Human Error Is the Point: On Teaching College During the Rise of AI

Some mornings I forget my lanyard. Or the bathroom on the third floor is locked for reasons no one can explain. Or I bring handouts for the wrong section. I get distracted mid-lecture trying to remember the word for that thing that’s almost a synecdoche. Someone raises their hand to ask a question I don’t know how to answer, and I say the wrong thing. Or I say the right thing but too quickly, and someone flinches and I realize—too late—it wasn’t the question that mattered but the silence behind it.

And still: they come back next week. They sit down. They open laptops and notebooks and half-listen with the kind of distracted attention that is still, somehow, real.

AI will never know how to read that kind of listening.

In my classroom, there is always a delay. Between question and answer. Between what we meant to say and what came out instead. That space—the stutter, the pause, the gesture—is where the actual teaching happens. Not in the bullet points or in the Google Doc comments, but in the moment someone says, “I don’t know if this makes sense, but—” and suddenly it does.

A chatbot can generate lecture slides with more efficient scaffolding than I ever will. A bot can sort discussion board posts by keyword or sentiment. But bots will never notice the shift in someone’s voice when they say “home” versus when they say “mother.” It will never register the second eye-roll, the one meant not for disdain but for solidarity. It will never mishear “Homeric” as “homely” and accidentally create an entire week’s worth of discussion about what makes a hero.

AI cannot mishear. And mishearing is often how we learn.

Once, a student wrote a sentence so strange I wrote “What do you mean?” in the margin. The next week, she came to office hours. She told me the sentence wasn’t wrong—it was something her grandmother used to say. She translated it back into English the way she thought it should sound. It made perfect sense once she explained. But only after she explained.

No computer code creates that kind of knowing. No input-output sequence replaces embarrassment with insight. The error enabled the way in. The misunderstanding made the meaning.

This semester, a student told me they hadn’t spoken aloud in a classroom since before the pandemic. They hadn’t heard their own voice—aloud, in the classroom—for years. And when they did, the whole room shifted. You could feel it. You can always feel it. Even the overhead light seemed to dim a little, and the guy in the third row finally stopped clicking his pen. Everyone leaned in, to bear witness.

There’s no A/B test for that. No metric. No archive of comparable outputs. There’s just a small, trembling voice returning to itself after years in the dark.

Sometimes we read the same poems over and over. Bishop. Clifton. Olds. Sometimes I assign the same essay prompts because I don’t know what else to say. Sometimes I cry while reading student drafts—quietly, when they’re not looking. Sometimes I lie and say “that was a good question” when it wasn’t. And sometimes I say “that was a terrible question” and everyone laughs, including the person who asked it because they know I’m mostly joking. We laugh and something shifts and it becomes a good class even though nothing we planned worked. We didn’t even get through the reading.

But the reading isn’t the point. The point is that they’ll remember the class when someone finally said the thing. Or almost said it. Or didn’t. The not-saying is important too. It teaches us how to stay.

My syllabus is a mess of half-remembered intentions. I re-use icebreakers that I know don’t work. I forget to grade the first assignment until Week Four. I write emails that begin with “So sorry for the delay!” and I mean it. I use “This reminded me of something I once read—” as a stall tactic. I say “I don’t know” more times than I should. I also say “I love that” when I don’t. Because I want to encourage them. Because I do love that they showed up. Because showing up is a miracle.

No bot knows the miracle of showing up hungover and sad and still asking, “Can I turn this in late?” That is humanity. That is literature. That is the classroom. They don’t know what they’re doing here, and they come anyway.

At the beginning of every semester, I tell my students not to call me “Professor.” I say, “Just Sean is fine.” Then I ask them about breakfast. About what a perfect day looks like. And someone always says, “Not being here,” and someone else says, “No homework,” and I laugh, but I write it down on the board. Not because it’s clever. But because it’s true.

And then we begin.

I will never compete with AI in word count or response time. But I will keep saying, “Tell me more about that…” I will keep asking, “Who are you reading outside this class?” I will keep noticing how the girl in the back always looks up when I mention whales or rivers or grief. I will keep waiting for the moment someone finally turns off their spell-check and writes a sentence that shocks even them.

What A.I. can’t do is feel the shape of silence after someone says something so honest we forget we’re here to learn. What it can’t do is pause mid-sentence because it remembered the smell of its father’s old chair. What it can’t do is sit in a room full of people who are trying—and failing—to make sense of something that maybe can’t be made sense of.

That’s the job of teaching.

It’s not about knowing. It’s about being present. About staying long enough to know what to ask. About saying: “I think I know what you mean,” even if we’re wrong. Especially if we’re wrong.

And so: I forget my lanyard. I forget what page we’re on. I forget the password to the projector. But I remember the look in someone’s eyes when they finally say what they’ve been trying to write for weeks. And I remember the first student who asked if they could write about their dead dog, and the one who asked if they could write about the pills. And the one who said, “This class is the only reason I come to campus.”

I remember the human parts.

And the human error is the point.