The English Teacher in the age of AI

In the social media post announcing her engagement to athlete Travis Kelce, the singer, songwriter and pop star Taylor Swift described herself as her fans’ English teacher. The Swifties know what it was about. But our readers, other than the Swifties, need to know the context. Taylor Swift has often alluded to various literary texts in her songs, since at least 2008, when she rewrote Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet to give it a happy ending in her massive chart-topper “Love Story” from her second studio album, Fearless. In the same song Taylor makes another literary reference to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. The lyric reads: “’cause you were Romeo, I was a scarlet letter, and my daddy said stay away from Juliet”. Then, again in the song “New Romantics” from her fifth studio album 1989 Deluxe in 2014, she wrote: “we show off our different scarlet letters”. In 2017, appeared the song “Getaway Car”, in her sixth studio album, Reputation, whose opening lines are: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of crimes”. The literature students and lovers would take a second to understand the wordplay on Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities. Another song from the same album, “This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things” has many references to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. The song begins with these lyrics:

“It was so nice throwing big parties,

Jump into the pool from the balcony,

Everyone swimming in a champagne sea,

And there are no rules when you show up here,

Bass beat rattling the chandelier,

Feeling so Gatsby for that whole year”

The list would go on. I should better restrict myself here, now that the readers, hopefully, get the point. Over the years, Swift’s fans have made posts on social media, saying that she gives “such English teacher vibes”. Fans often joked about how Travis Kelce, who is an athlete, fits the archetype of a stereotypical gym teacher while Taylor fits the English teacher mould. When Taylor captioned her post announcing her engagement with “Your English teacher and Gym teacher are getting married.”, she directly embraced this fan-made inside joke.

The English Teacher Phenomena

So, what is it about English literature? And English teachers? What is this “English teacher vibes” that, most often, the students find so alluring? What is it that makes the English teachers seem so “cool” to their students? Many famous people have said, over time and again, about the influence they have had in their life and the support they have got from their English teachers. English Studies, particularly study of literature or poetry, has always been culturally associated with empathy, understanding, liberation, self-assertion, and also dissent. The answers probably lie in popular culture and its undeniable role in shaping the cultural image of a teacher in our mind. To look for answers, I have picked up films such as Peter Weir's Dead Poets Society (1989), John N. Smith's Dangerous Minds (1995), and Stephen Chbosky's The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012).

Cinema and the Image of an English Teacher

Cinema has repeatedly returned to the figure of a teacher extraordinary: the teacher who enters an insipid classroom, comes across students who feel suffocated in an uninspiring educational system, and somehow finds a way to make them believe in themselves again, the teacher who has the magical ability to transform minds. Films have often portrayed teachers as “superhuman, capable of permanently changing lives in a short period of time” (Farhi, 1999, p.157). The figure is familiar enough to become a cinematic trope. Yet within this larger tradition of the inspirational teacher, the English teacher occupies a particularly interesting position.

Dead Poets Society

John Keating, played by Robin Williams in Peter Weir’s Dead Poets Society (1989), teaches English at Welton Academy, an elite and highly disciplined boys’ boarding school in 1959. The school is organised around four values—tradition, honour, discipline, and excellence—and its students are expected to reproduce institutional authority rather than question it. Keating’s English classroom becomes a counter-space within this authoritarian environment.

In the movie, Keating's first intervention, as an English teacher, is not really to explain poetry. Rather he takes it upon himself to change the way his students look at the world. He takes the boys out of the conventional classroom and asks them to look at photographs of former Welton students and there the lesson moves from the photographs to Robert Herrick's "To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time" and the idea of carpe diem. The images remind the boys that the boys who once inhabited the school are now dead. Keating uses this encounter to introduce the imperative carpe diem and explains the meaning to them: the students must recognise the finiteness of life and act before time closes around them. To the boys as well as the viewers, poetry, from that point of time, becomes a method of existential awakening and Keating’s teaching begins to feel almost philosophical rather than literary. There another important and interesting scene that requires our attention - the desk scene. The boys are asked to stand on the desk to change their vantage point so that they understand that there is never only one way of seeing the world. Keating’s methods may seem eccentric at first, but gradually we realise, they do form a pedagogy of perspective.

Keating, who is passionate about poetry, manages to infect his students with his love for poetry and literature. Whitman’s elegy for Lincoln gets a second and equally powerful lease on life in the film. “O Captain! My Captain!” becomes the emotional emblem of Keating’s influence. The poem that Whitman penned as a national lament was transformed by Weir into a structural and thematic pillar supporting the entire narrative, questioning what we sacrifice when we dare to shout seize the day. At the end of the film, the students stand on their desks and address Keating as “O Captain, My Captain,” even though the headmaster orders them to sit down. The gesture is significant because it is both literary quotation and decisive action. The students use poetry, the one thing Keating was most passionate about, to honour him, and to oppose the authority that has expelled him.

Dangerous Minds

LouAnne Johnson, played by Michelle Pfeiffer in Dangerous Minds (1995), occupies a very different world than Keating. She teaches at an economically deprived inner-city school to students who are predominantly Black and Latino. Unlike Welton, where students are over-disciplined and privileged, LouAnne’s students are represented as alienated from an institution that has already failed to invest in them.

If Keating begins with canonical poetry and asks privileged students to imagine beyond conformity, LouAnne in Dangerous Minds begins from the opposite direction. Her famous "Dylan-Dylan" lesson provides perhaps the clearest example. She begins with Bob Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man” to teach students metaphor and symbolism and then subsequently introduces Dylan Thomas's "Do not go gentle into that good night." She uses popular music to demonstrate that figurative language is already present in cultural forms familiar to the students. She asks students to find a poem by Dylan Thomas that can be connected with a song by Bob Dylan. The scene is useful for analysing the cinematic construction of the English teacher because LouAnne makes the teacher appear inventive rather than doctrinaire. While Keating takes his students outside the classroom, LouAnne brings her students' cultural world into the classroom. Their approaches are different, poetry acts as the common factor that helps them bridge the gap with their students.

The Perks of Being Wallflower

Bill Anderson, from the film, The perks of Being Wallflower, played by Paul Rudds, on the other hand, is not the charismatic type. He is Charlie’s freshman-year English teacher. The film establishes Charlie as an intensely withdrawn freshman who struggles to participate socially. His first meaningful connection at school is with his English teacher, Mr. Anderson. Mr. Anderson is an essential adult role model in Charlie’s life. While his parents are generally loving and supportive, his father in particular is traditionally masculine in the sense that he is uncomfortable with expressions of deep emotion. Until he met Mr. Anderson, Charlie hadn’t received serious encouragement from an adult to pursue his natural talent for writing and analysis. Mr. Anderson opens a world of opportunities for Charlie, not only helping him to connect to the world-expanding philosophy of classic literature but also affirming Charlie's own literary abilities. Charlie opens up to him about his own personal problems, and Bill listens seriously and without judgment. One of the film's most memorable exchanges is when Charlie asks Anderson why nice people choose the wrong people, he responds with the idea that people accept the love they believe they deserve. The character of Bill Anderson deviates from the superhuman teacher trope, which makes him much more realistic than the other on-screen English teachers.

Why English? Why Literature?

John Keating, LouAnne Johnson, and Bill Anderson are markedly different figures. Yet the three figures participate in a shared cultural fantasy. As a teacher, all three of them manage to transform the classroom from a space of one-way instruction into a space of dialogue. They use literature to make students feel connected to their own identities and experiences. They make their classroom a space where students feel nurtured, heard, encouraged. That an English teacher is often that person who ignites minds is also due to the magical ability of literature to transform lives.

Future of English in the Age of AI

As artificial intelligence learns to summarise novels, analyse poems and produce essays in seconds, and as fewer students choose to study English at university, the question may arise, what, exactly, is English literature's future?

To answer the question, I will say, literature, at its heart, is about stories. And long before there were books, there were stories. Humans told them around fires, on journeys, in temples, in courts and in kitchens. They told stories to remember the dead, explain the inexplicable, preserve histories, warn children, entertain strangers, make sense of suffering and imagine worlds that did not yet exist. The technology changed—from the spoken word to manuscript, from manuscript to print, from print to film and digital media—but the impulse remained.

The danger is real. English Literature and Studies will have to brave the pressures of AI, shrinking enrolments, utilitarian education, and an increasingly impatient demand for disciplines that promise immediate economic returns. But perhaps literature has never survived because it was useful in the conventional sense. It has survived because human beings have always needed stories—to tell them, to hear them, to question them, and to find themselves in them. Call me an optimist, but I believe English Literature and English Studies will survive this storm—not because they are immune to change, but because the humans’ need to tell, hear, and understand will outlast every technology they build around them.