AI can assist but cannot replace human connection.
    • Daily conditions in the classroom should foster engagement.
    • EduProtocols can reduce teacher workload and increase student interaction.
    • Reflection is crucial for student development.
    • Teaching is about guiding students through their learning journey.


    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.

    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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    17 分