Teachers in Transition: Career Change and Real Talk for Burned-Out Teachers
Burned out in the classroom? You’re not alone—and you’re not stuck.
Teachers in Transition: Career Change and Real Talk for Burned-Out Teachers is the podcast for educators who’ve given everything to their students—and now need to give something back to themselves.
Hosted by Vanessa Jackson, a former teacher who transitioned into the staffing and hiring industry, this show blends honest conversations, practical strategy, and deep emotional support. Vanessa knows exactly how burned-out educators can reposition themselves and stand out to recruiters because she’s been on both sides of the hiring table.
Each episode offers real talk and real tools to help you explore what’s next—whether that’s a new job, a new identity, or a new sense of peace.
💼 Career advice for teachers leaving education
💡 Practical job search tips, resume help, and mindset shifts
🧠 Real talk about burnout, grief, and rebuilding
You’ve given enough. It’s time to build a life that gives back.
👉 Learn more at https://teachersintransition.com
Teachers in Transition: Career Change and Real Talk for Burned-Out Teachers
AI, Authentic Applications and the Human Advantage
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
AI is everywhere, but should we embrace it, fear it, or approach it with a healthy dose of skepticism?
In this episode of Teachers in Transition, Vanessa talks with bestselling author, former educator, and AI expert Jeremy Schifeling about the strange contradictions surrounding artificial intelligence. AI can help teachers recognize their transferable skills, translate their experience into corporate language, and strengthen their job-search materials, but when it becomes an easy button, the results can quickly turn into generic, fabricated word salad.
Vanessa and Jeremy explore the difference between work that is generated by AI and work that is developed with AI. They also discuss the emerging AI arms race between job seekers, recruiters, and employers, and why the best way to stand out may be to lean harder into the qualities AI cannot replicate: personality, curiosity, empathy, relationships, and real-world problem solving.
In This Episode
- Why AI works best as a thought partner rather than a replacement for human thinking
- How teachers can use AI to identify and translate their transferable skills
- Why generic AI-generated resumes and cover letters can hurt a candidate
- How to write for both applicant tracking systems and the humans behind them
- Why understanding the hiring manager’s actual problem matters more than simply matching keywords
- How teachers can use a master resume to make tailoring applications easier
- Why relationships and networking remain essential in an AI-driven job market
- How AI may affect entry-level jobs and the future talent pipeline
- Why teachers’ relationship-building and emotional-intelligence skills may become even more valuable
- How to ask AI to critique your resume instead of writing it for you
- A simple, low-pressure way for AI beginners to start experimenting
- Jeremy’s Teacher Hack for surviving those final ten minutes before the bell
A Few Important Takeaways
· AI is especially good at translation, pattern recognition, brainstorming, and review. Give it your real experiences, accomplishments, feedback, and stories, and it can help you see connections you may have missed.
· AI should not replace your voice, your curiosity, or your relationships. Use it to support your thinking, but keep yourself in the process.
· And remember: Your teaching experience has prepared you to solve real problems, communicate with different audiences, manage competing priorities, and build relationships quickly. Those abilities are valuable far beyond the classroom.
Connect with Jeremy Schifeling
Connect with Jeremy on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/schifeling/
Connect with Vanessa Jackson
Connect with Vanessa on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/vanessajackson78132/
Learn more about Teachers in Transition:
https://teachersintransition.com
Support Invisible Excellence
Vanessa’s upcoming book, Invisible Excellence: The Hidden Value of Teachers Beyond Teaching, is currently in its presale and crowdfunding phase. The goal is to bring this book into the hands of teachers everywhere and help them recognize how much value they carry beyond the classroom.
Watch the campaign video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6-SUmRVND0
Visit the book launch page:
https://books.manuscripts.com/product/invisible-excellence-the-hidden-value-of-teachers-beyond-teaching/
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Bottom of Form
The transcript to this podcast is found on the episode’s homepage at Buzzsprout
00:00:03 Vanessa
I'd like to welcome everybody back to Teachers in Transition, the podcast. I am your host, Vanessa Jackson. I taught for 25 years out in public education in the fine arts, and now I work for teachers helping them find their way out of the overwhelm and the stress and the chaos of trying to leave education and work in other fields.
And today on the podcast, we have Jeremy Schifeling with us, who is a bestselling author and an expert in the AI field, which I'm so excited to talk about. Because we get— first, let's, let's talk about the elephant in the room. We have all these conflicting messages about AI. Use AI, use AI, you know, AI is not, not okay. And can we start with that little contradiction in terms?
00:00:49 Jeremy
Absolutely. First of all, I have to say, just like you, former educator, you know, taught kindergarten in Philly and New York back in the day. And then I was actually working for Khan Academy when ChatGPT came out and we got early access. You know, they wanted us to use it to see if we could help schools help teachers.
And I totally agree with you, Vanessa. It's this double-edged sword. At first we were blown away. Look at all this great stuff it can do. It can develop curricula, it can develop lesson plans. And then we started to see the dark side. The hallucinations, the student cheating. And so even 4 years into this whole adventure, I'm still torn.
But I'm curious to hear what you think and would love to get this conversation started.
00:01:29 Vanessa
Well, you know, one of the new buttons on LinkedIn is if you've like, “looks like AI slop to me”, which has just blown my mind because of all the places of, you know, we have this AI that we would love to rewrite with AI for you. Why don't you try it out? And so it— I, I think it is a double-edged sword.
I think AI is best used as a thought partner. I think it has to be trained. Um, little sidebar here, sitting on my feet that we cannot see is a large 80-pound Rottweiler. Same thing, you know, if they're not trained, if they're not brought up correctly, you've got something that can run amok and cause a lot of damage.
So You know, I'm already predisposed to proper training. For example, I, I use ChatGPT. I will argue points with it. I have trained it to disagree with me. I have trained it to hold me to facts and not go too out into the weeds with my opinions, which is sometimes really annoying, by the way.
I think some of the cautionary tales that have come out where we have learned about horrible things that have happened and what that GPT has said to that individual. I think you can track that back to how were they training it? What were they teaching it to say?
00:02:43 Jeremy
Yes, yes. And I, I love the idea of training because I think it applies both to our students and to ourselves. You know, obviously with students, if left to their own devices, they're going to say, hey, I can do the thinking for me, I can do the writing for me, and they're never going to grow those muscles.
So we have to really hold them to account, like you said, Vanessa. But the same can be true for us. You know, let's say you're contemplating leaving the classroom. You have to put together a resume for the first time in 10 years. It's so tempting just to say, ChatGPT, write that resume, write that cover letter.
But now if you put yourself in the shoes of a recruiter on the other side of the screen, they say, look, this is so generic, it's so fabricated. This is not someone I want in my company. So again, teaching ourselves AI can be helpful, and we'll talk about some of those good sides, but don't fall into that easy button trap because it's not quite as easy as it seems.
00:03:31 Vanessa
Yes, absolutely. Because I call it word salad. It looks like a word salad. And it reminds me of those technical manuals where technically all the words are English, but I don't know what it says. So a lot of times when I'm working with people, you know, the biggest, the biggest challenge that I find that teachers have is translating their teacher skills to corporate language.
And I think AI can be very useful in that pursuit.
00:04:01 Jeremy
Absolutely.
00:04:02 Vanessa
What is your verdict there?
00:04:04 Jeremy
Yeah, I think this is huge. You know, like, one of the big challenges that I felt as an educator moving into the tech sector— I've also coached military veterans breaking into civilian roles— is so often the language and the culture that we're coming from prevents us from getting ready for the language and the culture of the next organization because we're carrying that baggage of all this stuff that those people don't understand.
The beautiful thing about AI is it's not good at fabricating new stuff because it just hallucinates, but it's very good at translation. So if you say, hey, here's everything I did in the classroom, now train, uh, change that to corporateese, to the specific keywords that recruiters in corporate America want. All that discussion about classroom management, lesson planning, curriculum development, that's project management, that's leadership, that's organization, that's cross-functional collaboration.
Now you're speaking the language of an insider, not an outsider. And that's how you want to position yourself.
00:05:00 Vanessa
Yes. And I actually, I built - a little shameless plug here - I built a tool for my clients that they can tell their stories. Here's what happened in the classroom. Here's how I reacted to this. Here's what I did. And it will go through and it will pull out the different things that they've done and then translate that into corporate speak.
00:05:20 Jeremy
Yes, and I think one really cool hack if anyone wants to try this at home is take a job description you're excited about, and you might be facing imposter syndrome. You're like, oh, do I really, you know, fit this edtech job as a, um, you know, district liaison or whatever it's called? Just put the job description into ChatGPT or into Vanessa's bot and literally say, how am I qualified for this role based on my existing teacher resume?
And it will actually boost you up. It'll say, Vanessa, Jeremy, you've got all these great skills. Here's how you have to explain it so it makes sense to a recruiter who's never been a teacher. So whenever you're facing that classic, you know, self-doubt, let AI sort of shine a light on those connections because you're so much more qualified than you realize.
00:06:06 Vanessa
Absolutely. One of the fun things with the tool— I named it Scout, by the way. It's for the Oh my gosh, I can't even remember.
00:06:13 Vanessa
I'll come back to that.
00:06:14 Vanessa
But the, the tool is good because AI can find patterns. So when people are telling their stories, it can start to extract patterns. I encourage my clients that use that. The more data you give it, the better of a job it's going to do.
00:06:32 Vanessa
And to— yeah. Yeah. To look for those strengths. You know, you have particular strengths in this department because you consistently say da da da da da da. Which is, I always find very fascinating.
00:06:42 Jeremy
Yeah, here's another little hack. Um, I think you totally nailed it, Vanessa. Classic rule of AI, garbage in equals garbage out.
00:06:50 Vanessa
Yes!
00:06:50 Jeremy
If you say just generate a cover letter, just generate a resume, it'll do it. But like your Rottweiler, it'll do it in a very sort of messy way that doesn't actually help you. Versus if you say, here's my resume, here's my you know, teacher professional development feedback from my principal or from my teaching faculty, all of a sudden it's got something to work with.
It's got more context, so it can start to find some of those hidden connections that you may not have realized yourself.
00:07:19 Vanessa
Yes, because that's another thing. I'm sure that you went through this too as a kindergarten teacher, you know, one of God's chosen. You— there's a special seat waiting for you for teaching kindergarten. I taught middle school. Kindergarten, I, I could not have done that.
00:07:34 Jeremy
And I feel the same way about middle school teachers. You guys are saints.
00:07:37 Vanessa
So, so I see. I, I feel that way about, about the people who work with the littles because I would have been useless. I've been like, “you're so cute!”. I would, I would have been useless in that classroom. But, um, yeah, there goes my train of thought again.
00:07:52 Jeremy Well, and I'll, I'll just say that this is really an important point, which is no matter where you're coming from, like, don't ever have this feeling of, I don't belong. This is like a world that's closed off to me. As someone who was a kindergarten teacher who then went on to work at Apple and Google, what I discovered when I got inside these organizations is there were tons of teachers on the inside.
00:08:17 Vanessa
Mm-hmm.
00:08:18 Jeremy
But they had figured out what took me so long, which is to believe that they belonged. To see those connections. And so if you're struggling right now, you know, you've got a tool that Vanessa and I didn't even have when we were back in the classroom, which is this incredible X-ray vision, you know, to see inside the black box of the hiring process and say, hey, I actually match all these things, let me get credit for that.
00:08:42 Vanessa
So I think one of the things that we may be hitting on here is the difference between generated by AI and developed by AI.
00:08:51 Jeremy
Yes.
00:08:52 Vanessa
How, how is it— what, what signs show up that something has been generated by as opposed to developed by? I feel like the em dash, you know, has been a classic bellwether there.
00:09:06 Jeremy
Yes, I'm gonna give you the 100% smoking gun based on all my recruiter friends. They say if a cover letter starts, dear sir or madam, I am ready to express my interest in X role at Y organization. They pretty much stop reading and then immediately move on to the next application because 3 things immediately occur into their brain because they've seen it so many times.
Number 1, you clearly used AI. AI always starts that way. Number 2, you used AI in a lazy way, not a sophisticated way like Vanessa said. Number 3, therefore you must be lazy and there is no way I'm going to put my own reputation on the line. to go to bat for a lazy person.
So bottom line, don't fall into that lazy trap. Use AI to understand what does this organization care about? What are their values? What do they need done at the end of the day? How can I prove that? Not just how can I check this box as fast as possible?
00:10:00 Vanessa
Oh, that's an excellent point. I, I love that. Okay, so all right, the next big question, and I'm going to reference an older movie here, Real Genius. Have you seen it?
00:10:11 Jeremy
Yes.
00:10:12 Vanessa
The scene where we get to the point where there's a montage - because it's an '80s movie - and Mitch keeps going to class and there's fewer and fewer kids in class and more and more cassette recorders. And then on the final day, he walks in and you just see him look so defeated. And there's no humans in the class.
It's just a bunch of recorders and then a reel-to-reel from the professor that says, this can be hard to hear. Listen closely. And I feel like we're, we're getting to that point. There are several— there's a lot of job descriptions that are written by AI which are their own word salad that now we're trying to extract and figure out how to write a resume that's tailored to that and, and meets that.
But let's just say everybody's using AI to tailor their resumes to the word salad. Aren't we just going to end up with a bunch of resumes that look the same?
00:11:03 Jeremy
Yeah, it's like this AI arms race, right? Job seekers using AI, recruiters using AI, employers using AI. Everyone's just trying to out-AI each other. And I think the way to step off that broken treadmill is to come back to the humanity, the thing that got you into teaching in the first place. Like, you didn't go into teaching to become part of a bureaucracy.
You got into teaching because you wanted to help other people. And I think what you can think about when you apply for a job Is what's the pain point behind the hire? You know, here we are in 2026. It's kind of a crappy job market. I'll be honest. If a hiring manager— Yeah, that's right.
If, um, you're gonna stick your neck out in the middle of this dumpster fire as a hiring manager and say everyone else is doing layoffs, but I actually want to hire, that's a huge risk. And you are taking this risk because you have real problems to solve. You know, imagine you work at Khan Academy and as a nonprofit, your big goal is I gotta serve more kids.
I gotta get more schools involved. I gotta help more teachers, but I have a small staff. How do I do that? And now when you sit down to write the cover letter or write the resume, don't just think, how can I put in some keywords that make another AI happy, but how can I put in the solutions that my future boss is gonna crave?
Show him or her, hey, I understand that you're facing these huge challenges. Here's how I solved them in my classroom. Here's how I can solve them for you. If you're speaking that human language of actually solving real problems in the real world, you're already standing out compared to all the AI bots.
00:12:38 Vanessa
I love that. And, and, you know, you're almost kind of walking into another problem that we find as job seekers out in the market. You've got the ATS, whose only job is to get rid of most of the applications before humans see them. I think of it as a little Gandalf going, “YOU SHALL NOT PASS!”
But then once it gets past that, now a human has to interpret what made it pass. So you're really writing for 2 audiences at this moment. So the keywords, I think, are important because otherwise you don't get through that gate unless you've gotten through it other ways by networking and making friends, which that's really the way to go.
But, uh, but it does also have to make sense to— it also has to make sense to a human who reads it in the, in the setting of a recruiter or a hiring manager. But let's pivot a little bit to talking about how the teachers who listen to this podcast who are still in the classroom How can AI help them in a world where everybody thinks they can do 5 jobs and in one 8-hour day, which is of course impossible?
00:13:49 Jeremy
Yeah, well, I love what you shared there because this is really, I think, teachers' superpower. So many job seekers approach this whole ATS gauntlet that we were talking about as a pure little game where I'm just trying to get all these keywords matched up And maybe that'll work, maybe they'll get you through.
But then, as you said, you still have to have a human recruiter read your resume and decide whether they like you, whether they can trust you. And I think the huge teacher advantage here is that we understand the idea of empathy intrinsically. When you get up in front of your classroom, you're not staring out at 25 widgets.
These are 25 individual children, each with different needs, different understandings, different backgrounds. And we understand that as teachers as part of our job. So what I want you to do when you apply for your next role is not just focus on this robotic ATS, but the human behind it and what they're struggling to find, what they need to get their job done.
And then when you write that resume, yeah, it's gonna have the keywords, it's gonna get you through that first test, that first Gandalf. But number 2, when a human reads it, they're gonna say, whoa, this person is focused on a specific role. They've shown me what they can do in the past, and now they're showing me what they can do in this specific challenge that I'm facing today.
And I think if you can deliver that to Gandalf, you will have the One Ring or the one resume to rule them all.
00:15:12 Vanessa
That is the goal. That is, that is the plan there. Um, so, and another thing that, that I've, I've really been bouncing off of lately is the idea that AI can automate so many things and it can make so many things easier, we're losing entry-level jobs. And what we're also losing are the bottom rungs of the career ladder, um, because people don't spring out of college with 5 or 10 years of experience.
And so there's gonna— I'm predicting an interesting mismatch in corporate America. I'm just wondering what you're observing.
00:15:49 Jeremy
Yeah, my crystal ball prediction is exactly the same. which is these couple years that we're living through right now, which is kind of this no hiring, everyone's job hugging, just trying to hold on for dear life. It's going to come back to haunt them when they say, okay, it's 2027 and we have no junior bench, no entry-level folks to promote to managers.
And yet we've got a ton of work to get done because the world is accelerating faster than ever. And so I do think there is going to be an explosion in hiring in the future. to make up for this gap of these last couple years. That being said— oh yeah, go for it.
What do you think, Vanessa? I'm curious.
00:16:26 Vanessa
Well, no, I was gonna say, at this point, I think teachers are going to become increasingly valuable because they're used to herding all the cats and bringing people back up to speed very quickly. Um, I, I could go off on a 30-minute side rant about what standardized testing has done to our country and how people think and learn or don't think and don't learn.
But I will say we've created a situation where teachers have to do a lot of handholding and a lot of leading to get people where they need to go because we ask them to do developmentally inappropriate things too young. That's going to come back and bite us later too. And I think teachers will be extremely valuable in the workforce bringing everybody back up to speed.
00:17:07 Jeremy
Absolutely. But I do want to come back to something you had mentioned a second ago, Vanessa, which is this idea of relationships. Because I want to be really honest with your audience. If you are coming straight from the classroom and you want to go work at a nonprofit or education technology organization or anything in corporate America, you are going to be at a disadvantage compared to the people who are already there.
Think about how risk-averse people tend to be in general. They say, hey, why would I trust this brand new person when I can go with the proven insider? However, the way you overcome that is not through keywords, not through AI, but through relationships. Because if you can build a connection on the inside with an insider, you become an insider yourself, even if you get to step foot inside that organization.
And so my challenge to every educator out there is, even if you're not ready to take the plunge, start planting the seeds today. Find someone maybe who went to college with you or a friend of a friend. We can talk about all the LinkedIn things, um, who basically is doing a job that you're curious about.
Maybe you want to understand what it's like to work on the other side of the house as an edtech vendor versus an edtech user. Find that person doing that job. Maybe they're the rep for your school and take them out for coffee or have a little Zoom chat. Because if you start to build that connective tissue, when it comes time to choose who's going to get hired for that next role, and you have a bunch of random outsiders and one insider who has a relationship, you know in your heart who's getting hired every time.
00:18:43 Vanessa
And I also say teachers downplay how good they are at building those relationships. I mean, we are— it is the day we are recording this is August the 14th, so people are either just getting back into school or it's around the corner. And the way that they connect with the kids just in the first week of school however many kids that is, and parents and new colleagues and new admin.
And the fact that they're absorbing all of this and building these relationships is a stunning accomplishment that nobody thinks twice about because it happens every year and it's just normal. But it's, it's incredible that teachers can do that.
00:19:23 Jeremy
Yeah, I really think if you think deeply about what AI represents, AI is kind of commoditizing IQ. All the stuff that we fetishized for a century or more, like, oh, we need the smartest people working on the toughest technical problems— all of a sudden, if you want to code, use AI. If you want to do data analysis, use AI.
You don't need to hire someone for 6 figures for that. But EQ is something that AI is not good at today, we all know, and will probably never be good at because it's such a deeply human thing. And so if you have that ability to build relationships with the families, with the students, with your coworkers, start to broaden those circles, not just inside the school community, but in all the worlds you're curious about, because that's going to pay off big time as you explore further.
00:20:13 Vanessa
Absolutely. Absolutely. Um, what part of a job search would you not ever let AI do for you?
00:20:21 Jeremy
Yeah, I think this does come back to the relational piece, and there are some hacks. Like, you could have AI, you know, say, look through my LinkedIn, help me figure out 5 interesting people that I can learn from. And that's a great use of AI because it kind of gets you off the schneid, gets you moving in the right direction.
But then if you say, AI, write messages to all those people, AI, script all the things that I'm going to talk about with these people, All of a sudden you've replaced your innate curiosity with this totally artificial, just like box-checking exercise. So even if you're an introvert, I know there are some teachers like that, and I certainly was one of them.
Like, please, please, please. Yeah, we're gonna raise our hands here. (Vanessa raises her hand) The introvert club. Please do not write yourself out of the human equation because you are half of that delicate dance. Do not let AI replace you in that, in that part of the process.
00:21:13 Vanessa
This is one of the reasons when I'm working with, with people, I advocate a branding statement as opposed to a summary statement or a, a, an objective statement.
00:21:23 Jeremy
Mm-hmm.
00:21:24 Vanessa
Objective— everybody wants a job. Everybody's got the same objective. Um, but the branding statement, I think, lets a little bit of the personality, a little bit of that individual unique flavor shine through in a world where everything else is the same. In the resume, and I think that is how we catch people's attention.
00:21:42 Jeremy
Yeah, I love that because I do think one of the things that AI is doing is making everyone the same. We're all becoming widgets inside the corporate factory, and that's bad for us, right? Like, if you've ever seen WALL-E, you know, all those people floating in space just like interchangeable blobs. We don't want to end up like that.
We want to be special snowflakes in our own way, just like our students are.
00:22:06 Vanessa
Sparkly unicorns.
00:22:07 Jeremy
Sparkly unicorns, I like that. That's even better. And I love— Vanessa, I would love to hear more from you actually in terms of how does a teacher do that? Like, how do you understand yourself out in this world, especially as you're exploring new fields?
00:22:21 Vanessa
And that is one of the big conundrums when we're working to pull out what people are interested in and what they do. As you mentioned a little bit earlier, teachers have almost unmatched skills in terms of event planning, project management, um, conflict de-escalation, uh, deal, you know, communications. Because think of the vast array that a teacher has to communicate with in one day in terms of age, ability levels, and topics.
Most people don't have to do that. Um, I think that one of the things that we do with the bullet points is we, we tell that story. This is how we have accomplished these things. This is what I have gotten done, and here's how it would help. Here's how it would make your life better.
Because what a company is interested in is, what— can you help them make money, or can you save them money?
00:23:16 Jeremy
Yes.
00:23:17 Vanessa
From going out. So you have to be answering those questions as well. Um, I think sometimes that, that's a second pass. I think if someone's going to sit down and write a resume doing it in one pass is not a good idea. I think you lay everything out, you go through, you make it pretty, and then you go through and then you say, how do I arrange these to tell a story?
So I think it's done in multiple passes to create a really good— I advocate for a master resume template.
00:23:46 Jeremy
Oh.
00:23:47 Vanessa
Um, that way they can take all the things that they've done, and then when we go through and we find a job description, we we can lay our master template against the job description to make sure we're speaking the same language, because the applicant tracking systems aren't as smart as the rest of the AI.
They haven't really— unless something's changed really recently, they haven't really developed them. And there's, there's, there's a few lawsuits out there on that topic.
00:24:13 Jeremy
Yes. Yeah, no, that's smart. I love the idea of like almost an archive of your greatest hits, your best highlights, that you can pick and choose for the relevant job description. One other AI idea I'll throw out there is instead of having AI write your resume, which leads to all the problems we talked about, what about having AI review your resume?
Say, hey, put yourself in the shoes of a corporate manager or an edtech professional who's reviewing resumes. What would you honestly say about this resume? What are the biggest red flags? And sometimes when you ask AI not to be sycophantic, But to play devil's advocate, it really rises to the occasion. So don't throw the baby out with the bathwater, but give it a better role to play.
00:24:54 Vanessa
AI wants to make you happy. So if you teach it that it makes you happy by pointing out what's wrong, it will be happy to do that. And it will do so occasionally kind of viciously. So, right, you could say be gentle, be gentle, be tactful, or you could even say be ruthless.
00:25:13 Jeremy
Yeah.
00:25:13 Vanessa
Because sometimes we learn more from that. You just gotta kind of armor up, but before it does it, uh, and just know that that's coming for you. But as an AI trainer, tell me how you train people for AI. What do you, what do you, what do you do?
00:25:27 Jeremy
Yeah. Okay, so here's the first thing I wanna level set with folks. If you've been listening to this and you're like, yeah, this is all great, but I don't use AI, like I've been super afraid of it or anxious about it. What I would suggest is that AI is the technology that breaks all the rules for technology.
We teachers have had our hands slapped by the IT guys for like 50 years now. Oh no, you messed up the system. You broke my computer, blah, blah, blah. What are you thinking? And as a result, we did—
00:25:57 Vanessa
Really?
00:25:57 Jeremy
That's right. We developed this phobia of like, better not touch it because we don't wanna get in trouble. AI cannot be broken. AI cannot lead to, you know, disastrous repercussions for the whole district. Instead, it's like a sandbox on your computer to play with, to try out new things, to be creative. And so if you're just sort of first stepping into this world, either to try it in your classroom or to try it for your job search, just get started, even if it's something simple like, I have a really cool vacation coming up over the holidays and I want you to suggest an itinerary.
See what it can do, get a sense for what its capabilities are, and then you'll be so much wiser using it with your kids or with your hiring manager because you've started to understand it viscerally, not just by watching us talk about it.
00:26:46 Vanessa
I love that. Okay, so I like to make sure every week that there is some sort of— I call it a teacher hack, and yes, it's designed to save us in one of the 3 ways that we pay: time, money, or stress.
00:26:57 Jeremy
Yes.
00:26:57 Vanessa
Do you have a good teacher hack for us?
00:26:59 Jeremy
Absolutely. And so my number one hack for teachers, and I think this has to do with all those things, well, at least time and stress, is I feel like there are all these moments in the teaching day when we just need something to diffuse, you know, the, the tension that's built up. And especially in elementary school where you've been with the kids for like 6 or 7 hours, you're like, I just need 10 more minutes to get to that bell ringing at the end of the day.
AI, even though it's crazy, even though it hallucinates, is crazy good at coming up with creative ideas. So if you say, I've got 10 minutes to fill, my kids are about to explode, my brain is about to explode, what can we do that kids will love? You will be shocked at the crazy funny things that it comes up with, whether it's doing like, um, a group Mad Lib that it generates for you, or even generating a song or a picture or whatever.
So see if AI— not as long as it's gonna come in and solve brain cancer, but if AI can help you solve those 10 minutes that get you to the bell, that gets you to sanity, give it a shot because it is strangely creative and it's the first time I've ever seen technology play that role.
00:28:09 Vanessa
I love that. Okay, so, and you have several books out. How can people find out more about you if they want to read your book or read your webpage or connect with you?
00:28:21 Jeremy
So in true teacher tradition, I'm going to turn this into a little bit of homework. I know we teachers are like, we don't do homework, we give homework.
00:28:27 Vanessa
Let me tell you, I gotta take notes.
00:28:29 Jeremy
That's right. My homework for you is, I hate to say it, but LinkedIn is kind of the global hub of hiring these days. And I know we teachers are like, oh, LinkedIn, another annoying social network. I want you to go on to LinkedIn, even if you've never used it before, create a profile.
You can just like upload your existing resume. And then connect with me because I want you to see that it's a safe space. It's not like TikTok or Instagram. You can connect with people who are new to you, connect with people that you already know, and then start to get known for being awesome at what you do.
So my challenge is happy to chat more, happy to share more ideas, but come join me on LinkedIn because that's where the action is.
00:29:09 Vanessa
Ooh. And if you have spurred people to go create LinkedIn pages and they haven't connected with me yet either, they should also do that.
00:29:16 Jeremy
Yes, Vanessa is the hub of this whole world.
00:29:18 Vanessa
So, and I will have that in the show notes, so it'll make it easy for people to find and connect with. So I, I want to thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast and talk today, because this is such a timely thing, and, and the rules are changing so quickly, uh, that it's almost hard to keep up with.
And, and I really appreciate the very grounded and common sense tips that we've gotten today. Jeremy, thank you.
00:29:45 Jeremy
Hey, it was my pleasure. Thank you for the opportunity, Vanessa, and thank you to everyone listening out there. I know teaching is the toughest job in the world, but it's also one of the most important jobs. So thanks for all you're doing. And if you choose to take that skill to that next place where you can contribute in the world, I wish you incredible success making that giant dent in the universe and all that you do.
00:30:06 Vanessa
Thank you so much. That was amazing. I really enjoyed talking with Jeremy. Hopefully, maybe he'll even come back sometime in the future, but definitely check out his books and his webpage and connect with him on LinkedIn as we were given our homework to do. I want to take this moment and I want to remind you that my book, Invisible Excellence: The Hidden Value of Teamwork, Teachers Beyond Teaching is in its presale phase, which means we are crowdfunding for the publishing of it, and we are trying to raise $15,000 in 4 weeks.
So please, in the show notes, you can see where you can go and you can contribute to that in a way that feels good to you and help me get this book into the hands of as many teachers as possible, because we want the teachers everywhere to know how valuable they are. how much value they have, and just that they can be anything that they want to be.
So thank you very much and have a wonderful, wonderful day. And remember, you are amazing.
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That’s the podcast for today! If you liked this podcast, tell a friend, and don’t forget to rate and review wherever you listen to your podcasts. Tune in weekly to Teachers in Transition where we discuss Job Search strategies as well as stress management techniques. And I want to hear from you! Please reach out and leave me a message at Vanessa@Teachersintransition.com You can also leave a voicemail or text at 512-640-9099.
I’ll see you here again next week and remember – YOU are amazing!