Saint Viator High School

Tom Foster

Tom Foster is Director of Instructional Technology at Saint Viator High School with a background in English education. He focuses on integrating AI into learning, reshaping curriculum design, and helping students move from rote tasks to authentic, applied critical thinking.

Convenience, Generations, and Changing Realities

The Sunday after Spring Break, my motivation to go grocery shopping was buried under the white sand of Siesta Key, some 1,200 miles from Saint Viator High School. Thus, Monday afternoon, I was forced into doing something rare in the educational community: I ventured into “the real world” to pick up a chicken burrito.

Maybe it was the copious amount of hot sauce I piled on or the fresh air of an unseasonably warm March Monday maybe it was just the novelty of interacting with people who don’t live by a bell schedule but as I sat eating, I found myself contemplating how society evolved to provide burritos on demand. It’s a luxury of convenience only recently introduced to my own family tree.

My mom grew up in Ireland, and she once made the mistake of telling my Granny she was hungry outside of mealtimes. Granny didn't reach for the biscuit tin or offer a piece of toast. Instead, she silently grabbed a mallet and headed for the backyard bunny cage to prepare a stew.

It was one of those wonderful childhood experiences that first-generation Americans share to both fill their children with guilt and explain their lifelong dedication to bland, simple food.

Truthfully, none of us are truly that far removed from the generation of the mallet. In 1926, the majority of Americans were intimately acquainted with their protein; whether raised in a coop or plucked from a crate, a meal required a level of manual labor we can hardly contemplate today. Very few of us would have the competency to get a meal on the table if it required turning a live fowl into food. But does this lack of grit make us less capable than the people of 1926? Are we "cheating" at survival because we’ve outsourced the most grueling parts of the process?

Rethinking Effort and Learning in Academia

In academia, we seem to think so. We remain obsessed with the "de-feathering" of information, clinging to the idea that if a task isn't tedious, it isn't learning. When a student uses AI to bypass the formulaic assembly of a five-paragraph essay or a rote bibliography, we don't see an efficient "cook" we see a moral failing. We label it "cheating" because we are still grading the manual labor of the past rather than the technological evolution of the present.

During my ten years as an English teacher, I never took joy in assigning eight-page papers on the "recurrence of decay in Hamlet," and I certainly didn't want students to sacrifice any of their Spring Break to summarize The Scarlet Letter. I’m willing to bet that if English departments never required those essays again, there would be no student walk-outs to bring them back. Today, AI can produce those assignments with more precision and in less time. Why insist students spend cognitive energy "de-feathering the chicken" when we could teach them how to actually cook?

From Formula to Authentic Expression

I thrived on the pieces where students actually showed up: the scathing argument against taking a family to Chuck E. Cheese, or the comparison between Fahrenheit 451 and our own high school cafeteria. Those students weren't checking boxes; they were displaying a deep, lived understanding of literature. In that context, AI shouldn't be a penalized shortcut; it should be an encouraged resource that handles the "manual labor" of writing so the student can focus on the "craft" of the argument.

AI is not the death of critical thinking; it is the birth of an engaging curriculum. No adult has ever needed to defend the symbolism of Piggy’s glasses in a five-paragraph format to keep their job. It simply doesn't develop a practical skill set socially, culturally, or professionally. Success today is defined by the ability to apply facts to complex, human problems. To stop our students from simply plucking at a text, we must move the goalposts from information retrieval to authentic application.

AI as Collaboration, Not Replacement

The "secret sauce" lies in prompts that incorporate the students’ own lives, modern contexts, and moral gray areas complexities AI struggles to replicate. In fact, what resource do you think I used to help me revise the very essay you are reading? By treating Gemini as a collaborator rather than a cheat-code, I focused on the "flavor" of my argument while the machine handled the "de-feathering." Some fear AI will destroy human interaction, but I believe the opposite is true. Stripped of formulaic busywork, teachers will finally have to start conversing with their students again... that is, unless they’re too chicken.