Recently I was talking with a teacher in a one-on-one session, and she mentioned that she’d like to regain her sense of possibility as a teacher.

Afterward, I kept coming back to that phrase: sense of possibility.

And the more I turned it over, the more I realized that a sense of possibility is, in many ways, the opposite of burnout.

So, let’s talk about what it actually means to have a sense of possibility, and how you can hold onto it (or get it back if you’ve lost it).

Around the eight-year mark of my own teaching career, a colleague told me about the “eight-year burnout cycle” for teachers.

Something about the seven-to-nine-year mark, she said, made teachers start to wonder if they could do the job for much longer.

The truth is, I don’t know if there is actual research behind this; the whole concept is more of something I heard through the teacher grapevine.

But it was true for me.

This is the last post in a series on AI and teaching.

I purposely left the topic of teaching writing for last, because while working on this series of videos and posts, I very consciously looked for ways that AI could help me save time and effort.

In this last segment, my hope was to be able to share a few tips based on my own experience writing and making videos about this topic.

First the good news: there were ways that AI helped me save time and effort.

But also… this series on AI and teaching has taken more time and more work on my part than almost any other topic I’ve ever covered.

That tension, it turns out, makes a pretty good jumping-off point for talking about how to teach writing in the age of AI.

There’s a lot of uncertainty right now about teaching in the age of AI — a lot of stuff we don’t know.

But there is one AI tool that I can say, in an uncomplicated way, has made my life better.

And it’s both a writing trick and a time saver for teachers.

My very favorite thing that AI has brought into my life in recent years is that is provides a whole new way to both capture ideas in writing and to review written work.

I’m going to give you an example of both — plus my biggest tip for how to do voice-to-text in a way that is most usable when you go back to read it.

Knowing how to do your own research is one of the most important takeaways from a good education.

It’s something I emphasized in my high school language arts classes, and something I value in my own life.

It’s also become kind of a joke.

That’s because these days, when someone says they “do their own research,” they’re often about to describe their journey down a rabbit hole of conspiracy theories, or their hours spent in an algorithm-based mental roll cage that reinforces everything they already believe.

But here’s the thing: doing your own research still is an important skill.

So how can you make sure that your students are doing research in the good, ongoing self-education way — and not in the conspiracy theory, rabbit-holey, terrible first date way?