Good morning. It’s Wednesday. We’ll meet a teacher who just won a $25,000 prize. We’ll also get details on a preliminary report about the carriage horse that died in Central Park last week. He had chewed on a poisonous shrub.
A Manhattan high school teacher who says he is “still a skeptic” about artificial intelligence just won a $25,000 prize for excellence in teaching. The jury that selected him cited classroom projects he had developed using A.I.
The teacher, Ian Weissman, teaches social studies. He put A.I. to work on immersive learning history projects, including one that let students question A.I.-powered figures that represented the principals at a conference in Berlin in 1884 and 1885, among them Otto von Bismarck, the German prime minister at the time.
This comes as teachers and students have increasingly found uses for artificial intelligence in the classroom.
But it also comes less than two months after the schools chancellor, Kamar Samuels, scrapped plans for an A.I.-focused high school in Manhattan amid a surge of opposition. Some families had sent Mayor Zohran Mamdani a petition with thousands of signatures calling for a two-year moratorium on generative A.I., such as chatbots.
Weissman, who teaches at the Repertory Company High School for Theater Arts, was one of six recipients of Flag Awards for Teaching Excellence, one from each of the five boroughs and one in a category for 3K-to-fifth-grade teachers citywide. Each received $25,000, along with $10,000 grants for each of their schools. Eleven finalists were given $10,000 prizes and $5,000 for their schools, and 17 semifinalists were awarded $1,000 each and $1,000 for their schools.
The organizers say that a total of $409,000 was paid out. The awards are administered by a foundation started by the financier Glenn Fuhrman and his wife, Amanda Fuhrman. The jury included Betty Rosa, the state commissioner of education and president of the State University of New York; Shamilia McBean Tocruray, the director of education at the Brooklyn Museum; and Emily Chandler, a special-education teacher from Brooklyn who won a Flag award last year.
‘More from the teacher side’
Using A.I. “more from the teacher side than from the student side,” Weissman said he had tried a new approach with material that he used to teach in conventional ways. The jury mentioned the project about the Berlin Conference, which divided Africa among colonial powers.
He also used A.I. to build an immersive learning project about World War I that focused on “life in the trenches and chemical weapons and rats and mud and all these things that soldiers were writing about and talking about.”
“I’d previously done that on standard, traditional paper,” he said. “Nothing wrong with that.”
Into the trenches on the Western Front
But he wanted his students to get a sense of actually being in the trenches with British soldiers. “If they could speak to soldiers in uniform in the trench with sound effects going on in the background,” he said, they would “experience our best approximation of the atmosphere on the Western Front at the height of World War I.”
He also said it was “time-intensive,” because he had to figure out how to use the A.I. tools “to get the images that I wanted, the sound that I wanted and the effects that I wanted” and end up with ”something that does justice to historical accuracy rather than kind of gamifying and glorifying warfare.”
The city’s Education Department has started to develop guidelines for how teachers and students should use artificial intelligence. In March, the school system published its first playbook for A.I., developed in consultation with educators and education technology companies.
“It’s still very much the Wild West in terms of regulation of these tools, of our understanding of what they can and can’t do,” Weissman said.
“I think it can be an enhancement for our brains and an enhancement for our thinking and a great thought partner,” he said, referring to A.I. “But I’m uncomfortable with the idea of it replacing human teachers and students’ human-generated work and human-generated learning.”
Weather
Expect partly sunny skies, a chance of showers and thunderstorms, and a high near 79. Tonight, keep an eye out for cloudy skies and rain. Temperatures will fall near 66.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until Friday (Juneteenth).
QUOTE OF THE DAY
“You could eat sitting at that bar and it would be Bernie Madoff next to the postman,” said Brooke Emmerich, a regular at Donohue’s Steak House, a family-run restaurant on the Upper East Side that will close on Friday.
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The World Cup
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Getting there: To find out what is the fastest and least unpleasant way to get to the stadium for the FIFA World Cup games, my colleagues took four different modes of transportation — train, bus, ride-share and personal bicycle.
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A name change: New Jersey and New York City won a bid to host eight World Cup matches at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J. But to comply with a FIFA prohibition on branding, the stadium was renamed “New York New Jersey Stadium.” New Jerseyans were not surprised.
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Deniz the carriage horse died after eating a poisonous plant
A carriage horse that collapsed and died in Central Park last week had eaten a toxic shrub, even though rules prohibit horses from consuming plants in the park.
A preliminary report said that Deniz, the 16-year-old horse that died on June 10, had chewed on a Japanese yew. Parts of the plant were in his mouth, and there was more in his stomach, according to the report, which said that his symptoms were consistent with poisoning.
The report was released by Transport Workers Union Local 100, which represents carriage horse owners and drivers. The findings do not represent an official cause of death. That will come from the city health department after a complete necropsy has been conducted.
Still, the findings set off a fresh round of finger-pointing between the union and the Central Park Conservancy over who bears the blame for Deniz’s death.
The conservancy blamed the death on negligence by the union, saying that park rules “plainly forbid horses from eating vegetation” in the park and that carriage drivers and operators are required to “attend to their horses at all times.”
“Perhaps if they had, Deniz would not have suffered as he did, and died,” the conservancy said in a statement, adding: “This tragedy underscores something larger: It’s time for New York City to join other major cities around the world and ban horse carriages from our city.”
The City Council is considering legislation that would tighten regulation of the carriage horse industry, or ban it. After Deniz died last week, Mayor Zohran Mamdani repeated what he had said during last year’s campaign, that he supported “removing horse carriages from Central Park.” He also said that he looked forward to “working with union partners and community leaders to actually deliver on that.”
METROPOLITAN diary
Good burger
Dear Diary:
In the early 1980s, I traveled to New York to visit a friend who lived on the Upper West Side. She wasn’t home from work when I got there, so I took my bag and went to a restaurant a few blocks away.
The bartender gave me a roll of quarters for the jukebox. After learning I was from out of town, he offered to take me to get the best hamburger in the city. He told me to get on a specific subway car at a specific time the next day.
I followed his instructions, met him there and had a meal that, I must admit, was quite good. I don’t remember his name or the restaurant’s, but have always considered New York a friendly place since then.
— Marian Koral
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Tell us your New York story here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.
Davaughnia Wilson and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
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The post This Teacher Has Doubts About A.I. But He Won a Prize Using It. appeared first on New York Times.
