What a room of STEM teachers taught me this morning

I spoke to a room of high school STEM teachers today, through the DC/MD/VA Space Grant Consortium's "Future-Ready STEM" workshop. I went in planning to talk about AI. I left thinking about something else entirely.

Every question I got afterward had the same shape underneath it, even when the words were different. Not "how do I use this tool," "how do I keep my classroom rigorous when a machine can produce a plausible answer in half a second." That's not a technology question. That's a judgment question, and it's the one I actually wanted to talk about.

That's worth sitting with. The instinct is to treat caution as a gap to close, get comfortable with the tools, catch up, move on. But the caution I heard today wasn't a skills gap. It was correct professional instinct, aimed at the right problem: how do you protect a student's actual thinking when the fastest path to a finished answer no longer requires having one.

I don't have that fully worked out. Nobody does yet, which is exactly why I'm writing The Intelligent Classroom instead of a shorter argument. One thing I said this morning that seemed to land: the fix isn't banning the tool or pretending it doesn't exist. It's changing what you grade. If the deliverable includes how a student verified an answer, not just the answer itself, the tool use becomes visible instead of invisible, and the grading finally measures the thing you actually care about.

That's one piece. There's a lot more underneath it I'm still building out, this Dispatch is where I'll think through it in public, a little at a time, as it comes together.