Primary Guest
Dr. James Kaishian is the Superintendent of Briarcliff Manor Schools in Westchester County, New York, and the host of Superkast, the district’s own podcast. A former English teacher who began his career in the Bronx, he leads a small district that prides itself on the kind of relationships and community most schools talk about and few get to live. In this crossover episode, he opens his conference room to Brett, two of his teachers, and two of his seniors for an honest conversation about what AI looks like inside one school, period by period. He calls himself a Luddite, then proves otherwise by asking the questions a community needs its superintendent to ask out loud.
Superkast is available on Spotify and everywhere you get your podcasts.
Also in the Room
- Karen McCarthy is an English teacher at Briarcliff High School. Twenty-three years in the classroom, eighteen of them as advisor of the school’s award-winning literary arts magazine, Briars and Ivy.
- Chris Lo teaches Computer Science at Briarcliff High School and is honest about the moment he tried to outsource his multiple-choice questions to AI and gave up because verifying the answers cost him more time than writing them.
- Ava Wu is a senior at Briarcliff High School and the editor-in-chief of Briars and Ivy. She gives her flowers to the students in the building who hold a moral line against using AI at all.
- Noah Rinke is a senior at Briarcliff High School and a theater kid who delivers the line the episode turns on: AI is “consistently inconsistent.”
