In this episode, Priten speaks with Chuck Parish, an English teacher at a private Christian school in El Paso, about what it looks like to build an AI elective from scratch inside a community that is still deciding whether to be afraid of the technology or learn it. Chuck's path runs through pastoral ministry, teaching at the bachelor's level in Papua New Guinea, and a year of sixth grade before landing in high school English. The conversation moves between the practical questions he is sorting out for his fall semester and the deeper one he keeps returning to: whether schools are forming the kind of judgment students need to use powerful tools well, or whether they are only writing policies.

Key Takeaways:

• Policy can legislate behavior but it cannot form character. Chuck argues that a clean ban or a strict acceptable-use document is the easy move, and the wrong one. Without a foundation underneath it, students will either ignore the rule or comply for the wrong reasons. The school's one-sentence AI policy treats the question as plagiarism, which misses most of what the technology actually changes.
• A Christian worldview has to address AI the same way it addresses every new tool. The Bible does not name AI any more than it names calculators or television, so the work is in applying an existing foundation to a new technology. Chuck wants students to be able to reason from that foundation themselves rather than relying on him to legislate each case, especially because they will leave the school and lose the legislator.
• Writing instruction was already in trouble before AI arrived. Texting has shifted how students communicate so far that sixth graders submitting "OMG" and "TY" in their papers is no longer surprising. AI does not start the decline in written reasoning; it accelerates a slide that started with the way students already talk to each other. Chuck plans to use handwritten baseline essays to anchor what each student can actually do without help.
• Demonstrating the tool in class is more honest than hiding it. Chuck plans to put ChatGPT on the classroom screen, show how fast it can produce an essay, walk through prompting, and surface the hallucinations and fabricated citations directly. The argument to students is that cutting and pasting cheats them out of the learning, and that integrity has to be taught, not assumed.
• The AI conversation has to include companions and cyberbullying, not just essays. Chuck wants the elective to cover Replika-style companions and image-manipulation tools alongside academic use, because those are the parts students are already encountering outside class. Putting head in the sand, especially in a Christian school context, leaves students to form a worldview about these tools on their own and usually badly.