Through the Undertow
If you've ever swum in the ocean you know that it is not a neutral environment. It looks manageable from the shore. You walk in, it's fine, you're swimming, you feel capable. And then at some point you look up and the shore is further away than it should be. You've been moving. You just haven't been moving in the direction you thought.
That's an undertow.
An undertow is not a wave. It's not dramatic. It doesn't announce itself. It's a current running beneath the surface, moving in a direction opposite to where you're trying to go, and it is most dangerous precisely because you can't see it from where you're standing. By the time most swimmers realize they're in one, they've already been carried.
Through the Undertow
Learning to Read the Water
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
What happens when a student submits an essay containing a word he can't pronounce, can't define, and can't defend — and still looks you in the eye and tells you that you must be a really good teacher?
That's not a cheating story. That's a cognition story. And that's why Through the Undertow exists.
In this pilot episode, we introduce the central metaphor of the show: generative AI as an undertow — not a wave, not a villain, but a current running beneath the surface of learning that moves students away from independent thought without them feeling it. We talk about cognitive erosion, what it looks like in a real classroom, and why the ban-it-or-embrace-it debate is mostly the wrong conversation.
This show lives in the harder and lonelier place in between. Welcome to the water.