On Monday and Tuesday I’m reading in the high school classroom. I’m an integration aide. The students are putting information from complex graphs and spreadsheets made by large corporations into their own simple spreadsheets, which the teacher shows them, again, how to do, i.e. how to use Excel (then, failing that, he does it for them). After recess, a younger group of students are studying Medieval Europe. I’m reading about the Plague and the Crusades in dot points in a Powerpoint presentation on a student’s iPad. Reading is hard. I’m distracted by the student’s constant switching of tabs to various games, messaging apps, camera (to check his fringe’s fall), even the clock, where some more innovative students have invented a game with the stopwatch function, which involves tapping the ‘Lap’ button twice in quick succession to create a lap of as few milliseconds as possible. Anything less than ten ms. is good. Any app other than the one with the slightly difficult reading on it.

A teacher friend tells me about a meme where Slavoj Zizek sings the praises of AI’s dual role for student and teacher labour (essay writing; essay marking) as a freeing up of time for REAL LEARNING to begin. I’m surely mangling the meme which came to me down the whispered line of pub chatter. To mangle it further let me add that it makes me think of the more melancholic J.M. Keynes writing about the ‘Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren’.