Month: April 2026

AI’s “Jagged Intelligence”

If you’ve read my earlier blogs about Artificial Intelligence and teaching, you know that I’m convinced it’s here to stay, that the questions we should be answering are how can we use it to improve teaching and how can we limit the harm it can do. I don’t pretend to have the answers, but I’m committed to the questions and exploring our options.

Recently I had the privilege of reading Mason Broxham’s blog on Riddance called “The Accountability Gap.” As someone who believed that guardrails are our best hope to limit harm, I was startled to read, “At Riddance, we’ve observed a pattern in our investigations: When two or

more AI systems overlap, the guardrails designed to reduce harm and prevent Terms of Service (ToS) violations stop working like they should.” (www.riddance.ai) He goes on to explain that this is a structural phenomenon. Because AI is sometimes “stitching together AI scenes that were not necessarily problematic in isolation,” and because platform moderation is automated, AI is not capable of recognizing the harmful content that evolves from these patchwork efforts.

“The AI that made the content had no mechanisms in place to understand the harms it perpetuated, and the AI moderating the content had no general concept of what those harms look like in the first place,” he argues. Human beings make decisions in a context that informs those choices. Humans live in a “real, messy world of interconnected reasons and norms” that informs their “decision-making calculus.” AI models lack this kind of overall context, creating what Broxham calls the “accountability gap.”

This thunderbolt struck terror in my generally optimistic vision. If guardrails cannot create real accountability, what can educators do? I posed the guardrail issue to my husband and sons, all of whom work/worked in tech. In the AI arms race, one son sees a dire future while the other works on building better guardrails. My spouse argues that “humans using AI will probably be able to work around the above guardrails. Furthermore, immoral builders of an AI system can just not put in needed guardrails. All this means is that just like before AI, humans will be able to be immoral and illegal even using AI.” My pessimist son lists tools with capacities that keep me awake at night.

I struggle to maintain some optimism in the face of these discussions, and the inertia of education and the overwhelming power of AI make me wonder if we’re doomed. I don’t have an answer. I do know that we’re failing to ask enough questions, to bring together enough human minds to counter this trajectory. But we cannot afford to wait. I hope that people smarter about this than I am are doing more than I currently know… We need them to.

Reading Matters, Redux

I am an avid reader, devouring books at an even more rapid rate now that I’m retired. I have read before sleep since I was a little girl, and now I have the luxury of reading during the day as well. Books sustain me, they entertain me, they show me new worlds and new worldviews. I cannot imagine a life without reading.

Sadly, I have become a unicorn. Last September I blogged about the dramatic decrease in reading. The stats are compelling. The data from the National Endowment for the Arts’ 2022

Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (SPPA), shows the regression of reading as a pastime.

(www.arts.gov)

This fiction-reading rate was the lowest in the history of the SPPA, a survey that goes back more than three decades. Daily reading for pleasure in the US has experienced a sustained decline, dropping 40% over the past two decades. (Ibid.)

Those stats are skewed, though, because they offer an average rather than a mean, so heavy readers skew the percentage upward. Consider these stats:

  • 40% of Americans don’t read a single book per year.
  • 27% of Americans read no more than four books per year [even when digital, audio, and print formats are included].
  • The median American read two books in 2025. The average reader clocked in with eight. To put it starkly? 19% of American adults did 82% of the country’s reading. (https://lithub.com)

Students don’t read for fun as much as they used to, either.

(www.the74million.org)

On March 19, 2026, my favorite Chicago Tribune columnist, Heidi Stevens, made yet another argument for reading: “Books are little empathy gardens, feeding and growing the stuff that makes us feel, makes us care, makes us human.” (www.chicagotribune.com) She references neuroscience at Emory University (https://esciencecommons.blogspot.com) to support this claim. She reminds us that books are a way to walk in someone else’s shoes, to imagine their lives and learn to care about them.

In a new study from the University of Florida and University College London, experts affirm this value of reading: “Reading for pleasure has long been recognized not just as a tool for education, but as a means of supporting mental health, empathy, creativity and lifelong learning.” (https://news.ufl.edu)

Stevens acknowledges that current English curricula may not be designed to foster a love of reading, and I agree. We need to meet students where they are before we can lead them to the texts we so value. We should include more appealing choices because we have never needed to encourage reading more than we do now, in this time of division and lack of empathy. Stevens writes,

Because empathy doesn’t just seem like the best way forward right now. It seems like the only way.

What better way to pivot and heal from a chapter like the one we’re in now, a chapter marked by constant cruelty and chronic chaos? What better way to recoil, reflexively, from the next leader who comes along behaving like the one we have now? (Ibid.)

Last September, I wrote, “Reading well develops critical thinking skills, grows vocabulary, and makes us better writers. It introduces us to wider worlds and other ways of being. It helps us figure out who we are and what we believe. Why would we settle for less?” All of that is true. Let’s add a piece that’s more critical now than ever, though: let’s read widely so we may rediscover our shared humanity and rebuild an inclusive and welcoming society.