When teaching stops being bounded

This essay first appeared in my weekly newsletter, The Work of Being, where I write once a week about work, learning, and judgment.

For a century, teachers have been operating within a narrow band of their potential. This was not their fault. The constraints of the system made it impossible to do more. One teacher. Thirty students. Fixed curriculum. Limited time. The math never worked.

AI changes these constraints.

A huge amount of education we could never access is now available. Unlimited 1:1 instruction. Instant feedback. Adaptive content that meets each learner where they are. Real-time assessment. Personalized pacing. These were theoretical ideals for decades. Now they are operational capabilities.

This should feel like liberation. I am not sure it does.

The problem is that teachers have only ever known the constrained environment. Their training prepared them for it. Their skills were optimized for it. Their professional identity was formed by it. The bounded classroom is not just where they work. It is what they know how to do.

Unlocking what was previously inaccessible does not make teaching easier. It makes teaching different. The job expands. The boundaries blur. The skills required shift in ways that are not yet fully legible.

A teacher in the old model managed a room. Delivered content. Assessed at intervals. Maintained order. These tasks demanded real skill. They also had clear edges. You could know what was expected. You could know when you were done. Teachers were trained for a bounded role. That is not a performance problem. It is a structural problem.

A teacher in the new model orchestrates something harder to define. The AI handles content delivery and basic feedback. The teacher handles everything the AI cannot. Motivation. Discernment. Judgment about when a student needs challenge and when they need support. The ability to cultivate something in a person that the person does not yet know they are missing.

This is a different job. We do not yet have a clear picture of what it requires.

I have seen this pattern in other fields. When you remove operational constraints, the human role does not shrink. It concentrates. The routine work disappears. What remains is the work that requires judgment, creativity, and presence. The work changes shape. The people doing it have to change shape with it.

Teaching is entering this transition now. What I do not know is what support looks like during this shift.

Some teaching practices were shaped by the constraints themselves. Others were shaped in spite of them. When the constraints lift, those differences become visible. But visibility is not the same as judgment. We do not yet know which practices were load-bearing and which were scaffolding. We do not yet know what the expanded role actually demands.

There is a version of this transition that goes well. Teachers gain access to tools that let them do work they always wanted to do. The administrative burden drops. The relational and formational work expands. The profession becomes more demanding and more meaningful at the same time.

There is another version that goes poorly. The expansion feels like scope creep. The new expectations arrive without new support. Teachers are asked to become something different without a clear path to get there. The tools feel like surveillance. The change feels like blame.

Which version we get is not predetermined. It depends on how institutions respond. It depends on whether the transition is treated as a training problem or a design problem. It depends on whether teachers are given room to develop new capabilities or are simply expected to perform them.

I do not think we have answered these questions yet. I am not sure we have asked them clearly.

What I keep returning to is this: a profession built around managing scarcity is about to encounter abundance. That is not a small adjustment. It is a redefinition of what the work is for.

The constraints gave teaching a shape. They also gave it a ceiling. The ceiling is gone. What remains is an open question about what teaching becomes when the boundaries no longer hold.

We are going to find out. The teachers living through this transition will know things about their profession that no previous generation could have discovered. They will learn what was essential and what was accommodation. They will learn what the work actually requires when the old limits no longer apply.

That knowledge does not yet exist. It will be built by the people doing the work, in real time, without a map.

I am not sure what they will need from the rest of us. I am sure they will need something.