The Introvert & The AI
I've had an AI tab open in my browser for almost the entire year.
Sometimes it's on my school laptop. Sometimes my Chromebook. Often it's an app on my phone. Honestly, it's become as normal as opening a new tab to Google something, except the results are more helpful.
Here's the thing you should know about me: I'm an introvert.
I know. Strange for a teacher. But after a full day of middle schoolers (the energy, the noise, the constant needs), I don’t want to talk to anyone for a while. Sometimes that looks like sitting in the backyard with a book. Sometimes it's a long walk with a podcast. Sometimes it's just sitting in my car, breathing.
So when it's time to get work done or learn something new, AI is my go-to. Usually Claude or Gemini.
And here's why that matters for an introvert:
I have a subject matter expert for any subject available whenever I want one, and it never requires me to talk to a single human being.
That's not a small thing. That's a bit of a miracle.
Just since school let out, AI has helped me with more than I can put into a blog post. But here are the highlights:
Building my personal portfolio site (benknaus.com)
I wanted a site. I had no real plan, just an old site I hadn't touched in years. AI helped me figure out where to host it, what to include, what to cut, and when I had specific ideas about how things should look, it wrote HTML tailored exactly to my vision and matched my existing styles and tone.
Could I have figured out the code eventually? Probably. But "eventually" means hours or days, and AI got me there in seconds and minutes. And the introvert in me didn't have to talk to anyone.
Building this blog
You're reading it. AI helped me decide where to host it, which templates actually made sense for what I wanted, and how to move 337 posts out of Blogger without losing my mind. When I got stuck (more often than I'd like to admit), I'd take a screenshot, add a quick explanation, and get back step-by-step directions that were almost always exactly right. Hours saved. And not a single customer service chat.
These are just the big things. There have also been smaller moments: brainstorming summer learning ideas, planning some summer training, thinking through how to improve my teaching this coming school year.
AI is quietly becoming my first resource for just about everything.
I'm a teacher who loves learning. I'm also someone who needs quiet to do it. It turns out those two things are a perfect match for this particular moment in technology.
For this introvert, AI is my partner.
