Twenty years ago I had a student who taught me what work really means I'm in my 30th year of teaching, going to retire next June. With all the AI stuff in classrooms now, I keep thinking about a kid I had in 2003. I taught math at a Title I middle school. Had a 7th grader, call him M, who couldn't sit still and never did homework. Failed the first three quarter assessments. By December his mom and I both kind of accepted he was going to repeat the grade. Then in January he started turning in his homework. All of it. Handwritten in a notebook. The handwriting was bad but the work was right. I asked him what changed. He said his older sister had moved back from college because money was tight, and she had been sitting with him at the kitchen table every night with her precalc textbook, doing her homework while he did his. Said it was easier to focus when she was working too. He told me she would stop her own work to help him with the parts he didn't get. He passed 7th grade.…