The Sentence That I'm Very Tired Of Hearing as a Teacher

and my case for nuance with the term "efficiency" in education

For the past year, there has been one sentence that I feel like I cannot escape. No matter where I look as a teacher it appears continuously, tirelessly, particularly when navigating various online education communities.

And while I do grant that this sentence is usually well-intended (at least at the surface level) I’m really getting to the point that I cannot take it anymore.

Hence, this post.

The sentence?

This can save you time as a teacher.

Regardless of whether this sentence arrives from someone genuinely trying to help teachers or someone trying to promote the latest AI product to hit the market, it feels like all the algorithms have somehow barricaded me into a loop of being told repeatedly that there are all these magical solutions of efficiency that will avail me endless time to do “the things that really matter.”

Well, consider this as my formal rebuttal.

(And no, this post decidedly will not save you time as a teacher.)

---

one of the biggest algorithm hauntings for me these days: Brisk AI

Yes, efficiency can be good! (but not always.)

I worry at times that efficiency is understood automatically as the clearly-better path.

Are there cases where this is true? Of course. Trying to keep our heads above water as two educators in a household with a 5-year-old and 2-year-old, I wouldn’t hesitate to press a hypothetical button that allowed us to bypass all the laundry-folding and dish-cleaning and lunch-preparing in a given week.

But there is a temptation, I believe, to transfer the more-efficient alternatives in these situations into education spaces and to neglect any consideration of what is lost in the move as educators towards efficiency in our practices.

Perhaps my immediate counter, then, to any of these offerings of tools or strategies for efficiency is to wonder what will be lost in the move to a more-efficient practice?

For example, one particular video that I cannot find an escape from features someone I presume to be a teacher showing how they can within seconds use the Brisk AI tool to turn any informational YouTube video into a Google slide deck that could immediately be used for the classroom. “Let me show you how to make a week’s worth of daily slides in 20 seconds,” the advertisement opens with.

(Click on the link if you dare to enter the purgatory I’m already entrenched in!)

Setting aside the lesson that many of us teachers learned during COVID-era teaching that nearly all initially-free online tools will eventually ask for you to give them your money, I would make the argument that even if I could generate high-quality slide decks for all my lessons in the upcoming week in 20 seconds, my teaching of those lessons would suffer for not have spent that time making them.

Is that a result of my experience as well as my quite-considerable organization of resources I’ve made over my career via a color-coded Google Drive system? In part, yes, and I am also without question much more skilled at creating slide decks for a given lesson now than I was a half-decade ago.

Yet I would still argue that my understanding of the intricacies of any lesson—from its pacing to its nonnegotiables to its opportunities for flexibility and responsiveness—is deepened by my own investment in designing and revising the slide deck on my own. Authentically creating my own slide deck is an opportunity for me to think more deeply about the myriads aspects of the lesson itself, and I very much believe that time has value.

All of which would be lost if I handed off this task to Brisk or any other AI tool.

---

a not-efficient-at-all way of getting student feedback and responding to it

Choices around efficiency: an informal case study

The aforementioned example does not mean, I’ll acknowledge, that all opportunities for more-efficient practices as a teacher should be rejected.

Rather, my broader and more-nuanced point of this post is that we need to approach the idea of efficiency with much more consideration and, in particular, to weigh any potential loss that comes from shifting towards a more-efficient practice as an educator.

To illustrate what this consideration can look like as a teacher, I want to walk through three different versions of activity that many teachers use throughout the year in their classroom: informal surveys for student feedback.

⓵ Hard Copy Surveys with Handwritten Answers

When I started teaching back in 2012, this was what pretty much all surveys (along with pretty much else!) looked like in the classroom, leaving me to collect and paperclip stacks of papers to eventually find a time to read and record results.

Efficient? Not so much. But even in 2025 I still use this version from time to time, especially as a single-question survey at the end of something students are already completing and turning in.

This creates opportunities not only for me to be more thoughtful in collecting the feedback—reading the actual handwritten words of students ends up sinking in for me much more anything submitted digitally—but also, perhaps more importantly, more authentic in responding with my own quick handwritten notes back to students.

This takes time, of course, but I’ve found that it is well spent time at certain moments in the school year.

⓶ Google Form Surveys with Spreadsheet Results

As pretty much anyone who has read The Broken Copier over these past few years knows, I’m quite a fan of the Google Form survey—particularly Jim’s monthly check-in strategy that has now become a core part of our own classroom. (Despite some clunky Google Form updates of late, I will fully admit!)

While this is much more efficient than gathering feedback via printed surveys, I still appreciate how this tool creates an opportunity for me to engage with the data on the resulting spreadsheet. After collecting results, I take the time to look for averages with some quick formula work and then shift to reading through typed responses line-by-line, looking for potential quotes to feature anonymously in sharing back the results.

And therein comes what I think is the most important step: whenever I give a survey, I hold myself accountable to sharing the results back to students—and that simple process of going through the spreadsheet and finding a way to share my own interpretations of the data back with students? I find it incredibly meaningful in making sure I authentically sit with and process the results I’ve received.

⓷ AI-Generated Summaries of Digital Survey Results

This is where the new landscape of artificial intelligence offers an even more-efficient path: having an AI tool review the results for you and generate a summary and interpretation of the results that you can instantly share back to respondents.

Quite literally, this can mean that within seconds of a survey being taken you can turn around not just the averages but a comprehensive overview and series of interpretations. I pulled up an old spreadsheet of end-of-course survey results from a previous school year just now and uploaded it to Claude.AI after removing all identifiable data, and it immediately spit out an entire breakdown, including this:

part of the AI summary and interpretation of an end-of-course survey

The benefits of this: super-efficient turnaround and fairly-accurate interpretations (I had gone through all this data and recorded my own reflections back when I gave it originally, and it all pretty much lined up.)

The downsides, though, of this AI-enabled more-efficient move? It pretty much eliminates the need for my own investment of reading through and processing the results. With just a few quick moves, I can have a solid interpretation of the data at my fingertips—why got through the work of interpreting it myself when I can just share back what Claude.AI provided for me?

(I bet Claude.AI can even make the survey next time, too!)

---

Canva AI Dream Lab-generated image from this prompt: cartoon with a teacher holding a sign that reads "This AI tool can save you time as a teacher" with black and white shading (I mean, who doesn’t love “you time”?)

My broader point: efficiency has downsides

I can only speak for myself, but my own reaction whenever I read survey results or any form of communication in which I find out that it was generated via AI—either through a transparent acknowledgment or my own suspicions?

A feeling of disconnection and, to a degree, disappointment.

They didn’t care enough to spend the time with this survey themselves.

This is the “more-efficient” landscape I fear we are entering: one in which quantity has never been easier to achieve and, as a result, quality, particularly in terms of authenticity, suffers immensely.

Yes, you can cherry pick the examples of AI tools themselves being flawed, such as the image above that produced a fun typo when I tried to generate an image for this post via Canva’s Dream Lab.

But AI is becoming increasingly accurate by the day, and ultimately accuracy is not nearly as much of a concern for me as authenticity is.

Why should a student (or anyone else) invest time in a survey that is just going to be fed through an AI tool to process the results? Why should I read an email that someone couldn’t both to write? Or sit through a PD activity they did not spend time actually designing themselves?

Admittedly, however, this piling of questions is a bit of a straw man approach on my part, as I am sure there are best case scenarios in which those needing support spent just as much time with their own investment while working alongside AI to get to the outcome they desired. For instance, someone could very well share back not just the AI-generated survey interpretations but also their own thoughtful reflection of what AI took away from it.

Efficiency isn’t automatically good, but it isn’t automatically bad, either.

It’s complicated.

---

This is why we need more nuance around “efficiency”

Especially in this moment.

Going back to my survey examples, before I leap towards a shiny new tool promising efficiency, I think it is incumbent upon me to consider not only the benefits but the downsides as well—and to make the decision that is best for my students and classroom in the moment and going forward.

As skeptical as I remain within the AI conversation amongst educators, I also recognize that the fact that it is as much of a conversation as it is sort of underscores the importance of grappling with the potential benefits of artificial intelligence as a tool rather than outright rejecting the premise.

That said, the grappling needs to happen in both directions—which is why those spewing “This can save you time as a teacher” promises into the ether need to also qualify those claims with acknowledgments of what could be lost amongst this time-saving. (Not to mention the inevitable “filling of that time” by other expectations in the scarcity-landscape we are increasingly moving towards in education.)

Efficiency can be good, but not always.

(Now, if only there was a way to escape the algorithm?)

---

Some additional stuff

As always, feel free to respond with your own thoughts and questions about this efficiency stuff. Also, don’t feel the need to be too efficient as you do so—say all that you want to say, haha! “Conversation in the comments” has been one of the best parts of this Substack, and don’t hesitate to share out this piece on other platforms if you feel it’s worth sharing!

Finally, before I sign off officially—talk about an inefficient post, am I right?—here are four education-related things I’ve recently come across that felt worth sharing with our readers:

• When I downloaded the most recent Human Restoration Project episode for my drive home this past weekend, I did not expect that I’d be reconsidering my entire approach as a teacher in the classroom—but after listening to Christian Moore-Anderson share his pedagogy through the lens of cybernetics, I was could not stop reflecting on my own practices now and going forward. It was a gift of a conversation, and you should without question check it out!

• Consider this line from

  Adrian Neibauer
  ’s latest reflection: "School is temporary. Learning and growth are forever. I help them find solutions to the things in life that are challenging because these same challenges may one day become their strengths as adults." I know Adrian’s work gets shared a lot on The Broken Copier—including our most recent podcast with him!—but there’s a reason: his transparency and humility in sharing his student-centered practices are a gift. (And well-worth becoming a subscriber to if you aren’t already!)

• Writing for Edutopia, Tyler Rablin lays out four different strategies to “boost students’ self-efficacy.” He begins this piece by acknowledging how “confidence” has become another overused phrase in education, “joining the ranks of terms like grit and resilience that are great in theory but are often used to put expectations on students instead of analyzing the system of education or how our classrooms function.” Great strategies in this piece—and also a great framing from one of my favorite voices in education.

• In Top 5 Worst Pieces of Feedback Given to Educators by

  Jo Lein
  lays out five different phrases to avoid when offering feedback to teachers—and, in my estimation, goes 5/5. (Along with an important reminder that teachers, like students, are quite attuned to anything inauthentic as far as feedback.)