A good book is not yet a course.
A course is timings, handouts, print counts, rubrics, openings, contingencies, and what to say when the room goes quiet. Clear Teaching About Smart Machines is that whole layer, done: the session-by-session instructor's guide to Clear Thinking About Smart Machines, written by one teacher for another, in plain sentences, with the seams left showing. Where a session tends to go wrong, this book says so, and says what to do about it.
Twenty-eight kits, one per chapter, each ready to run
- A timed run of show, from the first minute of class to the exit ticket.
- Handout masters at full letter scale, one per page, each carrying its print count. Owning this volume licenses you to photocopy them for your own students.
- Rubrics with graded anchors: what exemplary, adequate, and insufficient answers actually look like, side by side.
- Answer keys banded INSTRUCTOR ONLY on the page, backed by regeneration procedures, so a leaked surprise never retires a session.
- The contingencies: where this session stalls, splits, or runs long, and the move that recovers it.
- The sessions themselves: a timeline bet, a panic tribunal, a breakup hearing, an ethical review board, a drought council, a verification gauntlet, a steelman tournament, a licensing negotiation, and a capstone in which students defend their own terms of engagement.
The architecture around the kits
Part I sets up the term: a draft syllabus, the assessment spine, the standing rules, an LMS shell, adaptation guides for rooms and calendars unlike the default, an accessibility audit of every activity, and a chapter chooser that lays all twenty-eight sessions side by side so you can pick the handful that fit your course. Part III is the grading room: a rubric library, worked sample essays with margin comments, the handout index and print calendar, the answer-key vault, a permissions matrix, and a guide to the classroom situations every discussion course eventually meets.
Chapter 1 is the shared library: thirty-two classroom techniques, each explained from zero. Nothing here assumes you have run a discussion seminar before; where a technique has a name a methods workshop would take for granted, the book stops and explains it.
Teach three chapters, or all twenty-eight
Every kit stands alone. Run the full course, or pick the sessions your term has room for, in any order your syllabus allows. The trim is 8.5 by 11 inches so the handout masters photocopy directly from the printed page, at full scale. Professors, lecturers, high-school teachers, and workplace trainers can all run this room; so can a determined book club.
For your students, the course text is Clear Thinking About Smart Machines. For readers outside any course, the same arc exists as a solo edition, Neither Saviors nor Fate. The machines are neither saviors nor fate, and a room that argues well about them is where that judgment gets built. This is the room, ready to run.
