There is a particular kind of teacher who shows up in every school, in every district, in every generation. You can spot them by what they don’t do. They don’t wait for the approved curriculum to catch up to reality. They don’t hide behind the phrase “that’s not my job.” They walk into the classroom on the first day of the school year already three problems ahead of everyone else — not because they’re anxious, but because they care so deeply about what happens in that room that they refuse to be unprepared for it.
Dr. Ernesto Lee is that kind of teacher.
I have watched him teach. I have watched him design courses, argue passionately about pedagogy at faculty meetings where most people are just waiting for the coffee to kick in, and spend hours rethinking assignments not because he had to but because he couldn’t help it. When artificial intelligence arrived at the classroom door — not as a distant promise but as a present reality — he did not panic, and he did not dismiss it. He did what he always does: he got to work understanding it well enough to hand it to his students responsibly.
This book is the result of that work.
What you are holding is unusual. It is not a technology manual dressed up as education theory. It is not an alarmist warning about robots replacing teachers. It is not a breathless listicle of AI tools you’ll have forgotten by next semester. It is something harder to write and rarer to find: a serious, honest, deeply pedagogically grounded guide for what it actually means to teach in the age of artificial intelligence — written by someone who is still doing it, every semester, in real classrooms with real students.
The theories in these pages are not decorations. Vygotsky, Bloom, Piaget, Dweck — Dr. Lee uses them as structural steel, not wallpaper. He connects the science of how human beings learn to the realities of what AI can and cannot do. He gives you the vocabulary to think clearly about the difference between a student who is learning and a student who has outsourced learning. That distinction, it turns out, is the most important question in education right now.
I want to say something directly to the teacher reading this: you are not being asked to become a computer scientist. You are being asked to become the kind of educator who understands the landscape your students are already living in. The students in your classroom in 2025 are navigating a world saturated with AI-generated content, AI-assisted work, and AI-enabled shortcuts — whether you address it or not. The only question is whether the most important adult in their educational life has thought carefully about what that means. Dr. Lee has. And now, so will you.
There is a moment somewhere in Chapter 1 when the author asks you what kind of teacher you want to be on the other side of this disruption. It is not a rhetorical question. Take it seriously. Think about the teacher who first made you believe something was possible — the one who stayed after class, who pushed back when you took the easy road, who saw the version of you that you hadn’t become yet.
That teacher did not succeed because they had better tools than everyone else.
They succeeded because they chose to be present in a way that no tool can replicate.
That is still the job. It will always be the job. This book will help you do it better.
— Professor Carlos Marquez AI Professor Miami Dade College