Tony Morinello left teaching in 2018, after seven years and seven courses of his own design. Now, as Sageworx builds an academy, he’s thinking about what those courses missed and what he’d do if he taught them again.

For seven years I taught teenagers to write code. They built games, and the hardest thing I asked of them was to sit with a broken one until it made sense.

I ask the same thing of peers, who have a site an AI built for their business, with their name on it. Here at Sageworx, we’re all teaching one another, and next we’re building an academy to share our collective knowledge.

I left in 2018 to build software, when this year’s high school freshmen were in kindergarten. ChatGPT came out when they were in fifth grade. Upper administration wore me out, but the kids never did.

I’m not going back, but I think about what I’d do differently, especially now that AI writes most of my code, more of it every year, and my job is mostly reviewing what it wrote.

The surprise, eight years in, is how little of the work was ever syntax. Every real project tracks its changes in version control and runs on a database. None of it counts until it’s published. The seven courses I wrote spent most of their time on syntax, and most of my students never touched the rest.

They were great at emailing each other code, though. When I asked one of them to walk me through “their” program, they couldn’t, so we rebuilt it together, line by line, until they could. AI just makes the copying instant. Today, I’d have one rule: if you can’t explain a line to me, it isn’t yours yet.

A fifteen-year-old would have a fair question: why learn loops when a chatbot writes them in a second? Because you can’t fix code you don’t understand, and you shouldn’t put your name on it. The basics would still come first, with no AI: variable types, conditionals, loops, functions. Reading a loop isn’t the same as writing one, and I haven’t worked out how I’d check that a student can do it on their own.

What excites me most is teaching how software gets built now. Every student would make a portfolio website about themselves, and everything they built in class would live there, games included. It would sit in version control from the first day, the way real projects do, and it would get published. AI could help build it. But it’s a site with their name on it, so every line has to be one they can explain.

Two things worry me -- the kid who turns in a working project without grasping any of it, and the kid who can’t use these tools at home. Then there’s which ones to pick, and how to pay for a whole class using them all period.

The hardest thing I’d ask of them now is what I always asked. Sit with it until it makes sense, even when the code shows up finished and looking right.

If you can’t explain it, it isn’t yours yet.