Every year, schools find ways to celebrate the educators who show up – and show up fully – for students every single day. This year, the Scholar team decided to do something a little different. Instead of sending flowers, we sent ourselves.
We called it Fetch the Teacher a Break.
The Scholar team visited classrooms across our partner schools during Teacher Appreciation Week and taught 30-minute lessons – so teachers could step away, breathe, and actually enjoy a moment of the week meant to honor them.
But here’s the part we didn’t expect: the kids had a lot to say.
The Lesson: “What Makes a Great Teacher?”
Before we walked in, we had one goal: give teachers a genuine break while giving students something meaningful to do with the time. So we designed a lesson in Scholar that did exactly that.
Each student logged into Scholar individually, typed “hi,” and BaxterBot – Scholar’s AI tutor – took it from there. BaxterBot guided students through three big concepts, one at a time:
- What do teachers actually do?
- Why does that matter for your learning?
- What can a teacher do that AI never could?
Their final task was a personal gratitude statement, typed directly into Scholar, addressed to their teacher. Every response saved automatically and was visible on the teacher dashboard.
The Part That Stopped Us in Our Tracks
We’ve seen a lot of BaxterBot sessions. We know what students ask, what confuses them, and where they light up. But this lesson surfaced something we hadn’t quite seen before – students thinking critically about AI, and articulating with surprising clarity what makes a human teacher irreplaceable.
Here’s what they said.
Why This Matters Beyond the Warm Fuzzies
These responses weren’t just sweet – they were instructionally significant.
When students articulate why they value their teacher, they’re doing something cognitively sophisticated: connecting learning experiences to outcomes, identifying what kinds of support help them grow, and distinguishing between types of intelligence – human versus artificial. That’s metacognition. That’s AI literacy. And it happened inside a 30-minute Scholar lesson.
This is the design philosophy behind Scholar: AI should always amplify what teachers do, never try to replace it. BaxterBot can personalize practice, give real-time feedback, and surface the data teachers need. But BaxterBot will never show up to a student’s soccer game. It won’t act out a Civil War battle scene to make history click. It won’t step on a palmetto roach in a moment of chaos. And it won’t make a kid feel like the best version of themselves.
That’s the teacher’s job. And students – even young ones – already understand this.
Want to Bring This to Your School?
The “What Makes a Great Teacher?” lesson is available in Scholar now. It works as a standalone activity, a meaningful end-of-year reflection, or a conversation starter any time you want students to think more critically about AI and the humans who teach them.
If you’re a school leader looking for ways to honor your staff and give students something worthwhile to do in the same 30 minutes, reach out to the Scholar team – we’d love to talk.
Dance parties. Perspective. A better version of yourself. You do the things no algorithm ever will.
Thanks for all you do, teachers! – The Scholar Education Team