Intro:
If you’ve been listening for a while, you know oral assessment has been building toward this. This week, I made it official — a required, graded piece of every major exam for the first time. It went well in one class. It was genuinely hard in another. And there’s a piece of it I’m not willing to hand over to AI, no matter how tempting the time savings are.
This one’s a solo update — no guest, just me and what actually happened in my own classroom this week, including the honest math on whether any of this works if your class is twice the size of mine.
Timestamps:
0:00 – Cold open
0:17 – Welcome / what this episode covers
1:16 – How it went in Geology/Meteorology/Oceanography (GMO)
2:02 – Gut instinct over a formal rubric
2:53 – GMO wrap-up: “it worked swimmingly”
3:09 – Honors Physics: 18 students, barely finishing in 55 minutes
4:59 – The line I won’t cross: why AI can’t grade the summative assessment
5:20 – The formative side: the daily lesson cycle and where it breaks down
6:38 – The real bottleneck: not enough time to reach every student
7:04 – The fix: using Flint K-12 for after-class oral check-ins
8:07 – Tying back to Justin Reich: “nobody knows how to teach in the age of AI”
9:33 – A colleague’s test scores jump after going analog
10:13 – Close
