Intention Is Everything

Preface (updated May 27, 2026): I wrote this in early spring. By the time it was about to be posted, the conversation around AI had shifted hard, and I had to add this. Sorry, Andy. So much for keeping it micro. NPR covered the trend: commencement speakers are getting booed off the stage just for saying the words. UCF graduates booed Gloria Caulfield when she called AI “the next industrial revolution.” Middle Tennessee State graduates booed Scott Borchetta when he told them “AI is rewriting production as we sit here,” then told them to “deal with it.” Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt got booed at Arizona for telling graduates that AI is the future. Read the room. The graduates are the future. AI is a tool they can choose to use well. And the pushback isn’t just on graduation stages. I’m seeing it from educators I follow on Instagram and TikTok, good teachers, bashing AI hard. I get it. I don’t think we should blindly say AI is perfect and great. I also don’t think we should blindly say it’s horrible. It’s all about intention, which is what this whole blog is about. So before you join the wave of bashing it, ask yourself the harder question. If a kid in your room could learn a skill better, or get there faster, because of something you built with AI, does that matter? That’s the question I keep coming back to. And it’s the one the rest of this post is trying to answer.

I get it. If you hear “AI in education” and your gut tightens, I’m not here to tell you you’re wrong. The environmental cost is real. The laziness it can enable is real. The risk of teachers handing their thinking over to a machine is real. None of that is lost on me.

I’ll be honest. I’m starting to be known as the AI guy in health education. My friends call me Claude. Some call me Matt GPT. I can appreciate the humor. It’s not all I want to be known for. I’ve spent twenty-two years building trust with teenagers, reading rooms, being direct about hard topics, and designing a skills-based program I believe in. AI didn’t build that. I did.

That’s exactly the point. AI does not make you a better teacher. You make yourself a better teacher. AI just gets you there faster, and faster matters. Because the kids in your room cannot wait for you to get good. They need you to be good now.

Here is what intentional use actually looks like for me.

I have been able to take unit plans I was already proud of and rebuild them with depth I could not have reached alone. Work that used to take weeks, I now do in hours. Not because the thinking is outsourced, but because I can talk out my ideas, pressure-test my choices, and keep building instead of getting stuck. The creativity is mine. AI just keeps me moving.

I photograph student exit ticket responses and have AI sort them into categories so I can see patterns across sixty students in minutes. Then I sit with the actual student, thinking about myself.

I record my classes and build a daily catch-up for students who miss. Slides, handouts, short podcasts, quick videos. Things I will never spend hours hand-crafting again, because my students cannot tell the difference between the version I sweated over and the version I built in twenty minutes by talking it through. The creativity isn’t in the slide. It’s in what I’m teaching with the slide. AI handles the build. I handle the teaching.

Reflection has also become a bigger part of my day than it has ever been. I talk about what happened in class, what worked, and what didn’t. AI helps me capture it and hold it. I’m a more reflective teacher this year than I have ever been.

The filter is always human. Every single time. My experience. My judgment. My knowledge of my students. My voice. Your experience. Your judgment. Your knowledge of your students. Your voice.

I recently had a conversation with a college student who told me, flat out, “I will never use AI.” I respected the conviction. I also asked a question. If there is a skill a student needs to learn, and you could help them learn it better, or get them there faster, with the help of AI, would you? Because the kids in our rooms don’t get a do-over on the year we teach them.

I’m not asking anyone to abandon their hesitation. I’m asking us to stay open. To get educated about what this tool actually is, and is not, before we decide what it means for our students. The teachers I worry about are not the ones asking hard questions. They’re the ones who have decided not to ask any.

Intention is everything. Use it well. Use it with intention. Or take the time to understand it before you decide. But don’t pretend the choice doesn’t matter.

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