Hi again,
The email lands in your inbox on a Tuesday: "This fall we're piloting an AI-powered instructional copilot with agentic workflows and LLM-based supports."
Twelve words. Four of them fog. You read it once, then read it again, and somehow feel a little dumber the second time. So you do the reasonable thing — you file it under "later" and go back to your morning.
Back in the summer, when we sorted out what an "AI agent" actually is, I promised I'd translate the rest of these words into teacher. And right on schedule, the fall rollout emails have arrived carrying every one of them. So it's time. This one's short — it's your holiday week, and short and useful is the whole idea.
Here's the running joke, and it's most of the lesson: half these words just mean "we added a chatbot."
The whole vocabulary, in teacher
Model (or "a GPT"). The engine under the hood — the thing actually doing the reading and writing. The catch: a dozen different tools are often the same engine in different clothes. What it means for you: a fancy new name doesn't guarantee a new brain. Sometimes it's a familiar engine with a fresh paint job.
Copilot. Marketing for "a chatbot bolted into software you already use." What it means for you: it's the same kind of assistant you've met, just living inside a program instead of a separate window. Handy. Not magic.
Agent / agentic. The aide you can hand a whole errand, not the pen pal who only answers what you ask — same as the summer issue. What it means for you: the more a tool can do on its own, the more that one rule matters (more on that below).
Hallucination. When the AI confidently makes something up — a fake statute, a quote nobody said — and states it like fact. What it means for you: this is the whole reason everything it gives you is a draft you verify, never a final answer.
Prompt. Just... instructions. The directions you type in. What it means for you: you already write better ones than most people alive. You write directions for a living — a good IEP goal is a better-specified request than anything most adults type into a chatbot.
The safety beat, one clean line
That rollout email? The one-pager in your box? Product blurbs, headlines, marketing copy — all of it is public text. Pasting that into AI is completely fine, the same way public fine print was fine last week. The rule lives somewhere else, and it never moves: a shiny new name has not earned a single word about your students. The vocabulary changes every fall. The rule never does. (And your district's AI policy is still the final word on any new tool.)
The one prompt: a translator you keep
Here's the thing to save. Next time an AI announcement makes you feel behind, don't look up the words one at a time. Hand the whole sentence to a translator:
You are a plain-spoken translator for a busy special education teacher. Here is a sentence or paragraph from an AI product announcement or headline — it's public marketing text, and it contains nothing about any student: [paste it]. Give me three things: (1) the plain-teacher translation in two sentences; (2) what, if anything, this would actually change in a classroom; (3) the one question a teacher should ask before believing it. If a term is marketing dressed up as a capability, say so plainly. Don't guess, and don't invent capabilities the text doesn't claim.
That last line earns its keep. You want the translation, not a sales pitch echoed back at you. If the announcement is mostly fog, a good translator will tell you it's fog.
Fair warning, same as always: the translator can be wrong about the fanciest new stuff, because the fanciest new stuff is exactly what it's read the least about. Treat its answer as a first read, not a ruling. If the tool actually matters to your building, the fine-print habit from last week is your follow-up.
Most AI vocabulary is sales vocabulary. The fog is the product. A translator beats a dictionary every time.
The part nobody tells you
Most AI vocabulary isn't there to inform you. It's there to sell you. The words are built to make the product sound inevitable and make you feel behind — that's the whole job of the fog. And here's what flips once you can translate it: you realize you already understood every concept underneath. A copilot is an assistant. A prompt is a set of directions. An agent is an aide. Nobody had just said it in your language.
You were never behind. You were waiting on a translation.
Try it this week
Grab that fall rollout email, or literally any AI headline that made you nod along without knowing why. Run it through the translator once. Then close the laptop and enjoy your holiday Monday — this issue is short on purpose, and you've earned the afternoon.
Then hit reply and tell me the word or phrase from your district's rollout that made you nod along without really knowing what it meant. That's how the next translation gets written.
Talk soon,
Shaun
P.S. If a colleague was in that same meeting nodding at the same four foggy words, forward this one over. Translation travels well.
A quick but important note: this newsletter is for general educational and informational purposes only. I'm a special education teacher sharing time-saving ideas. The views here are my own and don't represent any school district or employer. I'm not a lawyer, and nothing here is legal, compliance, or professional advice. Always follow your district's and state's policies, especially on AI use and student privacy, and check with the right person in your district before acting on anything significant. You are the professional: review and finalize everything yourself. And never put student names or identifying details into any AI tool.