The Animals (People) Come First: Conversation as Care in the Age of AI

I am one of many Americans who have spent the cold winter months wrapped up in the cottage knits and cozy fires of Skeldale House on the PBS show All Creatures Great and Small. I am drawn to the show as an animal lover but also because the veterinary care offered by Siegfried Farnum and James Herriot seems like the best of us humans; animals “always come first” so the vets frequently provide care for free to struggling villagers, accept gifts instead of money for services, and will stop everything in their practice to travel across the Yorkshire dells to midwife with their neighbors who are facing an emergency in animal husbandry.  

In Season 4 it is World War II and the practice accepts an intern, Richard Carmody, because James is conscripted for military service and Mr. Farnum needs some help. The intern is a bookish young upstart who knows everything because he reads all the important studies in the field. Well, you can imagine that the messy reality of care in the barn of a sheep farm in lambing season clashes with Mr. Carmody’s sense of diagnosis from the living room couch, and in a moment of crisis he must learn a hard lesson: not all answers lie in books, and to be a healer, you must rely on instinct as well as knowledge.

Dr. Herriot helps a neighbor

This instinct, honed from experience, is what makes the villagers trust Mr. Farnum. He is one of them and speaks their language. He hangs out with them at the Drover Arms, the local pub, and knows the villagers, and their pets, by name.

A starkly contrasting narrative unfolded this week as my husband, who is caring for his 92-year-old mother, said something that struck me. After taking his mom to another frustrating doctor’s appointment, he reflected that, “she has a ton of health care, but no care.”  I immediately thought of Mr. Farnum and the care he gives. Recognizing he is a fictional character in a TV show about a small town in 1940s England, I still find myself longing for a doctor, and vet of course, who knows me and my loved ones and cares for us with this much heart and relationship. I suppose this is my humanity longing for time and attention from another human being.

As teachers, care is at the core of our pedagogy and is frequently the calling that leads us to the classroom in the first place. A colleague of mine has a cute sign above her desk: “I became a teacher for the money and fame.” Obviously, we did not and instead we teach because we have an instinct to help children academically and personally. I have a box of notes written to me by my students over the twenty years I have been teaching and I plan to read these when I am old and bedridden, ha, just to remember. This is why I teach.

But care has been under a bit of a threat recently with the public conversation about the end of education as we know it in the era of AI. It’s not that I am afraid of new technology. I have been teaching long enough now to have lived through several cited threats to education: Google, teaching reform, No Child Left Behind, social media, smartphones, and the COVID-19 pandemic. But this time the discussions feel different, because the name, “artificial intelligence” implies that what will be offered by these platforms is fake, and therefore non-human, divorcing us from the relationships that make caring for humans the core of our work. I know AI is much more nuanced and often discussed as a tool instead of a reframing of our work, but what is a humble teacher to do when the anxiety of AI crushes her spirit? How do we handle the hard conversations with Gen Alpha and Beta students about why using ChatGPT to write essays is not good for their brains? How do we teach moderate use and discernment to young brains physically wired to seek the dopamine hits?

Maybe the answer is to spend more time at the water cooler and copy machine.

Jim and Pam at the water cooler

I’ve always laughed at the phrase, “the word around the water cooler.” I am a child of the 80s so in my imagination, the water cooler is a bunch of dads at a Sparkletts dispenser talking about last night’s episode of Magnum PI while drinking water from cone paper cups. Low stakes chatting and gathering around the water cooler have always been part of our social fabric, even in our workplaces. It might be how we rest a bit in our day and also just take heart that other humans are going home and watching the same shows, aka living their lives the same way, as us.

At my school we have a modern version of the water cooler in our coffee pot. It takes a few minutes for a 12-cup pot to brew, so the considerate soul who brews a new pot instead of leaving the dregs behind to scald on the burner can hang for a minute and take a few deep breaths while they wait for a fresh cup. It’s easy in these moments to get on your phone–I’ve certainly done it. But waiting times within the bureaucracy of life can be an opportunity to let your mind wander, which is a cornerstone of creative work. And I also see that waiting around is time to care for each other. We can just check in and ask people how they are doing, and what they are up to.

My teaching team has reverted to paper for much of our writing process work, and therefore I am back to hanging out at the copy machine. Five years ago, if you had told me we would again be making the dreaded packets we were once shunned for by technology departments, I would not have believed you. But, like the cliché, that which is old is new again, and after a difficult first semester of students using AI to write their essays, we want them to write more on paper. Our freshman team is even back to using physical binders and dividers, with sections for class notes, reading handouts, writing support, and vocabulary and grammar work. I am now making hard copies of many materials I once posted online, or through apps like Microsoft OneNote, so sometimes I have stacks of class sets to make. But it was fun to hang out with my students while we assembled their binders–we actually talked, which I don’t think would have happened if they were online. I’m also enjoying how time at the copy machine is time to hang out for a little bit with colleagues I don’t always get to talk to. I don’t bring my phone with me to the copier, because I don’t need it, which is nice, and it’s also nice to just stare out the window and think about my students, or my day.

Certainly my first selfie with a copy machine...

We are also in year two of a Drop Everything and Read (DEAR) program with our freshmen. In January, we asked them to go to a library or a bookstore and pick out a book they want to read, any book, regardless of content or style. During class we build in blocks of time when the students drop everything and read, like they maybe did in elementary school; we let them curl up with blankets on the floor, and I sometimes gently light the room with tea lights. This reading time has a sacred feeling as a room full of high energy and distracted freshmen fall totally silent, absorbed in a book of their choice. Having a DEAR book is also great for transitions between activities in class because if you have a book to pick up and read while you wait for others, maybe you don’t get on your laptop. We hope a reading habit transfers to home life too, and instead of mindlessly scrolling on their phones they pick up their book instead. But the best part of this program are the conversations I have with my students before class, or even in the hallway. We talk about their books, and yesterday a student told me she spotted another student reading her book when her math test was finished. Being people, just hanging out and reading, then talking about it feels is a communal exercise that is caring for the spirit.

When I look back at our work on HVATT for the past five years, I think what we have really been grappling with all this time is keeping our humanity, and so much of this work means dropping our phones and being together. I’m not saying I won’t use technology–it saved our lives during COVID-19 and programs like OneNote make feedback quicker and more seamless. But we have been trying to thread the needle, and I think embrace my husband’s wisdom that I have cited in this blog before–both things can be true. Imagine if Mr. Farnum had greeted his clients and patients while looking down at his phone. What care would he have offered? 

Care before cell phones

Maybe care for each other is just gathering and talking at the water cooler. Talking means being present and chatting models for our students how to listen, and at the same time, we will feel so much better. The world is complicated and lately it seems, also increasingly violent. Resistance could perhaps be the kindness to reclaim the little things, and just talk to one another. 

Kate Schenck is currently reading Dawn of the North (The Ashen #3) by Demi Winters and learning how to embroider.