The professor - coach moment

Boston College women's eight at MIT Cup, April 6, 2024, courtesy of Boston College Athletics

The student pivot to offload thinking to AI offers what I shall call here the coaching moment: that is, the time to pause the current work we're doing in order to get back to basics.

Allow me to share a common experience from my coaching days. I spent a number of years as a rowing coach at colleges and a community boathouse, with male and female athletes between the ages of 16 and 75. The pattern was always the same: I'd pay close attention to each athlete's strokes, and discern how their work contributed to boat speed. When the boat speed faltered, my job was to ask what adjustments were necessary to ensure flow.

The coaching moment was the point at which we'd come to a stop, I'd explain what each rower needed to do to improve, and then talk about a drill that the boat would undertake--frequently by pairs--in order to build in a new muscle memory. Later, they would apply the new muscle memory together to improve boat speed.

My thesis is that professors in the humanities (and perhaps other types of disciplines) must call for a coaching moment dedicated to reading. We've got to stop the boat and get each student to work on the cognitive loading that comes from reading (as distinct from looking at words on a screen).

The discerning reader will already have picked up that I conceive of education as analogous to exercise, and that the exercises we give to student only infrequently correspond to actual skills they will use in their adult lives. No coach believes that he is training athletes to be excellent at pull-ups, and few professors believe that they are training undergraduate students to be philosophers. But coaches and professors do well to isolate exercises that build fertile strengths--by which I mean strengths that can be applied in any number of ways over time.

Reading is one of those core strengths. And far too many students are compromising their reading by using AI.

Let me offer a quick disclaimer: I support training students to use AI well.

First, though, it is imperative that we build in students at every level, from pre-K to graduate studies, the muscle memory appropriate to careful, sustained, discerning, reading. The coaching moment should pervade entire semesters of work. Reading is so fundamental a habit of mind that one can spend a lifetime learning how to do it. And it is so thoroughly part of good thinking that I can scarcely imagine a person coming to knowledge of themselves, let alone knowledge of how to live freely among others in civil society, without it.

In a class of first-year college students this past semester, we spent an enormous amount of class time doing slow reading (using actual books with paper): Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Euripides, Aeschylus, Plotinus, Origen. Often we would spend several minutes on a single line or word. Do I think my students will become poets or playwrights or philosophers or theologians? No. Do I think that dwelling on specific ancient Greek words, and the ideas they convey, is fertile cognitive loading? Absolutely.

My hope is that these students will, in other classes, develop advanced research and writing skills, deploying AI in ways that help them to solve massive questions. But for now, I hope that these cognitive loading drills will help them sharpen their minds and develop habits of attentiveness and discernment that will serve them in manifold ways over the long term.