The first thing is to thank The New Yorker for printing the article.

I encountered it just yesterday when my usual but too infrequent walk for exercise led me as usual to the Library where I could sit and rest and immerse myself in the atmosphere of community where people congregate often to read or interact and be alive enough and I could pick up the latest issue of The New Yorker and read the most recent two poems which are always good or better.

The article is “The End of the Essay,” in smaller print, “What comes after A. I. has destroyed college writing,” by Hua Hsu, who teaches “at a small liberal arts college,” but knows a lot of people. Read the article so you’ll know why I’m hyped up. It’s in The New Yorker, July 7 & 14, 2025, page 21.

So the second thing is to thank Hua Hsu for writing it.

That’s almost the first thing, really, because without his writing it, The New Yorker could not have printed it for me to read.

This is not unlike the conundrum of the chicken and the egg, which came first?

I started reading the article, after reading the poems. I’m a slow reader. I don’t just read something, I think about it. Sometimes I wish I could talk to the author. Hence this blog.

Hua Hsu might never read my response to his article, but I feel the need to get it “out there,” out of me, because it provoked a visceral reaction which could cause internal damage if I held it in.

I read maybe two pages, it was getting on toward Library closing time, so I checked out the issue to finish reading it at home, aware of my fear that it might keep me up all night. I knew it had started me on a train of thought.

We had dinner, I opened the magazine, found the place where I left off, read a paragraph, looked at the clock, did a quick mental calculation, decided to postpone the rest until tomorrow when I could start in refreshed. I couldn’t help thinking about my own experiences, those many years of teaching, and I didn’t want to rush things.

So I joined the family and we watched the next episode in the new Star Trek series, “Strange New Worlds,” which always gives you plenty to think about, parallels startlingly relevant.

So now it’s the next day and I finished the article.

I want to invite the author to lunch.

We have plenty to talk about. Experiences to share. Commiserations.

He’s in many ways another me. He might help me get over myself.

I’m older, go farther back in the last century, my century, so I have earlier perspectives. People are trying to get me into this century, and he could be a big help.

When Hua says, “My classes are small and intimate, driven by processes and pedagogical modes, like letting awkward silences linger, that are difficult to scale. As a result, I have always had a vague sense that my students are learning something, even when it is hard to quantify,” all I have to say is, “Me too.”

He goes on, “College is a choice…you’re being taught how to do something difficult, and maybe, along the way, you come to appreciate the process of learning.”

And A. I., emphasis on both independently, leads to questions. “Why bother teaching writing now?”

College Professors are waking up to the concerns that I worried about forty years ago teaching high school English. My article on plagiarism was much quoted then and raised a stir.

I feel the closeness of collegial friendship with Hsu, because we share the same love of teaching, what it is, can be, should be.

I don’t blame him for ending his essay with a kind of resignation. Revealing the problem, presenting history previously unknown to me, is a step in the right direction. A Big Step.

And his (almost, one might say) naive belief that people, some people, hopefully most or at least more people, can find it in themselves to choose right over wrong, a condition of belief I myself have borne from youth, perhaps congenitally, knowing my father.

And ending his writing (he writes very well, better than me) with a kind of whimsical zinger as the usual way to wrap things up, leaves the issue(s) open ended.

For instance, he notes the differences in essay writing between high school and college.

I fought that early fight, when my good high school students wrote better than my freshmen college students, and the college application essays and sample high school work opened Ivy League doors but sometimes provoked a rigid response from other institutions, the professors hired to force freshmen students into the college mold.

“That’s not the way we write in college. Here’s a book of our rules. Your thinking is too independent. You haven’t earned the right.”

There’s clearly a conflict here. I’m re-integrating myself into the fray, after 23 years of retirement and the tragic loss of my beloved wife after 60 incredible years of marriage, now clawing myself back into the world, re-integrating the passion I never lost, teaching to save the world from itself. Hence my blog.

I caught myself the other day saying to no one in particular, “I’m glad I’m old school, when we cared about our students, got to know them, helped them become themselves, ready for life in the larger world. And I’m glad I’m old, so I won’t have to see the world become what it’s becoming.”

I’ve never given up, and I won’t. The fires of altruism have always burned in me. Brighter now, as my time left diminishes, and I still want to see that better world, even if I don’t survive to live in it. My life should have meant something.

Like Hua Hsu, who lets us know.

I do what I can, though never enough.

Hence my blog. At least someone in 61 countries is reading what I write, or, watching my new vlog, seeing me say it.

A. I. scares me. The internet scares me. But even with my clumsy attempts to dip into the stream, learn what buttons to push, the pressure of growing awareness provokes me into action.

I was horrified recently to read the announcement by someone successful in the tech world that he never read a book. Tech manuals, yes, but not one book, from high school through college. I can only imagine how he faked his way through. He’s sadly unaware of his loss.

I used to like teaching my high school seniors, when the curriculum opened to World Literature and the constraints were removed like college at its best and those of us teachers who were willing and able, I spent several days on World War I poetry from the countries on both sides. How the world entered the war as a disagreement among gentlemen who followed the rules, and almost immediately there were no rules, no gentlemen, death knows no boundaries and is the last word for everyone, and the world changed forever, notwithstanding the indeterminate attempts to the contrary.

Hence my blog.

And I live in regret that I haven’t done more.

Now I’m trying to reconnect the scattered threads of my own life and reach out. The blog.

In those early days I had students one class at a time. In elementary school, maybe thirty students, for a year. In high school, five periods a day, one conference period which I spent working with individual students, and more after school, staying up late every night into the early morning commenting on papers, no, I didn’t get much sleep, and coffee became addictive, class size was an issue. The mandated cap of thirty was constantly overridden. A teacher was let go to balance the budget, the students were spread and farmed out to the rest of us and our classes swelled to 34 and 35, hard to get around to everyone, crowding the room, and when it reached 40 per class, illegally, and there were not enough desks and no room for them, the overflow sat on the bookshelves in the back of the room, and then, even on the radiators along the windows, turned off during the hot Southern California weather, but on those chilly days in the fall and winter when the custodian turned on the furnace in the basement and we heard the hissing gurgle and the radiator students jumped up with burning bottoms and had to stand all period, and to this day I don’t know or remember how we got through even one day of crisis because my memory protects my mind by shutting down selectively.

Yes, I have stories to tell, ways to survive.

Now I nourish Hope by adding to the enormous collection of student responses, the files and boxes that survived the Altadena fires. I’m a very emotional guy, and I cry when I reread them. The students would write me letters and cards, and an undoctored response on the final exam asking what their plans are for the future and what they learned in the class. “Now I like to read.” “Poetry is wonderful and I can write it.” “I realize I have something to say, and I know how to say it.” “You started me thinking and now I can’t stop.” “If only my father cared about me 1/10 as much…” “You are the first teacher who…”

I don’t want to be the first, or the last or the only. I know that we, teachers, don’t all agree on what we do, what teaching is. But communication helps align us in common cause. Hence the blog.

My students have gone on to significance in the world. Now that I’m “open for business,” they track me down. One wonderful girl, now a woman, pretty high up in health services, found me from my blog about Marshall Fundamental Secondary School where I taught for almost forever. She’s in touch with a Marshall network, and suddenly 243 messages appeared from students from back then and she summarized them saying, “You are loved!”

Aww…

I think I’m going to put together another book, this one on teaching, my life in and out of the classroom, what worked, what didn’t, why and why not.

It may extend to two volumes. There’s already a lot.

And suggestions. I’m always making them. Read the old story, “The Marching Morons.” It’s immediately relevant and obvious. You get the point without trying. There are parallels everywhere for everything. Sometimes they converge.

I’m rushing to fill the time I have left, there’s so much to do.

So thank you Hua Hsu.

First things first.