Priten: Welcome to Margin of Thought, where we make space for the questions that matter. I'm your host, Priten, and together we'll explore questions that help us preserve what matters while navigating what's coming.
There's a version of the AI and education conversation that stays very abstract—policy debates, think pieces, conference panels—and then there's a version that happens in a real classroom with real kids in a city that doesn't always make it into the conversation.
Today's guest is Mary Nance, a computer science teacher at a diverse high school in Greensboro, North Carolina, where she teaches AP Computer Science Principles and is stepping into a new role this year as her school's informal AI resource for faculty and staff.
What makes Mary's perspective unusual is the arc that brought her there: decades in corporate sales, hotel management, and business-to-business work before returning to the classroom in her sixties and finding that her students know less about what AI can do for them than they think and more than she expected.
We're going to talk about how she uses ducks to change the culture around AI in her classroom, what it actually looks like to let kids use AI responsibly, and what a teacher who came up before the internet has figured out that a lot of younger generations miss.
Let's begin.
Mary: So I'm a relatively new teacher. I got my degree in education in the early eighties and just entered the classroom about a year and a half ago. So I teach computer science. I taught AP Computer Science and Computer Science Principles, and this coming year I'll be teaching Computer Science Principles and Sport and Event Marketing.
And then in the spring I'll do AP CSP and Computer Science. I think I'll do Sport and Event Marketing as well. I believe it's a class that they put a lot of kids in that they don't know where to put them. And I even said to them, "Well, let's do Computer Science Discoveries," which is really basic and not big challenges, and put our kids that don't know what to do in there. That's a lot more marketable scope of skills than Sport and Event Marketing.
Priten: Tell me a little bit about your school. Is it a private school, public school? Where in the country? What's the student population size?
Mary: Student population size is 900 and some. Grades nine through twelve. I would say I think about 12% of our population is Caucasian, and the rest is a variety—predominantly African American and Latino. We're about 70% Spanish-speaking and African American population. We're in what I would call more of a rural neighborhood, but we're not far out of the city center of Greensboro. And we also pull from the city of High Point. So it's a very diverse school. I absolutely love teaching there. I love my kids. Even though sometimes I get some of the stronger discipline problems. I'm sure at some point I'll come across one that just isn't gonna work in my classroom, but so far I've been able to wrangle them in, and I think the kids know that I wasn't always a teacher. So they kind of don't know what to expect from me, which is fine. It's exactly the way I want it.
I do run a very strict classroom in terms of technology—like personal technology devices such as their phones and such. Our school put in a new policy this past school year where when the kids enter the classroom, they drop their cell phone in a numbered space in this suitcase so I can zip it up and take it out if there's a fire drill or something like that. And it is not adhered to a hundred percent by all teachers. I do adhere to it. And you know, I audit the phones a couple times a week to make sure everybody's in there. If someone has a phone violation, I write their name on the board, and if they get two, that phone gets taken away and they have to get it at the office. So I'm pretty strict about that.
I do, however, use the kids' phones as an incentive. So if I want to make sure everybody gets done with this or that, I might say, "If we are done by ten till one, I'll let you guys play on your phones for the last ten minutes." So I use it like that with AI.
And part of what I'll be doing this coming year is being the resource for the other faculty and staff at school on how to use AI. If they're new to it or they just wanna talk about it. I've had one day of training on that particular concept, and it wasn't really great. I've been to a lot of AI-focused webinars and conference calls, and I've been very interested in it for a while and have told my kids, "This is the future. There's most likely going to be a career title called Prompt Engineer soon. And they're going to be just like you have an IT specialist or a tech support or something like that. There are going to be people who become very skilled and experienced at listening to, let's say, someone who hasn't really used AI but has a vision of what they want. And this person helps fine-tune and craft a prompt that gets them exactly what they need in a thirty-minute meeting as opposed to a series of department meetings. So that's what's coming down the line for them."
Priten: What specific questions would you have for me?
Mary: Sorry, I meant to ask what would you like to know from me?
Priten: I love to start by asking folks to remember their first memory of being a student in technology being used in the classroom.
Mary: I don't remember it in the classroom, but I can tell you in my career when that light bulb went on. So I was the corporate sales manager for the largest hotel convention facility between DC and Atlanta. And when we would book meetings, we would go into the book room and there literally was this book that was like giant—the size of a card table—and you would flip the pages and you would write in there with a pencil: "The North Carolina Brick Association, 11 to 5," or something like that. While I was there, we changed all of that into a digital system. It wasn't even Windows yet. It was more of a DOS-based sort of environment. And I was sitting in our department meeting and the general manager of the hotel was at one side of the table, and the most senior person in our department was at the other head of the table. And Mo was his name. Mo was telling us all about the training schedule. And he said, "Half of you guys are gonna go this week with half the secretaries, and the other half is gonna go this week with the other half of the secretaries." When one of the salespeople—that senior one—said, "Oh, well my secretary will do that," he leaned forward on the table and he said, "You will be your own expert." And that's when it hit me. I'm like, "All right, I hear that loud and clear." And I was just bitten by the bug of that and was teaching my kids—my children—how to use technology. I taught my son how to read with a Compaq Presario and a CD of Berenstein Bears. I was a very quick adopter, but that was the moment for me.
Priten: When you initially got the education degree, did you think you were gonna go into teaching? And then what caused you not to at that point? And then what caused you to come back?
Mary: Well, so I did think I was gonna be a teacher because my mom had been a teacher. My grandmother was a teacher. My grandfather had been a principal, and my grandmother had eight sisters, and several of them were teachers. So it was like, "Of course I'll grow up and be a teacher." Once I finished my degree in education, I had gotten married and was moving from Ohio to Wisconsin, so I got my certification in both Ohio and Wisconsin. And then we moved to Wisconsin. I don't even think I looked into teaching then because I was already involved in retail and sales and things like that, and ended up going into a full-time outside sales career at that time and just stayed in the business-to-business world from then on.
And so until COVID hit. I had been working in Manhattan at that time, and my husband and I—my first husband passed away in 2007, so this is a different husband—but he and I just decided we were gonna go live near either my daughter or my son. And my son and his family live in Alexandria, Virginia, and my daughter and her husband live in Greensboro. We kind of talked about which one would be better, and we picked Greensboro. And our neighbor across the street suggested that we do substitute teaching. And I was like, "That sounds fun." And so I did some substitute teaching. My husband got the first substitute teaching job that he took, and it ended up being the one he's still in. He teaches carpentry and he had 37 years in the motion picture and television set construction business, house building, and all kinds of stuff. So when the principal met him, he was like—and it's funny to hear my husband talk about it now. He says, "I have a shop, I have a classroom, I have an office, I have a design room. It's air-conditioned, and I teach kids how to do all this stuff, and they pay me."
Priten: Oh, that's great.
Mary: Yeah, so we're both loving this, and it is a retirement for us because we worked pretty heavy-duty jobs before we got into teaching. So honestly, summers off and next summer I'm gonna take more time off. I did a lot of professional development this summer, but it was just a full circle moment, I guess, because I had a lot of experience with it and all kinds of different computer applications and such. And so it was an easy transition. And I remember when the principal asked me to take the position permanently, he said, "I just can't seem to find any computer science teachers." I said, "That's 'cause they're writing their own tickets out there. They're not interested in teacher salaries."
Priten: That's an amazing journey to the classroom.
Mary: And that's the short version.
Priten: Yeah, I'm sure. So tell me a little bit about what teaching computer science has been like as AI capabilities have gotten stronger. Obviously, you hear rhetoric from some of these tech CEOs and they're very clearly thinking that like software engineering is gonna be offloaded to AI largely. I think NVIDIA's CEO said software engineers are gonna be gone in a few years. Microsoft, I think two days ago, was talking about how their stock keeps growing, but they're laying off folks, and they were trying to help people see that like this is the reality of AI, which I was surprised he was so direct about it. We had started seeing trends because I would just like to follow this stuff, but the larger tech companies were hiring less developers in the last few years. And so each year there was just less job openings. That's normally how this stuff is gonna happen, right? It's not gonna be like a massive set of layoffs overnight. It's gonna be like we're gonna hire less and less of a certain position. But Microsoft is starting to do some layoffs and that was shocking. And then there's people who say, "Well, you can't possibly understand a world that is driven by computers without learning computer science." And so I'm curious what your opinion is on that and how you talk to your students about it.
Mary: First of all, I think it's unfortunate that a lot of the kids come into my classroom with the perception that they'll use AI and sneak using it like it's cheating or something. Whereas I want them to use it. It takes 'em a while to really get the point that I want them to use AI. I want them to. I need to know three things. If they're going to use AI, one, I need to know which tool they used. I need to know what their prompt was, and they need to be able to explain what they extracted and put together from that without looking at the AI documentation. So as far as I'm concerned, that's the same thing as looking it up on Google or Britannica. You're going to cite your source. You're going to write about what you are looking for, then you're going to write it in your own words or use the AI words. Maybe you wrote a great story, but you're worried that your grammar isn't correct. So take this great story and tell AI to make sure all the grammar's correct. When that kid gets the grammar corrected back, they see that and they're learning where the commas go and all of the other things that so many kids, even in high school, don't know or they don't feel is important, even if they do know it.
But also I wanna go back to two things. One, this coming year I have this jar of little ducks. And every time a kid finds a way to use AI, I'm gonna tell them, "Go quack, quack." And then they're gonna tell us what they went to AI for, what they found, and how they used it. And then I'm gonna encourage them to ask each other questions like, "Well, how do you know that's true? Did it say what the source was? Or do you agree with that? Or did you look at any other source?" I'm gonna really encourage them to question because I believe that experience—and this came to my head because I'm still not thinking of using AI as often as I should. I want it to be more of a top-of-mind awareness sort of tool. And I just thought, "Well, if we make a game of it. If they get to say 'quack, quack' and then they get a duck, and we spend a minute or two talking about how, what they're gonna use AI for. So that's one thing that I'm gonna introduce to try to let them know, I want you to use AI, but you have to be responsible about it."
I kind of aligned the three qualifiers from the AP College Board protocol for using AI, 'cause you can use AI on your PT Create project for AP CSP.
So the other thing I wanted to share with you is that I did not know how to code in any language when I first started teaching computer science. I came in mid-semester, so I didn't even get the benefit of the early lessons. I jumped right in the middle with where the kids were at. And so I just tried to stay a little bit ahead of the kids. And by the fall semester and finishing the spring semester, I was in a much better position in terms of knowledge on that subject.
But I was shocked and amazed how many apps my kids created in Code.org App Lab when I didn't even know how to do that yet. And that was something that really worried me, but I kept thinking, "If high school kids can learn this, yeah, I can learn it too."
Priten: Do you feel that way about the AI stuff at all? I'm curious. Do you find yourself ahead of the students on the AI?
Mary: My goal would be to teach the kids to know more than I know. But I feel as though I do have a higher skill level or awareness or knowledge of how to use it because I have really, for the last year and a half, dipped my toe into a lot of AI sort of stuff. I haven't used it as much as a teacher as I will be this coming year.
Priten: I'd love to hear about both how you plan on using it this year, but also conversations you've had with colleagues because obviously you're teaching in the computer science world and the intersection is much clearer. And I think you can embrace it a little bit more and see the value of it. When we talk to teachers in other disciplines, there's a lot more fear. So I'm curious if you have had colleagues who've come up to you and said, "Well, you're the computer science teacher. Can you help me figure this out?"
Mary: So yes, I had one teacher come to me and she is the teacher that handles the exceptional children. And one of the tools she has to use with them is to get them to read aloud to assess reading skills or what have you. And so she came to me and she said, "They're bored stiff. How can I create a play or something in AI that they can actually play—be reading roles and lines—as opposed to a novel or any other kind of book?" And I'm like, "All righty."
So we sat down at my desk and I asked her a few questions and she popped in a couple of wild, crazy ideas and I was like, "Yeah, the wilder and crazier, the more interesting it'll be for the kids." And then we just went right into it. Literally this was ten minutes at my desk. I just used ChatGPT for that one and went in and just talked about, or gave the instructions—the prompt—in terms of how many characters and what the basic scope should be and how long. I think we said three-act play with the duration of no more than thirty minutes or something like that. But we finished it. I printed out a copy and she was thrilled, and she came back to me later and told me how much her kids really had fun with that. I'll have more stories to tell after this coming year.
Priten: When you think about the use of AI with students, there's a lot of folks who are concerned that a lot of it is just about engaging them, but without figuring out whether or not it's the best way to approach it for our classrooms. But of course, if they're not engaged, they're not learning anything, right? It's a problem that we're trying to figure out in terms of students showing up to school with less and less of an attention span. They're getting used to like massive dopamine hits every two minutes. And so then your forty-five-minute lecture is definitely not gonna cut it. I'm curious, especially like when you see in your classrooms they're interacting with their devices, they're doing something that's quote-unquote exciting because they're getting to build things and work on projects. Do you still find that you're competing for their attention?
Mary: Well, I don't, as a rule, allow them to have their phones, and I have a desktop classroom, so I don't allow them to use Chromebooks or personal computers. Everything's on a desktop and so I can control it a little bit more 'cause I can see all their screens on my screen. But yeah, controlling their attention. It's kind of like sometimes I feel like a standup comedian and when I feel like I'm not getting the response that fuels me to continue on, I just gotta shift gears.
One thing I do frequently is I'll say, "Okay, I'm gonna lock all the computers. And you guys sit at that table, you guys sit at that table, you guys sit at that table." I have three eight-foot conference tables. And I said, "Each of you, I want to do this or that, or whatever it is." Because they love working in groups. And so if I'm up there talking about something, or whatever, and they're starting to glaze over, I'm just gonna switch gears. We can come back to whatever it was, and I'll be purposeful in what the challenges are that I give them.
But matter of fact, one of my AP classes—I gave each of them a copy of a PRAS practice exam, and I let them figure out the answers as a table, and then whichever table got the most right was the winning table.
Priten: It sounds like the reactivity to the students is obviously a big part of it—recognizing when you've lost them and you need to regain them.
Mary: Sometimes I lose them because they put their heads down, and then beginning of the school year, I had this little bicycle bell. And I bring it out and I tell them, "If you lay your head on your desk, I'm gonna assume that you are sleeping and I'm going to do this," and I cling it. I said, "You've now gotten your warning. Don't sleep in my class. I'll wake you up."
Priten: The last thing I just wanna hear a little bit about from you is conversations you've had with students directly about AI. Either you know, one-on-one or as a class—have they expressed any sort of fear about it? Have they expressed a desire to learn anything in particular? I'm just kind of curious how your students are processing AI.
Mary: So one of the lessons that I do on AI is I put a line up. I've done it on my Promethean, I've done it on the Blackboard or whatever, and I have them take Post-Its. And you're either gonna be over here where you're terrified—you don't like even the concept of AI—and over here is, "This is so exciting. I can't wait to learn more. I might even make a career out of this." And I have them go up with a Post-It note and put where they are. Usually they center around the middle. But I do have some kids that are one side or the other. And generally it's what I would perceive to be the more academically strong students that are eager to get into AI. And it's the ones that probably have never watched anything other than a music video. They've never really been interested in AI enough to get even the slightest little education about it.
When I give a test, I put all their screens up on my Promethean, so they can all see what I'm seeing, and as soon as I see some—they can't read each other's screens—but that way I can travel around the room, 'cause cheating is rampant. And so when I see a student highlight like a whole paragraph of something, I know he or she is about to drop it into an AI and figure out what the answer is. And so I have some kids who have never really learned how to do that, right. And I frequently will reply back to them and say, "This answer has nothing to do with the question." And the students that do that more frequently are the ones that don't really care about learning anyway. They're just there because they have to be there.
I have a lot of kids who wanna know more about it, and even though I told them, "I want you to site it. I want you to find ways to use AI in the work that you're doing," I only had one student who did it as detailed as I asked. It's like I have to pull that out of them when I know they're using AI.
Early on last year, before I was aware of what the kids were doing with AI and Grammarly, I had a student who turned in something that was beautifully written. And so I read it aloud to the class. I said, "This was a great way to answer this question. Listen to this." And he never produced anything that well written again. But it was early in my getting to know him. That was kind of frustrating for me because I wish that I had been more critical and understanding of what that student was capable of at that point in time.
And there have been kids that I've said to them, "What tool did you use to go to AI for this?" And they tell me, and I say, "You have to put that in your report or whatever it is that you turn into me." I'm hoping the ducks will change all that and they'll get on the AI train because I wanna teach them how to use it properly and how to use it. I don't think they understand what is available to them if they learn how to dig into things that interest them.
And there are projects that I do that require the kids to make it known—maybe they love soccer, maybe they love race cars, maybe they have a passion for crocheting, whatever it is. And I encourage the kids to figure those things out. And then what I believe is that if the kids know they can put an AI prompt in and say, "What is the, you know, whatever their question is—you know, birds of prey." That was one of my son's passions. My son said to me one day, "Mom, can we go to the Natural Science Center after school today? I'm like, "Sure, what do you wanna go for?" He said, "I wanna look at Birds of Prey." I'm like, "Okay."
So we went to the Natural Science Center and we looked at birds of prey, got back in the car and he goes, "Can we go to the library? I wanna get some books on Birds of Prey." And I'm like, "Sure." So we stopped in the library, got some books on birds of prey, came home, had dinner. The next morning, he's getting ready to leave for school and his books are still on the kitchen table. And I said, "Patrick, don't you need to take these to school?" And he looked at me puzzled and he goes, "Why?" I said, "Well, is this for a project you're working on at school?" He goes, "No, I was just interested in them." That's what I want to ignite in these kids. And then if they know that they can take something as simple as how to play golf, or whatever it is they're interested in, and AI it, they'll learn so much.
Priten: I think that if we can get students to appreciate the intrinsic value of learning something, that I think AI plays a very different role, right? Like right now, because they're not able to recognize that, they're finding ways to take shortcuts. But I think if they have those genuine interests that they're able to buy into, then AI does open up a whole world of possibilities for them to explore those interests further. The challenge that we all have is to help them find out what that is for them.
Mary: Because a lot of kids, their perception of school is "this just work I have to do." Or I try really hard to tell them, "No, this is your stepping stone for what you wanna do in the future."
Priten: Thank you to Mary for joining us.
Mary reminded us that the hardest parts of teaching AI is helping students understand that learning something for its own sake is still worth doing, and that AI works best in the hands of someone who actually wants to know. Her instinct to meet students where they are—being strict about phones and generous about curiosity—is a model worth exploring.
Keep listening as we continue exploring the ethics and realities of education technology. And for more on how to recenter on our goals, check out my book Ethical Ed Tech at ethicaledtech.org.
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