Over the last two weeks, I’ve had several depressing end-of-summer conversations with my venture capitalist and technologist friends about their summer interns. It was disappointing to hear how disappointed they are with the skills and maturity they are seeing.
Whenever I recommend a student for an internship, I always follow up at the end of the summer. In the past, it was the only way I could ensure I had the information I needed to write a strong college recommendation letter. But nowadays, it’s become the only way I can decide whether I’m going to agree to write a college recommendation letter for a student at all.
What I’m hearing far too often is that a student doesn’t understand that an internship is an audition for opportunities in adult life.
Things I’m hearing this summer:
– The intern acted entitled to be excused from knowing or learning the basics. This is the belief of a child.
– The intern didn’t have or act from a sense of urgency about their assignments. This is the belief of a child.
– The intern acted as if they could be deliberately unresponsive in a work situation. This is the belief of a child.
– The intern tried to take shortcuts after procrastinating, using Chat GPT and other AI models to turn in mediocre, outsourced, error-riddled work instead of doing their own thinking and research. This is the belief of a child.
I wish I had a better way to get through to parents of my high school students, but because I don’t, I’ll just put this right here:
Parents of high school students are terrified of all the wrong things.
The biggest threat to your high school student’s future right now isn’t AI taking over — it’s the seductive power of time-wasting and indulging-baby habits in high school.
Smartphones now pose a significant threat to students’ futures. If your child is wasting four years in high school taking selfies, playing mobile games, and making TikTok videos, then they are not mastering the basics they’ll need when they graduate. And that means they’ll have to catch up on these skills in college, which will make them uncompetitive when they complete their degree.
High school students don’t have any time left to lose.
The addictiveness of mobile phones to teenagers has exposed a shockingly stark fault line: students who develop self-management skills in high school are going to have dramatically different opportunities, careers, and a secure middle-class life than those who do not.
Students who develop self-management skills in high school are going to have dramatically different opportunities, careers, and a secure middle-class life than those who do not.
There’s a limit to what we teachers can do about your child’s phone addiction. This year I’m going to have 205 students, so I don’t even have as much bandwidth as I had last year to police kids’ phone use.
Students will continue to bring in old, dead “dummy phones” they can submit to whatever harebrained adult policies we try to impose, and the majority of students will continue to view in-school instructional time as a forum for power struggles over their precious electronic devices. Instead of giving themselves over to the thinking and learning processes, they’ll stay laser-focused on indulging.
Next week, during our start-of-school professional development, I fully expect that administrators will introduce new policies and policing strategies for mobile phone restrictions that won’t be any more effective than any of the other phone policing strategies we’ve tried.
That will shove the burden back onto parents and students themselves.
Honestly, as much as I love and believe in the potential of technology, if I had my way, the FCC would change its restrictions and allow schools to signal-block smartphones in their buildings, turning them into “bricks” that could only operate as call-making devices.
Like the rest of your child’s high school teachers, I will continue to do my best to help them see that wasting their active attention at school is like stacking their talent on a table and lighting a match to it.
Developing human curiosity is the goal – becoming curious and learning how to tend and feed your curiosity. As Professor Anima Anandkumar of Caltech – the former senior director of Nvidia’s AI research and former principal scientist at Amazon Web Services – has described them, the jobs that AI will not replace will use “the ability to be curious and go after hard problems…. A bad programmer who is not better than AI will be replaced, but a great programmer who can assess what AI is doing, make fixes, [and] ensure those programs are written well will be in more demand than ever.”
As Sam Altman has pointed out, AI models will increasingly take over the mundane tasks of routine code generation.
But that doesn’t mean students get to skip learning the basics in high school – and it definitely doesn’t mean they’ll succeed with split or stunted attention.
I will continue to teach students that if you aren’t really focused on building your mind, you won’t develop much to offer. But without the help of parents, I’ll only reach the ones who can unplug for long enough to listen.
