At a recent conference, a panelist praised AI for helping students bypass foundational steps in Bloom’s taxonomy and ‘get more done,’ questioning whether group dynamics were worth the effort.
The room didn’t nod; it shifted. People pictured first-years without the domain footing to interrogate an output, accepting it because it looked cleaner than anything they could have drafted. The irony is that this was the point of the class: to interrupt the reflex for task over maintenance, to notice and name the slow work that builds judgment. Maintenance is where norms are negotiated, roles clarified, trust earned; it’s where the frictions of shared purpose are metabolized into judgment. Task without maintenance is choreography without rehearsal—crisp at 9 a.m., brittle by afternoon.
The irony is that the point of the class was to correct a reflex for task over maintenance, to notice and name the slow work that builds judgment. Visioning isn’t a sharp-sounding listicle destined for lamination; it’s a social process—collaboration, roles, norms, the choreography of disagreement. Instead, the session slid into execution dressed as leadership. The instructor’s enthusiasm did the rest, recoding gloss as progress. At the same time, what was skipped wasn’t “busy work” but the accretion of concepts and the argumentative scuffle that turns private hunch into shared understanding, the friction that forges judgment.
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