Teaching Upside Down is a newsletter about what AI means for college teaching—written by someone still trying to figure it out, in part by using the tools in question.
I’m Chris Wells, a professor of environmental history at Macalester College. For the past twenty-plus years, I’ve invested enormous energy in trying to teach students to think critically, write carefully, and engage with difficult problems.
I still assign essays and provide lots of feedback. And I talk with colleagues about this more than is probably healthy. Some things about AI in the classroom I’m very sure of; others are very much works in progress.
Much of what I write here starts from one observation: AI has flipped Bloom’s Taxonomy upside down and left it in a jumbled mess on the floor. Some of what we called advanced—creating, synthesizing, producing—is now trivial; what we called foundational—judgment, discernment, the hard work of figuring out what matters and why—remains as important as ever. I think through what that means in The Inversion, the argument most of this newsletter assumes.
If you’ve had both the “that’s kinda cool” reaction and the “this seems very, very bad” reaction to AI—often in the same week, sometimes in the same hour—you’re in the right place. This isn’t an evangelist’s newsletter and it isn’t a resistance newsletter. It’s a workshop with the door open.
New? Three good places to start:
The Inversion argues that AI is upending Bloom’s Taxonomy—both turning teaching upside down and explaining this newsletter’s title.
The Trouble with Authenticity tackles the ways that AI is undermining how we’ve traditionally thought about authorship and writing.
AI and the Tragedy of the Commons offers a framework to think through the collective agreements that we desperately need to make about AI use, but haven’t yet.
Some posts are essays where I work through an argument. Others are field notes—a short reaction to something I’ve encountered. All of them are honest about what I know, what I don’t, and what I’m still figuring out. I’m aiming for new posts most weeks, alternating between longer pieces and shorter ones.
I also want it to be clear that this isn’t an AI-free zone. I do not promote AI use, but as part of my efforts to understand AI and its implications better, I am actively using the AI tools that I write about. I never publish anything here that doesn’t go through many drafts and a lot of tinkering and editing—usually after feedback from other people. My goal is to explore what it looks like to write with AI, in no small part so that I can understand the nuances of how the tools work and what they change about writing. I don’t always use it heavily, and I rarely use it for every step of the process. But there is no step in the writing process—from internet research and voice-to-text idea capture to drafting and editing—for which I haven’t at least tried using AI.
If any of this bothers you, I promise that there’s a very real human using the tools on this side of the screen—and I’m learning a lot in the process. I hope that even adamantly anti-AI readers will find useful ideas and strategies here. I will not hold any hard feelings if you choose to go elsewhere, though.
Hit reply anytime—I read everything.
