Giving Up Teaching

and not because of AI.

A person who taught classes on building homes, buildings, etc., I always wanted to do what he was doing in planning housing and structures. It was not in the cards back in 68 and I ended up in the Marine Corps as enlisted. Did my time and got out in 71.

Thought I would go on to get an engineering degree. Fate arrived at my doorstep again. The bottom dropped out on that discipline. Ended up with a BA in Business/Economics with a minor in Math (JIC). JIC never happened and I ended up in Global Planning and touring the world. Fate has a funny way of changing your direction and fate in life.

Not any worse off (I think). I did not get to follow my deam. However, I did learn about the world in which I lived through extensive travel.

“After 18 years, I have given up teaching sustainable design,” Carbon Upfront, Lloyd Alter

In 2007, I was a Treehugger writer speaking to students. It was then the Ryerson School of Interior Design in Toronto. The Chair, Annick Mitchell, asked if I was interested in teaching Sustainable Design at the school. I started in January 2008 with no teaching experience. There were no textbooks on the subject. It was a weird time; the housing crash had hit, and the economic crash was coming, and my early lectures were full of pictures of food lineups from the Great Depression.

I really didn’t have any idea what I was doing. Everyone was talking about Peak Oil (remember that?), and I talked about peak corn, peak gas, peak water, peak metal, even peak dirt. I would show this version of Hubbert’s Peak chart, which puts us now right in the middle of confusion, baby boomer die-off, and Saudi Arabia running dry.

Teaching sustainable design was hard; everything was changing all the time. The Inconvenient Truth had just been released and won the Academy Award for Best Documentary in 2007; climate change was being discussed, but was not yet dominating the discussion in the design world. We were too busy arguing about LEED and bike racks, mercury in compact fluorescent bulbs, green gizmos and always about energy. There was a bit of talk about embodied energy, and nobody had heard of embodied carbon. There was exactly one timber tower under construction, Waugh Thistleton’s Murray Grove in London; the developer was so afraid that nobody would want to live there. He was he insisting all the wood be covered in drywall.

I learned so much over the next few years, about mass timber from Andrew Waugh, Passive House from the late Monte Paulsen and Elrond Burrell, The Original Green from Steve Mouzon, Thermal comfort from Robert Bean, carbon from Bruce King, and sufficiency from Yamina Saheb. Perhaps the highlight of my career was a Twitter conversation with Elrond Burrell and Jorge Chapa, where we renamed “embodied carbon.” I am very proud that “upfront carbon” is now in common use. As my thinking and writing evolved, so did my teaching.

My TMU Sustainable Design students on how to fix the world

I enjoyed teaching. In early 2024, I explained why I kept doing this.

“Ultimately, it is for the satisfaction I get from many of my students’ work, particularly in the final exam. It becomes clear they were listening and learning. And many woud tell me they have been inspired. A few have said it changed the direction of their lives and switched courses to the sustainability sector. And sometimes, I feel that I am learning as much from them as they are from me.”

Why I am thinking about giving up teaching

How quickly things changed. Fifteen months and two teaching terms later, I was singing a very different tune, I thought half of the work submitted was AI-generated. As the old joke about advertising goes, I didn’t know which half. Nobody was showing up to class. I was frustrated and angry and complained that it was probably my last year of teaching, it wasn’t fun or satisfying anymore.

I decided to give it one more chance. But this year, I was going to do it differently. I wanted bums in seats, so 40% of the marks were going to be for little reports on at least eight lectures:

“What did you learn? What did you like? What did you disagree with? 250 words tops.”

This meant I had to grade up to 120 little essays every week, but some of them were astonishing- I got instant feedback on every lecture, strong pushback and discussion about many points, complaints that I was strident and opinionated (I am), but also many that showed some serious thought about the lecture. And they showed up in droves.

Instead of the big projects and book reviews of previous years, I asked them to write an essay about what interested them about sustainability. They were confused because it was so vague, but I met with a small group of them every week to discuss topics, which is the first time in all these years where I actually spoke to every student individually. I have been reading essays on the Hagia Sophia, on sandstone architecture in Jordan, on basketball shoe design, and a mindblowing one on brutalism and timber design that will be another post. Every one is different and there have been just one or two where I smell AI, although it is getting so good that I probably wouldn’t know. But I am enjoying my students and their work more than I ever had, and I am learning something with every essay.

“Why are my students falling asleep in class? I don’t think it’s me.“

On the other hand, I hated the classroom, stuck in the giant cold gray engineering building. It was a bitter, snowy winter in Toronto and I couldn’t ride my bike, and was stuck in crowded rush hour subways going home. The work of grading has taken its toll; I am tired of it, and I still have to face all the exams. And while I spend my days reading and writing, there is still the serious issue of currency- am I up to date and on top of the subject? I may have been there at the beginning of the discussion of embodied carbon, but the world has moved way beyond me.

There is also finally a textbook, Sustainable Design from Vision to Action, written by Jeremy Faludi, whom I have known of since the Worldchanging days. I bought it and honestly, while I covered most of the topics it does, there is so much more detail and rigour than what I was giving my students. This is a serious subject and they deserve more. They deserve a full-time professor, and this course shouldn’t be an option. It should be mandatory starting in first year. I have complained about this forever, and maybe now they will take the idea seriously.

I am glad I didn’t quit last year, and have enjoyed this one so much that I want to go out on a high note. So thanks to The Creative School and the School of Interior Design at Toronto Metropolitan University, and to all my students; it has been sometimes fun, sometimes a slog, but it has always been a privilege.