In my first posts with CSR (see here, here, and here), I explored stories of conviction, transformation, and the slow work of formation. Today’s story introduces a compass that I use to navigate learning in the age of AI, and of course, it’s about bananas, absurd deals, and the choices we make in our learning journey.
I have a story I tell at the beginning of the semester—usually to seniors. By that point, I’ve built up trust with them. They know I’m probably going somewhere with it, and they’re willing to go along for the ride.
I begin simply: “I AM the World’s Greatest Banana Salesman.”
Skeptical looks? A raised eyebrow? At least one student who started class looking bored is now sitting straight up with a “You’ve got to be kidding me—this is what we’re talking about today?” expression? Yes, yes, and yes.
I double down. Yep, I’m the World’s Greatest Banana Salesman, and I can prove it. I ask for a volunteer—someone willing to have some fun and not lose the thread. I offer them 12 bananas for $5. Will they buy them? Sometimes they say yes, sometimes no. Maybe it depends on whether the class is before or after lunch. I digress. Whatever the answer, here comes the fun part.
I say: I know I offered you 12 bananas for $5, but I have a MUCH better deal. I know you’ll take it. I’m certain. In a spirit of generosity, here’s my final offer: 6 bananas for $5. What a bargain, right? A steal. I know you want this. It’s so much better, right?
I build it up. I make them see the absurdity I’m trying to put over on them in such an obvious, bald-faced way—to get them to accept that less for the same price is more. We all get to a point where we’re a bit confused as to why I might try to do this to them. We see the perfect absurdity of it all.
Then I pivot.
This is EXACTLY what you’re doing to your education here at our university if you’re not careful. If a professor offers to cancel class, you celebrate. But wait—that’s one less banana. If you cut corners on an assignment, copy from a friend, use AI when you need to wrestle with something—one less banana. Skip class? Down another. Not get involved with a student organization? You must really not like the bananas we’re offering.
You’re paying the same amount in time and money—grab ALL the bananas you can. Be greedy for them. Hungry for them. Don’t let the World’s Greatest Banana Salesman—or anyone else, including yourself—convince you to take a sucker’s deal.
This story, I realized as I was preparing my book, is essentially the parable of the talents retold – what will we do with what we have been given? As educators, we have been given much and aim to deliver much.
I love this story—not just because it gets a laugh, but because it reveals something deeper. In a world shaped by AI, distraction, and acceleration, we’re constantly being offered deals: faster, easier, more efficient.
As I wrestled with this question—especially in the age of AI—a framework began to take shape. A simple matrix. A compass for formation.
It maps two tensions:
- Faculty posture: Do we design learning to resist AI (AI-proofing) or to integrate it wisely (AI-enhancing)?
- Student mindset: Do students approach learning as an obligation (have-to) or as a vocation (get-to)?
These axes form a 2×2 matrix—a tool I now use to reflect on how we teach, how we learn, and how we form students in this moment. The Banana story is an excellent argument for the Get-To mindset.
In my recent book, I name the quadrants, explore the details, and acknowledge the shared nature of the learning journey that leads to a blending across axes, ultimately asking what it means to move toward the upper-right: where AI is used wisely, and learning is experienced as a gift. There are places as educators and in life where we want to be in the Get-To/AI Proofed quadrant (I tend to call this Purposeful and Protective), where we want to build the foundation, get the reps, and lean into basic formation. And times to head all the way over to Get-To/AI Enhanced (Joyful and Wise) – use AI to go further, dig deeper, explore nuance. But the quadrants below that involve students performing drudgery, stuck in a Have-to state of mind? Not much formation is happening, and not a lot of reason to spend any time there.
Let’s also take a moment to return to that absurd 6 bananas for $5 deal and ask the hard question about what we are trading away?”
In 1956, Benjamin Bloom and his colleagues introduced a framework that would shape education for decades: Bloom’s Taxonomy.1 It offered a hierarchical model of cognitive skills, from basic recall to complex creation, and included steps such as remembering, applying, evaluating and creating. This taxonomy has become a staple in curriculum design, assessment, and pedagogy. And while some cognitive scientists and educators argue that thinking doesn’t unfold in neat layers, and others propose alternative models such as Anderson and Krathwohl’s revised taxonomy, Fink’s Taxonomy of Significant Learning, or Marzano’s Dimensions of Learning, I’m reminded of the adage “all models are bad, the best ones are useful.” Bloom’s Taxonomy remains a helpful tool—not because it captures every nuance of cognition, but because it gives us a shared language for thinking about learning goals and cognitive development.
AI tools like ChatGPT, Wolfram Alpha, and Grammarly now perform the lower levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy with astonishing speed and fluency. They can recall facts, summarize texts, solve equations, and even apply formulas to novel problems. What once required hours of study and repetition can now be done in seconds with a well-crafted prompt.
At first glance, this seems like a gift. Why not outsource the tedious parts of learning and focus on the higher-order skills? But here’s the problem: the lower rungs are not optional. They are foundational. They are the scaffolding that supports everything above.
When students skip the struggle of remembering, understanding, and applying, they lose more than time—they lose the opportunity for healthy growth and change. They miss the slow, effortful process by which knowledge becomes intuition, by which facts become frameworks, and by which ideas become tools for wisdom.
Cognitive science confirms this.2 The process of encoding information through repetition, retrieval, and application literally rewires the brain. It builds the neural architecture that makes analysis, evaluation, and creation possible. Without that foundation, students may be able to critique—but not comprehend. Remix—but not originate. In engineering, this is the student who attempts to evaluate the results of a finite element model without the discernment necessary to use a free body diagram to ensure that all of the forces and impacts have been addressed.
This is not just a pedagogical concern. It is a spiritual one.
For Christians, we know that learning is not merely the acquisition of information—it is the formation of the person. The mind is not a machine to be optimized, but a faculty to be renewed (Rom 12:2). When we bypass the struggle of learning, we risk bypassing the very process by which character, wisdom, and humility are formed.
Furthermore, this isn’t just about education. It’s about life.
We get to do hard things—for Him.
We get to wrestle with ideas, build relationships, and grow in wisdom.
Digital tools can help us—but only if we use them wisely.
The banana story is, at its core, a parable about what we do with what we’ve been given. In the age of AI, the temptation isn’t simply laziness — it’s the seductive logic of efficiency dressed as wisdom. We trade depth for speed, struggle for shortcuts, and formation for output. But the renewed mind Paul describes in Romans 12 isn’t produced by optimization. It is formed slowly, through effort, through community, through the hard and holy work of learning to think, to wrestle, and to create. The question isn’t whether AI can help us — it can, and wisely used, likely should. The question is whether we’ll let it become the World’s Greatest Banana Salesman. Grab all the bananas you can. But eat them with discernment.
- Benjamin S. Bloom, ed., Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, Handbook I: The Cognitive Domain (David McKay, 1956). ↩︎
- Douglas P. Larsen, “Planning Education for Long-Term Retention: The Cognitive Science and Implementation of Retrieval Practice,” Seminars in Neurology 38, no. 4 (2018): 449–456. https://doi.org/10.1055/s-0038-1666983. ↩︎
