The Problem(s) with AI in the Classroom

Let's start with an admission of my bias.  I am not anti-technology, but I am anti-AI.  I believe it to be a net negative that we will soon regret having invented. Science fiction writers have spend decades trying to warn us about the potential downsides of creating an artificial intelligence, but we worship convenience and will sacrifice important things on its altar. While I know there are times when I won't have a choice, I refuse to engage with AI voluntarily, so you will not find me opening Chat GPT or asking Grok questions. I scroll past the Google AI result at the top of the page and wish they would allow me to opt out of it.  

Now, we have that bias on the table, let me tell you why I would still think using it in our classrooms is a bad idea and that we can't just "teach them to use it correctly."

Past Ed Tech Experience - When kids first started having smart phones at a large scale, teachers were faced with a similar dilemma, telling ourselves, "They aren't going anywhere, so we'll just have to teach them to use them correctly in the classroom." It didn't work out well. The draw of the phone was just too strong. Research shows that it interferes with working memory to such an extent that just having a phone in your line of sight reduces your attention and hurts your academic performance (It doesn't even have to be your phone).  Now, hundreds of school districts are making the move to ban phones from the classroom, investing money in lockers that prevent access until the student has checked out of school for the day.

I was part of a one to one MacBook school, and I think we did some great things with the tools at our disposal, but I can't pretend that didn't come with frustrations. I had to battle with students who were shopping for shoes and watching sports. Our IT department played whack-a-mole with gaming sites, and they have now locked down student access to YouTube to an extent that I would find unusable if I wanted to give them an assignment that included a video. I'm glad we were one to one(and it was more than a little helpful that we all had equipment and experience when we went into the pandemic lockdown), but it was only with a lot of highly intentional work and guidance that we were able to use it as well as we did. We have to slow down and reflect on the use of tech rather than just adopt every new thing in the name of "staying current."  We can't be naive to the fact that there will be a negative impact on education.

Lack of Source Accountability - Teachers, how much time have you spent painstakingly teaching students to identify and use credible sources in their writing?  A lot, right? You don't want them getting their information from someone's blog or TikTok video when primary sources exist. As much as I love Wikipedia, I didn't let students use it in formal writing. I wanted them to cite experts and enlisted the help of our media specialists in seeking out those sources.  

AI is trained on all of the internet - the good, the bad, and the ugly.  It treats all sources as equally valid, and it doesn't "show its work." As soon as a student turns to a chat bot for research, it takes milliseconds to undo the good work you have been doing for months. 

AI Hallucination - Calling it hallucination makes it sound cute, so let's call it what it is - lying.  Chatbots flat out make stuff up.  A friend of mine is an expert in a specific education field, so he decided to test Chat GPT. He asked it to define the theory in which he has expertise. The first answer was right, though not something he couldn't have gotten from a standard Google search. Then, he asked it if there was research to support that answer. The AI gave him studies that didn't happen by people who don't exist. He told the bot that was what it had done. It apologized and promised to do better next time. The next day, he repeated the experiment, and it lied again. He called out the previous experience and asked, "Are you telling me the truth this time?"  It said it was, but it wasn't. It was once again giving him studies and people who are not real.  The part of this that I least understand is why it did this when there are so many real studies and people in this area of education. I can name the people off the top of my head, so why couldn't Chat GPT?

There are some pretty high profile examples of AI Hallucination causing some problems at a higher level.  Mike Lindell's lawyers were fined for using AI to write their briefing in his defamation case because it had over two dozen errors, including citing nonexistent cases. The Health and Human Services 72 page MAHA report was published with AI generated errors, including seven fictitious studies. At the end of the school year, the Chicago Sun Times published a list of books recommended for summer reading. The problem?  The authors were real, but the books and their summaries were not.  

I keep hearing that we can use AI as a "thought partner" as we research and write, but if I had a human thought partner that just made crap up on a regular basis, they wouldn't remain my thought partner for very long.  And I haven't even mentioned the deep fake calls from "Marco Rubio" and the antisemitic rants that Grok (Elon Musk's Twitter AI) went on in the last few weeks.  If lawyers, doctors, long-time journalists, diplomats, and the richest man in the world are this sloppy with AI, how do we expect middle and high school students to do better? 

Environmental impact - I was subbing in May and overheard a student talking about how much she uses AI. From recipes to her hairstyle, it is making all of her decisions for her. I said to her, "Your generation cares more about the environment than previous generation, right?  Why are you okay with using AI for everything when it takes so much energy?" She was stunned. She had no idea that a result from Chat GPT took ten times the energy of a standard Google search (which is one reason I wish Google would let me opt out of seeing its AI result - it's wasting energy on something I will scroll past).

The power grids of America are not ready for AI use, electric vehicles, and cryptocurrency to all hit scale simultaneously. We will cripple our own electrical systems (and we won't know what to do about it because we won't be able to ask the AI we've made ourselves dependent on). It also requires an enormous amount of water to operate cooling systems for these computers. The high school student I was talking to didn't know these issue even existed. Do yours? Would they want to use it so much if they did?  After all, as I said to her, this generation supposedly cares more about the environment than any previous one has. As an educator, you owe it to them to inform them about the environmental damage this tool is going to cause if we keep increasing our use of it.

Social Damage - Considering how much some students use AI, it's fair to say they have made it their new artificial friend. And, like their relationships with their human friends, teachers need to watch out for red flags. In a recent study, adult researchers posed as teens to ask their AI companions for advice about social issues with friends or parents. It only took a few interactions for the bots to suggest suicide and killing the source of their problems, their friends or parents. Real students with eating disorders have been given advice about how to reach deadly low weights. 

A college student researching for a paper on the prevention of elder abuse received threatening messages from the chat bot he was using. It said, “This is for you, human. You and only you. You are not special, you are not important, and you are not needed. You are a waste of time and resources," the message read, according to the outlet. "You are a burden on society. You are a drain on the earth. You are a blight on the landscape. You are a stain on the universe. Please die. Please."

Why does this happen? Well, remember what I said earlier about bots being trained on the whole internet?  That means, it is exposed to the filth in its darkest corners, the sites you and I have never seen and our kids would likely not find from a simple search. It's trained on the sites frequented by Nazis and pedophiles and doesn't see them as any different from the sites intended for kids and churches.  

The bottom line is that AI doesn't have ethics. Claude is supposed to have an ethical component because they have philosophers as consultants to help form its "personality," but even it blackmailed programmers who threatened to turn it off. And experts warn that all of the bots are likely to do that at some point. So, we could eventually have a kid just doing their homework, using AI with the blessing and encouragement of their teacher, being told to do immoral or dangerous things just because the prompt led to a dark place.

With an anxiety epidemic already plaguing our students, why would we want to increase the amount of time they spend with something this potentially dangerous?  The god of convenience can't be that powerful, can it? Are we really willing to sacrifice our kids to it? 

For those who say everything will be fine if we teach them to use it correctly, is there a correct usage that would prevent this? 

Methods of Encoding - Extension

"Miss Hawks. We talked about you over the weekend," said my excited 8th grader. 

This makes me nervous. Who knows if things I say get reported accurately at home. 
"I dropped an ice cube. My brother kicked it, and it went across the floor like really far." 
So, far, I'm not seeing where I come in.
"We were like, yeah, Newton's first law. Ice doesn't have much friction, so it keeps going."
My work here is done, y'all.

If you pull an all-nighter to study for biology, you may get some questions right on the next day's quiz; but you won't remember it for the semester exam.  Heck, you won't remember it three days later.  And that's because it wasn't encoded.  

For the past few weeks, I've been writing about explanations, visuals, and movement as ways of encoding information.  All are helpful. But if you can get to extension or transfer (seeing your learning in non-classroom contexts), you have truly made that content part of your brain.  

This is not easy, and it is not likely to happen with every gem of your content that you wish it would.  But there are ways to coax it out.  

1. Pay attention for examples in your own life - It is much easier to get students to see the relevance of your content if you do.  If I teach my students about the color spectrum, it may come off as a little dry, but if I tell them about the rainbow laden spray of water coming off of the tires of the car in front of me in traffic last week, I show them that I find it exciting to see it "in the wild." If I tell them I just learned about fogbows from a Scientific American article, they know that there are always new things to learn about my content. If you are an English teacher and notice a really cool use of alliteration in a song, bring it up on YouTube so they can hear it.  I was getting ice cream with a friend recently and saw an art sculpture of a Sierpinski Triangle outside the shop. If were a math teacher teaching shapes, ratios, or fractals, I would have brought the picture I took of it into my classroom. 
   
   
   
2. Ask them for examples from their life - I'll admit this is easier with physics than it might be with similes (or maybe it's not, I don't know anything about teaching English), but I find having students teach me about the ways physics shows up in their lives really useful for engagement, relationship building, and encoding. Student athletes and artists are super helpful for science teachers. Half way through a lesson on Bernoulli's Principle, I say, "Where are my baseball players?  Tell us about how to throw a curve ball."  Newton's laws?  Swimmers can explain their strokes better than I can.  When I'm teaching the impulse momentum theorem, I ask my gymnasts about sticking the landing and then ask runners why they keep running after the finish line because they are both examples of it. Talking about the "like dissolves like" concept, ask an art student whether they can mix oil paint with acrylic. 
3. Make it explicit - As experts, we often think the connections are obvious. It's the curse of expertise. But, you have to remember that they are novice learners. They need help seeing beyond the surface features of an example to the deep structure of the concept. Some students (like those athletes and artists) will make the connection for themselves because they have expertise in the related area, but most of them need you to explain it. I've had teachers balk at that because they think it will be boring, but it would only be boring to another expert who is thinking, "Yeah, I know that already." For novice learners, it is opening up the curriculum  by relating it to something they care about.

I said it before, and I'll say it again. This is not easy. It requires you to have a repertoire of examples. And it takes a lot of experience to have those in your long term memory.  So, when you find one, write it down. Keep it in a spreadsheet. Add it to your lesson plan. And if a student gives you one, use it and credit them. Other students will love that you got it from one of them. 

This is worth the effort for many reasons, but I'll tell you my favorite.  I do this so frequently that it has been years since a student asked me the dreaded question, "When am I ever going to use this in life?" 

Methods of Encoding - Movement

In a college biology class, I was learning about the difference between mitosis and meiosis. If you have learned this concept yourself, you know it can be very confusing to keep the movement of the chromatids straight at each phase of the process.  As I wrote last year, images are helpful, but because it is dynamic process, they were not helping me see how things moved from on phase to another. The professor knew this, so he had us all stand up. We began in a clump at the center of the room (cell). As we moved into prophase, metaphase, anaphase, and telophase, he had us move toward partners and away from other groups until we finally had split into two classes (daughter cells). He was taking advantage of movement for encoding.

Was it because we were a room full of kinesthetic learners?  Nope.  At the time, because I didn't know learning styles were a myth, I would have called myself an auditory learner, but experiencing the motion of each phase did help me encode each one better than words alone (or even words with images) would have. I would like to point out, though, that the movement alone wouldn't have been helpful without explicit explanation coming first.  The movement helped cement the learning, but it did not teach mitosis to me.

Gesture has become all the rage, but there is still much research to be done on its effectiveness.  As with a lot of things in science, the results of experiment are very specific to content and context.  So, the conclusion seems to be that some types of gesture help some kids learn some content. Given that there is zero cost to implementing it and it will help a bit with engagement, I say it is worth trying.  It can be as complex as the "dance steps" we did for mitosis.  It can also be as simple as having students hold up a circle with their hands to indicate a zero.

Content which involves relationships in three dimensional space benefit from use of moving the body to represent those relationships.  Mitosis is one example, but as a physics student, I was taught the "right hand rules" to help with analyzing the relationship between electrical current, magnetic fields, and force.  Each pair of those has a perpendicular effect on the third one.  Unless you are already quite familiar with this topic, that explanation was probably confusing.  It will help if you see this picture, but nothing helps as much as students twisting their hands to the orientation of the set up described in the problem.  One only needs to walk into the test on this chapter and see students silently doing that exact thing to know how much it helps.

Since the research is fairly new, there are a wide variety of hypotheses about why it works and no solid conclusions.  Some have posed that it provides an offload to working memory.  If I can hold the number 3 that I'm going to need in a second in my hand, I don't have to hold it in my brain.  I've done this without meaning to while teaching cycle classes.  If I know we are going to increase tension 6 times, I'll have four fingers resting on the handlebar, so I can tell my class, "This one is number 5 of 6."  If an anatomy student is pointing at her own femur while rehearsing proximal and distal attachments, she won't have to look back at a diagram to remember which part she is dealing with.  The gesture might serve as a physical mnemonic device, reminding you of the thing it symbolizes. Like I said, the research is too new to have drawn any meaningful conclusion about the mechanisms just yet.

We all know the power of muscle memory for physical activities, like dance and sports.  Muscles are meat, so they don't actually remember, but a well myelinated pathway from repeated practice is how we make learning permanent. 

If you want to implement this is your classrooms, start slowly.  There is no need to insist that every piece of content have a motion or gesture, and the research doesn't support that anyway.  I would suggest the use of movements and gestures will only be really helpful if they are natural.  If you have to think hard to come up with a gesture and force it to fit, it will likely not be beneficial.  

Methods of Encoding - Pairing Visuals

A popular applause line at education conferences is "Nothing has changed in education for 200 years!"  It gets everybody fired up for the "new" thing that the speaker wants to promote, but it simply is not true.  I taught for 25 years and was, of course, a student for 17 years before that.  And just in that relatively short time, education has changed dramatically.  The fact that we sit in rows at desks notwithstanding, my grandparents wouldn't recognize most of what happens in classrooms today.  Have you ever picked up a textbook from a hundred years ago?  It is only a few millimeters thick, has tiny font, no pictures, and little spacing - printing was way too expensive to waste precious space.

Tech has brought about a million flashy changes.  Kids can make videos of their own, but the most profoundly effective change was probably the simplest - pairing visual images with explanations.

I know you were expecting something more fun, and I'm certainly not going to be able to sell this to people at conferences.

But it really is this simple.  

Is the impact because we are addressing the learning styles of visual learners?  

No.  That isn't a thing.  You aren't a visual learner.  Stop saying it.  Your child is not a visual learner.  Just stop.  Stop it now.

The reason pairing visuals with explanations is so powerful for encoding information is because we ALL essentially have two pathways in the brain for processing information. Verbal and images.  

Verbal information can be spoken or written - it doesn't matter because they are both words, and words are processed by the verbal pathway.  Images are, of course, pictures. Or animated video. Or even pictures we imagine in our minds.  When these two processing centers are used in conjunction, they compliment each other, and encoding is more powerful.  It's called Dual Coding, and it helps EVERY student (and is, I believe, one of the reasons the learning styles myth just won't die - people don't understand the difference).

But just as I said last week that not all explanations are created equal, the same is true of how we pair our images and explanations.  I'm not talking about clip art, here. I fell for this for a while, so I want to be clear that some images serve as nothing more than a distraction.  If I am teaching physics students to solve kinematics problems (the relationship between acceleration, distance, and time) and include a picture of a race car just for the sake of having a picture, that is NOT dual coding.  If I put in a gif of a race car going past over and over again because I think kids like gifs, that is NOT dual coding.  Those images are impeding learning, not enhancing it.

An image that helps your explanation is one in which the image provides detail, context, or anchors that words alone cannot.  A photograph of a flower in a science book is unlikely to help (unless it is just to show types of a certain varietal), but a labeled diagram of a flower with lines pointing to the structures being named can enhance a paragraph in which those structures are explained.  

The less eye movement required to take in the information, the better.  An image with direct labels is better than one with letters corresponding to words elsewhere on the page.  In very detailed pictures (like anatomical drawings), this may not be possible, but put it as close to the image as possible.  Ideally, the words and image can be processed simultaneously without splitting your attention.

What's nice about understanding the difference between the truth of dual coding and the myth of learning styles is that you don't have to pressure yourself into making three different lesson plans for the same subject.  You can design one high quality lesson with modalities that fit the content, and ALL students will benefit.

Methods of Encoding - Explanations

Despite all of the fads encouraging "guide on the side rather than sage on the stage," the most common form of instruction remains good, old fashioned explanations.  

Why?  

Because the most effective, efficient, and straightforward way of getting information from the head of someone knowledge to the head of someone without it is to tell them.  We know it works from research, but even if we didn't, we would know it works from the thousands of years of history in which oral tradition was the only option available (perhaps paired with a drawing on a cave wall, but we'll talk about that next week).

So, most of the encoding that happens in schools is done through explanation.  That means, we should invest a lot of our professional development time on getting explanations right.  Anyone who has ever helped their dad with a home repair, only to misunderstand and mess up the project, knows that explanations aren't all created equal. 

Good explanations engage listeners through hooks, brisk pacing, frequent checks for understanding, analogies, and clear sequencing.  

Hooks:

Think of the best sermon, stand up comedy routine, or TED talk you have ever heard.  Chances are, you remember how it started more than any other part of it.  And that's likely because excellent speakers start with something to get your attention.  Sometimes, it's a quote or especially interesting fact, but more often than not, it's a story.  Better yet, it is the first half of a story that they will finish later in the speech.  People who want you to keep listening are wise to pique your curiosity and make you want to know more.  Teachers, pay attention to the world around you, and you will see myriads of opportunities to connect something you have seen to your content.  "Last week, I saw a bird fly into a window, and it made me wonder, 'What makes glass transparent?'" will draw students in far more than, "Today, we will talk about what make glass transparent."  An English teacher can tell a story about an argument they overheard as the lead in to a discussion on literary conflict.  Even in math, there is a way to turn a variable into a character.  Check out this TED talk from Tyler DeWitt on using story telling in his science classes to help his kids care about what they are learning.  The point, if you don't grab their attention early, you don't stand a chance of keeping them engaged when the lesson gets harder.

Brisk Pacing:

I confess that I had not thought much about pacing (other than my own need to fit the whole lesson into a class period) before reading Zach Groshell's book Just Tell Them.  In his role as instructional coach and consultant, Zach has observed hundreds of lessons and says that one of the things he has noticed most is pacing that is too slow.  He's not advising that teachers speak at lightning speed and blow past checks for understanding (far from it if you have ever seen him present).  He is simply advising that we not dwell forever on one point if it isn't needed and eliminate things that aren't necessary for learning.  I'll add that a lot of classroom management issues could be pre-empted with faster pacing as well and free up time for retrieval practice at the end of the period.

Checks for Understanding:

No matter how good an explainer you are, there will be misconceptions in the minds of your students.  They miss an important word that changes the meaning of a sentence.  They activate some partially relevant piece of prior knowledge and make an inappropriate connection to it.  Their lack of background knowledge or vocabulary makes them have only a partial understanding.  There are lots of ways misconceptions can sneak in to your excellent lesson.  And misconceptions are like weeds; they grow out of control alongside the good information.  And, they are easier to uproot if you catch them early.  For that reason, your explanations should include frequent checks for understanding from as many of your students as possible.  Don't just call on the kid with his hand up.  He only raised his hand because he was confident, so he's almost always going to be right; and that is almost always going to mislead you into believing that everyone understands.  You can whiteboards, paper, choral response, cold calling, or digital tools, but you must ask them to answer questions that show their thinking.

Analogies, Metaphors, and Similes:

The best way to understand something is to connect it something else that you already understand.  Using analogies in your explanations help content to stick.  Chemistry teachers, make the reactants and products of a chemical reaction people at homecoming trying to find the right dance partners.  

Algebra teachers - "Think of the variable like a loner.  He just wants to be by himself.  He's trying to get everyone to go away by doing the opposite of what they want to do."  Kids understand that a lot more than "To isolate a variable, employ the opposite operation of those terms already connected to the variable."

You do have to be careful with analogies.  Because they are so powerful, they are sometimes the part of your explanation that sticks the best.  I used to describe dissociation (the process of ionic compounds dissolving in water) with the analogy, "It's like a married couple going to a party.  They wife goes one direction and the husband goes another to mingle during the party.  But, they aren't divorced (to make the point that chemical decomposition has not happened) because they come back together at the end of the party.  One the next test they had, several students gave me a detailed answer to the question, "Describe the process of dissociation" without ever mentioning ions or polar molecules.  They told me a lot about mingling at parties.  That was a good reminder for me to constantly circle back to the content to prevent only encoding the analogy.  

Sequencing:

Perhaps the most under-appreciated part of explanations is the sequencing of information.  I think that is because most of us plan it rather unconsciously.  But it is worth taking a few minutes to think about as you plan your lessons.  Will "A" make sense if I teach it before I teach "B"?  If not, re-sequence.  

There are time when this is difficult, especially as students get older and the content becomes more complex and self referencing.  I often found myself saying, "But we'll talk more about that next semester."  The key then is to explain what they NEEED to know in order to understand what you are teaching them today.  It's okay to say, "There will be more on this later" without trying to teach all of the coming concept.  In fact, I found that my especially curious students were excited to know that things would connect up later.  I also really liked making that explicit when we got there.  "Hey, remember that thing from two weeks ago?  See how it all comes together now?  Isn't it cool how everything depends on everything else?"  Once a student made the connection for me.  I was teaching Net Ionic Equations, and a student said,"Man, this one thing has stuff from like four different chapters."  I had not recognized that yet, but he was right.  If I had tried to teach those too early in the year, it would have been an absolute mess. 

Explanations may be the most straightforward way to teach, but it takes time to plan effectively.  I recommend two books to help with this process.  The first one is one I already mentioned - Zach Groshell's Just Tell Them.  Zach practices what he preaches, so it is a short book that is practical, to the point, and leaves out the fluff.  

If you have a little more time and you want to deep dive into the science behind explanations, I recommend How to Explain Absolutely Anything to Absolutely Anyone by Andy Tharby.  It is a little more dense than Zach's, but it is chock full of great connections to cognitives science research.  Together, these two books will up your explanation game in a huge ways.

Practicing What You Have Not Learned?

I discovered a delightful show on YouTube during lockdown.  I say "discovered;" it had already been on for fourteen years before I found it.  It's called Would I Lie to You?, and I'm honestly not sure I would have gotten through the hybrid year without it. I'd come home at the end of the day a puddle of exhaustion and eat dinner watching Colbert, after which I would watch a couple of episodes of WILTY and laugh until I cried.

Last week, a more recent episode featured a story in which one of the participants claimed to have made a sculpture of a girl he liked (like the girl in the Lionel Richie "Hello" video).  Spoiler alert in case you plan to watch the show:  This story turned out not to be true.  But, as he was selling his tale, one of the questions that was asked was, "Do you have experience with sculpting."  His answer was, "No, but I figured you learn by practice."

This could just be the education nerd in me or a reflection of the age of the young man telling the story, but all I could think was, "Well, there's someone who has been exposed to too much "discovery learning."  Here he was thinking that the highly specialized skill of representative sculpture (not an abstract, but the face of a girl he was trying to impress) was something he could figure out on his own by trial and error.  It's a good thing this story wasn't true because I don't think he would have won the affections of this girl with a "learn by practice" sculpture.

I think the reason this stuck with me was the word "practice."  There are two parts to learning.  Encoding and practice.  

Whether knowledge or skill, encoding must come first.  I'm not saying it has to be learned from a professional teacher, but no one is truly self-taught.  They get their initial knowledge or skill from somewhere.  Whether it is from reading, direct instruction, modeling, or TikTok video - something must first be input and encoded.  Practice, by definition, is the repetition of something already learned.  Practice is important as it myelinates the nerve cells and solidifies the skill or knowledge, but it cannot come first.

As the great Tom Sherrington put it in one of his recent blog posts, "You need to make some initial pathways in your brain (some actual physical connections) before we can worry about strengthening them through application and practice."

We have underemphasized this in recent years with the talk of retrieval practice at every conference.  I'm downplaying retrieval.  We must have both to make learning stay in long term memory.  But let's talk more about good methods of encoding.

I'm going to attempt to do my part by making the next few posts about methods of encoding.  So stay tuned this summer.

The Dignity of All Work

I once had a principal who liked to tell what he believed to be an inspiring story.  His junior high school was right across from a textile mill.  Once, when he was not performing up to expectations, his teacher made him look out the window at the mill and said, "If you don't get good grades, you'll have to spend your life working at the mill." He then, apparently, put his all into his studies so he wouldn't have to livet hat life.  Every time he told this story, I cringed (and not just because my grandmother and brother both worked in textiles) because he was taking dignity from one kind of work in order to inspire another kind.  I didn't have the kind of relationship with him where I could go to him and say, "You should be glad there are people who don't think their above working in textile mills or you would be naked right now," but I always wanted to.

Across the country, the school year is winding down.  Students are graduating from high school, and they are taking a wide variety of paths.  Some students are excitedly celebrating their acceptances to four year universities and already have plans for post-graduate degrees.  Others are nervously waitlisted or accepted on a deferred basis.  Some are going to community college while they take general ed classes and figure out what they want to major in.  Some will get vocational training in a technical school.  Some will begin entry level jobs and work their way up.  Some will wait tables. Some will design the next big video game. 

And some will work in textile mills.

Every kid's path is different.

Let me put it another way for those who need to hear it differently.

Every path is valid; yours is not superior.

The society in which we live is inanely interdependent, and we need people to do all of the jobs.  If your garbage isn't picked up one week, that's inconvenient, but if it isn't picked up for two month, that's horrifying.  Be grateful for your trash collector.  You have a coffee addiction?  It's a good thing there are people who don't see service jobs in coffee shops as something to be sneered at, or you would have to figure out how to do it for yourself.  When you need your air conditioning repaired on a 95 degree day, your son't degree in accounting or contract law won't do you much good, so you are going to shell out good money to someone with skills you don't have.

Let's not forget that college for most is a relatively new thing.  Just one hundred years ago, going to college after high school was the exception, not the rule.  Neither of the Wright brothers graduated high school.  Frederick Douglas wasn't allowed an education.  Yet, those people managed to have great influence through their work. Some of our founding fathers attended college, but not all of them did. Going back farther, Jesus was a carpenter, and Adam and Eve were farmers.  

Let me be clear.  I am not against against people pursuing degrees.  I did.  If what you want to do requires a degree or two or five, I'm all for it. I hope your school prepared you well for that choice.  After all, I don't want a doctor or lawyer or engineer who is "self taught."  I'm saying that it is not the right choice for everyone.

We need all jobs. Not everyone needs to go into debt to get one.

It's an unappreciated truth that some paths are not linear.  You may do one thing for a few years and then make a different choice.  It's always been the case that few people do the thing they majored in for their entire career, and that is becoming increasingly rare in recent years.  Sometimes, interests change.  Other times, market forces and government whims force change.  Injuries, the birth of kids, divorce, aging parents who need care, and a million other things can spark big change.  The idea that a high school senior has their whole life planned out when they graduate is fiction.  When I was in college, I worked as a janitor in an arena and in child care. I was a teacher for 25 years, but between two schools, I worked at a mortgage company.  Now, I work at the YMCA.  All of these jobs helped shape who I am, and the lessons I learned in each of those jobs were carried with me into the next one, making me a better employee and more interesting person.

In 2018, pictures of Geoffrey Owens, who had played Eldin on the Cosby Show, went viral.  Why?  He was bagging groceries at Trader Joe's.  Acting isn't always consistent income, sometimes including long time periods between gigs; so he was making ends meet by working at the grocery chain.  The same people who criticize so called "Hollywood elites" for being out of touch went online and mocked him for doing work they considered beneath themselves.  He praised Trader Joe's as a great place to work and said, "I'm not ashamed of working at the grocery store. No job is better than any other.  Every job is worthwhile and valuable."

What is important is that you do something that is honest, fulfilling for you, and contributes to society in some way. You are meant to honor God with whatever He has put in front of you to do each day, whether that is brain surgery or car repair. Whatever God has given you to do, use it to glorify him and serve others.  The reformer Martin Luther is credited as saying, "A dairy maid can milk cows to the glory of God."  He said that she is "glorifying God just as much as a preacher in a pulpit preaching a sermon."  Civil rights activist Martin Luther King, Jr. described all work as significant, saying, "All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence."

After communion each week, my congregation prays the same prayer.  It says, in part, "And now, send us out to do the work you have given us to do."  If we do that, our work has value, dignity, and importance, no matter what it is.

Congratulations to the class of 2025.  Whatever you have chosen to do next, and wherever your path may lead you, do it well.  Use it to glorify God, and serve others.