AI & The Chasm of Nuance

March Madness, a fraction game, and de-emphasizing AI in order to build the skill of identifying subtleties.

Mar 25, 2025

Innovation in schools is people.

Sure, it’s AI and ed-techie and software updatey. But it’s people before, during, and after all that.

And people work is defined by context and nuance.

Quick Background: Successes and Fall-Flats

I was on a call with teachers who are trying new things in the classroom—new strategies to get students more actively engaged in their learning. The whole purpose of the call was to share, to talk with other teachers in other schools who are also doing a new thing as part of a larger collective shift towards student-centered teaching and learning. Part support community, part ideation space. At Learner-Centered Collaborative, these are our Innovation Cohorts.

Some groups chat AI at times, but mostly it’s about discussing new hands-on strategies and real-world projects. Educational innovation is collaboration at its core.

In this call, teachers shared about the highs and lows, successes and fall-flats. It’s important to celebrate the good times and also see that you’re not the only one whose lesson didn’t land.

Change is not a straight line, and the winding road is best navigated together.

In the conversation, I was struck by Joe, a 20-year veteran teacher who remembers students from a decade ago as easily as he does his 5th period kids from yesterday. He absolutely lit up when talking about a fraction game he brought back after discarding it years ago. In short, kids learn fractions by playing Nerf basketball in the classroom and counting made shots v. total attempts. It’s March Madness after all!

Fridays are scientifically proven to be two weeks long on hot days.

Hearing him delve so deeply into the joy he felt recreating curriculum, spending time wrestling with details for each particular class, remembering former students who still ask him about that game, it made me want to unlearn fractions just so that I could relearn them in his class. His unbridled joy, his unwavering commitment, his deep want to help his students build understanding was inspirational and moving. It made me miss teaching.

He talked about the exuberance in students’ faces when they made a shot. The playful anguish in missing one. The collective anticipation with the next one. He talked about how deeply meaningful it was to be able to spend time in the lab of his thoughts during the prep time, making sure he got it right for them, making sure that he was able to create a meaningful learning experience. He rebuilt the unit, spent time tweaking, and knew where to adjust in real time as a result. The kids loved it and so did everyone on the call. The details in his face, in his voice were the whole of it.

Sometimes, educational innovation is dusting it off again.

And then sharing that with others.

AI: Catalyzing Connection

After the call, I wanted to visually recreate what I saw in him during that conversation—the subtle shift in tone, the eyes shaped by excitement, the remnant energy as he recalled what it looked like last week—so that I could share the story more deeply with others. I wanted a little photo on the page of my oral story.

Change is not a straight line, and a small success story is helpful in navigating that winding road together.

So, I bopped into one of the AI image generators I use (ImagineArt), and it spit out something pretty damn close to what I was thinking. It was impressive in that respect. To boot, the image resembled Joe more than it didn’t. Not necessary, but a pretty sweet coincidence.

AI prompt: a teacher with glasses and a beard sits smiling at his desk in an empty classroom. In front of him is a glowing orb that lights up the room.

I later shared the photo with a colleague while recapping the conversation, and one thing struck me. It’s obvious but it’s worth noting nonetheless. As close as the AI image was to visualizing what I felt in conversation with Joe, it didn’t get close to what that feeling actually felt like. It’s an image. Duh.

The image and the experience are miles apart.

The goal of the image was not to be the follow-up conversation but to catalyze it. It wasn’t to be my experience in the conversation but to represent it. And, it did that. We had a fruitful conversation about the human engine of educational innovation and the byproduct of joy that it brings. The image was a fun little part of that conversation but it wasn’t the whole thing. Did it provide a minute moment of uplift? Sure. Did it do more than that? No.

Again, obvious for the adults in the room. For students, though, less so. Students assign meaning to everything, from the style of your jeans to what filters you use when you post a story to what type of Takis you eat. Everything has meaning.

That also means that the ways in which students experience learning have meaning as well. That photo is a representation of my interpretation of a conversation in which I was one of several participants. Every word in that sentence I just wrote takes you further away from the experience. Simply building that awareness is really damn hard for students and takes years of incremental growth. It’s a skill, and students need to make meaning out of the various skills they build.

In order for that meaning to take shape, students need to interact with their learning.

There are ways for AI to catalyze that process, but it can’t be the process entirely.

AI: Less is More

Part of the AI in Education conversation requires de-emphasizing its importance. It requires showing that new tools can open new doors, but the building is still relationships—relationships with yourself, with others, and with the world. And Takis.

Part of school is teaching students not only how to find meaningful experiences for themselves, but the awareness to think about the emotional chasm that separates those experiences from the retelling of them. It’s about teaching the skill of reflection in order for that learning to be applied the next time. It’s about building the capacity for metacognition in order to be able to recognize how you move through the world and how that jives or doesn’t with everyone else who is moving through the world.

It’s a world of nuance. And nuance can be big. The difference between a made and missed shot in basketball is a matter of centimeters.

brown basketball near ring — Photo by Danny Lines on Unsplash. Chosen for this post not because of his name, but he’s probably super cool.

It takes awareness, understanding, and an appreciation of the human experience to be able to identify that nuance. I’m not better at it than you, but I’m better at it than the middle schoolers I used to teach. We all are. That’s one of the biggest reasons schools exist—to incrementally develop the intellectual, emotional, and personal skills to build that understanding, to identify nuance and then figure out what it means to you. That takes time, and it takes doing.

AI tools are fast. Learning is slow.

Playing with AI image generators was fun, but it was a means to an end. So, too, are the more educational AI tools for students and teachers. They can get you into the game more quickly in some ways, but you still have to play, yourself. The real learning is in the relationships, in the experiences, in the authentic connections in the classroom. It’s in the playful anguish and collective anticipation of a 5th grade math class. How much less memorable would that lesson be if it lived in a chat history?

Educational innovation is people. It always will be.