Everyone thinks AI will destroy higher education.
Everyone thinks AI will destroy higher education. I think it’s exposing what was broken all along. AI can write the essay. Summarize the reading. Generate the study guide. Complete the problem set. And half the institutions I talk to are spending more time policing AI use than rethinking what they ask students to do. If […]
Two nurses walk into an ER . . .
Not all simulations are built the same. Most show you what students decide. They should show you how they think. Two students walk into a nursing simulation. Both choose to escalate a patient to the ICU. Same decision. One recognized the early warning signs and weighed them against three competing diagnoses before acting. The other […]
We built the most expensive worksheet in education.
I resisted AI longer than I should have. We had built something genuinely ambitious but it wasn’t a game-changer. Students could walk through the streets of colonial Boston in the days before the Massacre. They could confront figures of the Protestant Reformation in immersive 3D environments. They were stepping into history, making choices, living inside […]
“Trust us, our graduates can think” isn’t enough anymore.
I added an economics minor just to prove I was hireable. Not because I loved econ. Because I knew “history major” on a resume made recruiters skeptical. Most professors I’d talked to knew it too. They just didn’t have a way to fix it. That’s a broken system. That’s a broken system. Professors develop the […]
“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”
A dean told me last month: “We know our programs develop great thinkers. We just can’t prove it to anyone.” Not to parents writing tuition checks. Not to employers asking if graduates are job ready. Not to accreditors demanding evidence of career-connected learning. Tolstoy wrote that everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one […]
I was an Excel monkey.
I spent 4,000 hours memorizing Excel at Morgan Stanley. 40 hours a week. 100 weeks. As an analyst, you were basically an Excel monkey. I loved my team but the path to doing the interesting work ran through one bottleneck: how well you could build a model. If you weren’t the best modeler, you got […]
Facts don’t create skills. Decisions do.
Being a great lecturer doesn’t make you a great history teacher. That’s something I wish I had known going into teaching. I spent my first year trying to be engaging — better slides, better stories, better delivery. Students paid attention. Test scores looked fine. Evaluations were solid. But when I asked a student to explain […]
We weren’t memorizing history. We were practicing how to think.
The most important class I ever took had no tests, no textbooks, and no lectures. My Greek history professor didn’t care if you memorized the year Alexander crossed the Bosphorus. He cared whether you understood why people did what they did — and whether you were willing to ask the same questions about yourself. He […]