Teaching Notes: The Future of AI and How We Should Respond

Apple WWDC 2026

I just had a chance to watch the Apple WWDC 2026 presentation the other day, and to say that I am shocked would be an understatement. We are about to jump over a precipice, and to be blunt, I do not think any of us in education is truly prepared for what is about to happen. I do not mean for this to be incendiary or a “Chicken Little” post. However, we do need to have a serious conversation about the future of education.

In so many ways, I feel like our forebears, way back in the 1900s, as my students are fond of saying, when word-processing and then spell-checking and grammar-checking software emerged. For my generation, which, as an elder millennial, straddles the analog and digital worlds, it is both exciting and terrifying how fast technology is advancing. After watching the WWDC presentation, Apple is about to make AI as ubiquitous as spell-checkers. It will be so embedded in every student’s life that it will be hard to avoid. These tools already exist to an extent, but the latest Apple Intelligence models, partnered with Google Gemini, will make it hard to avoid using AI. This is not to mention public school systems, which have already decided to embed AI technology in K-12 Chromebooks. My sister-in-law teaches in a rural Virginia county school system which will begin shipping Chromebooks with “educational” models of ChatGPT in the fall.

I want to be clear: I do not have the answers. I am experimenting and trying to keep my head above water just like everyone else. What I do know is that the traditional five-paragraph academic essay is dead. The idea that we can also completely ban AI is gone. So, what do we do?

Like you, I do not want to completely abandon writing. Writing is an essential tool of creative and critical thinking. Most of us entered our fields, especially in the humanities, by writing traditional essays and research papers. I still think it is absolutely critical that we teach our students to be inquisitive, to think for themselves, and to question everything. Maybe that’s just the historian in me. However, if you ask students to write a traditional paper…AI can do that in seconds, and despite what AI detection software promises, you cannot tell the difference. Each new model gets better, sounds more human, and avoids previous mistakes. Hallucinations still occur; AI loves an em-dash, and it collapses everything into a neat, tidy package.

We are on a precipice. However, it is not hopeless. What I am learning is that most students are intrigued but skeptical of AI. Many of them realize that they do not want software thinking for them, and that there is some value in the journey. So, the key, I think, is to encourage that creativity and critical thinking. How do we do that? By grounding everything we do in live, in-class, real-life experiences. By making it essential that they incorporate our class discussions and activities into their essay. AI cannot replicate spur-of-the-moment conversations.

Let me give you an example:

Last semester, I asked students to read Friedrich Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England. This book is everywhere on the internet, and AI models have consumed every version of the text. If I had stuck with a traditional essay format, I would have received tons of AI-generated texts. And to be honest, they would have been really good. Using Claude and Gemini, I created an “AI-resistant” prompt.

Here is the prompt:

1. Engage directly with at least two passages that we discussed in class. You must explain how these passages relate to the themes we debated, including the question raised during our discussion of whether Engels is primarily describing conditions or making a moral argument. When referring to these passages, please explain how the class conversation changed or deepened your understanding of them. Do not simply summarize the text. You must use specific examples of class discussions here, not vague summaries.
2. Connect Engels’ observations to a specific example from our in-class activity. Using Google Maps/Google Earth, I broke students into groups and assigned them one modern post-industrial city (Baltimore, Detroit, Atlanta, Johannesburg, Cincinnati) and asked them to test Engels’ hypothesis about capitalism and urban design. They had to be in class in order to get credit for this part of the essay, and I placed a strict embargo on sharing information with those not present.
3. Respond to one of the disagreements that emerged in class. For this component, students had to identify a fellow student by name, and explain why they disagreed, explaining that disagreement fairly (no straw man arguments), and then arguing their position with evidence.
4. Reflect briefly on your own intellectual response. I asked students to think (in a very meta way) about how their view of Engels’ work changed between the first reading and our final discussion. The instructions stressed that they needed to reflect on their thinking process, not their personal feelings about the assignment.

I also added a couple of “poison pills” to the instructions to thwart AI-generated essays. They had to cite page numbers from the specific text I assigned in the syllabus, not from a random free online version. This gave me accountability, and I always choose books that are under $20, so not a major burden for my students. They had to explicitly refer to a fellow student’s idea. They also had to avoid general historical claims that we did not discuss or read about. If they mentioned Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, etc., they would receive an automatic zero for the assignment.

The results were really good essays that forced a deep engagement with Engels’ work. By grounding the essay in this way, I also avoided the gut reaction “communism=bad” responses so prevalent in my conservative student body. The Google Maps activity was a particular highlight, and something I will absolutely use again.

So: AI is here. It is not going away. It is about to become much more enmeshed in our lives with the new Apple Intelligence models announced this past week. We can continue sticking our heads in the sand and try to keep doing things the way they have always been done. Or, we can be creative. We can think about new directions. We can incorporate some of the useful aspects of AI while demonstrating the value of critical thinking. As I mentioned above, I do not have all the answers. However, I am convinced that the old way of doing things is dead, and we must adapt or die along with it.