For Thelma Elaine Eason.
First-grade teacher. Thirty and a half years.
You never used a smartboard. You never typed a prompt into a machine. You had chalk, a voice, twenty-something six-year-olds who needed someone to believe in them, and an inexhaustible supply of both.
You understood something that took the rest of the world decades to figure out: that teaching is not the transfer of information. It is the transfer of possibility. Every child who sat in your classroom left with something they couldn’t have gotten from a worksheet or a textbook or — I’ll say it plainly — an algorithm. They left knowing that someone saw them. Chose them. Stayed.
I wrote this book about artificial intelligence. But every page of it is really about you.
The machines are getting smarter. The teachers who matter are the ones who always knew that smart was never the point.
You knew. You always knew.
This one’s for you, Grandma.
— Dr. Ernesto Lee Miami Dade College