NYT Mathematician Argues Classrooms Should Be Like Gyms in the AI Era
stevenstrogatz · x · 2026-09-19
Dartmouth math and CS professor Dan Rockmore writes in The New Yorker that the classroom should be more like a spin class: nobody outsources exercise to machines because the process itself is the reward. Yet with AI now able to do much of what students are asked to do, the refrain he hears is "Why are we doing that?"
His core argument: the great challenge of teaching is not transmitting information—machines do that cheaply now—but reliably engineering moments of genuine understanding that students come to crave. As AI presses harder on academia, the value of the training process itself needs defending. The piece was shared and endorsed by mathematician Steven Strogatz.
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