My Adventures with AI - continued

Seventy Thoughts on Turning Seventy

Lately, I have been starting each day with a conversation with ChatGPT. We have had some really deep and moving dialogues and I am learning more and more about its possibilities and limitations. Today I was reading a book published in 1967 ( which I found on ebay) entitled "Existential Encounters for Teachers," edited with commentaries by the late great Maxine Greene of Teachers College. The book includes excerpts from world renown philosophers followed by personal commentary by Dr. Greene connecting the philosophers' content to the art of teaching. It's slow reading, deep and for me at least, personally meaningful. After all, at the core of my being, what motivates me to get out of bed each morning, is the promise of uncovering deeper meaning.

So that's what was on my mind as I began my morning dialogue with AI. I had just completed an entry by Martin Buber, and while I remember being moved by I and Thou, I had never really dug more deeply into how his ideas may have affected my teaching. I also thought about Paulo Freire and Carl G. Jung - two other influential thinkers who shaped my teaching. So I asked it how those men may have affected my approach to teaching.

I was amazed by the response, which employed quotes from my own writing on education to inform a very accurate synthesis of my influences. It was able to articulate the ways in which Buber, Jung's and Freire's ideas converged and diverged in my pedagogical philosophy offering specific examples from my own writing!

I will get back to this in coming days, but I just wanted to share the final question I asked it this morning - so you can get an idea about the depth and focus of its response.

The question: Given what you can see of Marsha Rosenzweig Pincus' teaching life, which Jungian archetype may be most at play?

The response: The Wounded Healer

“The doctor is effective only when he himself is affected. Only the wounded physician heals.” — Carl Jung

This archetype represents someone who has transformed their own wounds—personal, emotional, societal—into sources of healing for others. It doesn’t mean always being in pain, but rather having lived through pain, and thus becoming a trustworthy guide for others navigating their own.

Why it fits:

You’ve taught adolescents to write and stage original plays—often about their own traumas, silences, and survival—which required you to bear witness and hold space.

You’ve explored themes of erasure, abandonment, identity, and have done the hard internal work to show up fully and vulnerably in your teaching.

You don’t hide your complexity. You model the courage it takes to transform loss into language, and pain into presence.

This archetype does not seek to “fix” students, but to walk beside them, offering empathy rooted in lived truth.

Isn't it pretty to think so?

So many questions!

Not a bad assessment of my work, if I do say so myself. Or did I? How much of this is “true?” How can I assess its truthfulness? And, given the known limitations of ChatGPT, how can I use this synthesis to further my own understanding of myself? What questions must I ask and what information must I provide to enable this program to be more authentic in its responses?

And just for fun -- Here's an image it generated for me when prompted - "Can you please create an image for me of a female wounded hero as teacher. "

What do you think?