The Power of Slant

The truth we earn (even with AI)

Colleen Ferguson · Executive Director · 17 October 2025

A short time ago, my brother died after a very brief illness. Not only was he relatively young, six years my junior, he also appeared to be a picture of health and vitality. Writing his eulogy was one of the hardest tasks I’ve ever faced.

What made it difficult wasn’t just the emotion, or even finding the right memories—it was the responsibility of capturing who he was and what he meant, but doing it indirectly. To use words lightly and judiciously. Not to tell, but to show. To invite the gathered friends and family to join me in making meaning of a relationship, and sorrow, and a life gone too soon. This type of communication is effortful. Effort is the key that unlocks a shared truth. It’s active. It’s a creation made by both speaker and listener.

What I learned in writing that eulogy is something I now see everywhere—in writing, in learning, and increasingly in AI: that meaning isn’t delivered, it’s discovered.

In Tell all the truth but tell it slant —, Dickinson said that truth “must dazzle gradually.” She seems to be warning that unless we do some work in discovering truth, we can’t recognise it when it’s presented to us. Poetry is an oblique art—built on indirection and subtraction. A reader of poetry must engage, wrestle, associate, and reflect. Reading poetry demands effort. But the payoff, the reader’s “superb surprise” -- a jolting embodiment of the poem’s feelings, ideas, and sensory experiences -- is a moment of deeply recognised truth. True learning.

Unlike the effortful meaning making of poetry, most students see learning in school as transactional: effort is a cost, not a benefit, and grades are the reward. If you can skip the struggle and go straight to the outcome—you win. In fact, from their point of view, the purpose of schooling is to achieve an outcome. The learning itself is not the point. If you can leap straight to outcome while eliminating, or reducing, struggle, then you’ve cracked the cheat code of school.

We know intuitively that this doesn’t apply when we are developing physical skills. No one believes that they can be a concert pianist or an NHL hockey player without hours (years!) of practice. It requires making and learning from many mistakes, resilience, and active striving. In fact, you’d be hard pressed to be a good amateur in these pursuits without serious effort. In the realm of the physical, we know with certainty that a desired outcome is unachievable without struggle.

However, the same is not universally believed in the realm of thinking. A common perception is that those who appear to learn effortlessly are doing it best. In fact, if a student experiences too much cognitive effort, if there is too much friction or too much struggle, they think the problem is with them. This self-perception may negatively impact motivation, engagement and self-regulation. Most students prefer to listen passively to an entertaining lecturer rather than struggle with an active learning task. One study found that when it comes actual learning versus perceptions of learning, the introduction of struggle creates an inverse relationship. When there is no struggle, students feel like they are learning but are not, and when there is struggle, they feel like they aren’t learning but they are.

Students have a misconception that learning is best when it’s easy. An equally damaging perception is that while there might be some interesting diversions along the way, school must be endured until a desired outcome is delivered. Nothing reinforces this dynamic more than AI. Whenever a student butts up against a challenge, AI can provide the smoothest of solutions. A student can leap over the problem and land directly on an answer. AI hasn’t created this aversion to struggle but it has provided a free and simple tool to achieve it.

The idea that the purpose of learning is the straight line from school to career is an illusion. It skips the only part that matters — productive struggle. Deep learning is the crooked road of missteps, recalibration and grind. It’s the thinking equivalent of piano scales or hockey practice — complete with frustration and drudgery. In the AI age, students need to learn how to use the technology in ways that preserve struggle: to sharpen thinking, question assumptions, and reveal blind spots.

Left on their own, students instinctively use AI to smooth away productive difficulty, undermining deeper learning. They will do this even when they believe they are using the technology ethically. Some preliminary research even suggests that when using AI in ways that reduce or eliminate struggle, students may be risking cognitive decline. The comparison to physical effort seems to hold here: you gotta use it or lose it.

I have been thinking a lot about this, and along with some colleagues, we have come up with some ideas and a framework for how to find the right level learning challenge even when AI is involved. I’ll be exploring those in upcoming posts.

Truth doesn’t arrive fully formed. Effort reveals it. Learning is like that. So is writing. So is this moment of AI. Slantwise will be an invitation to keep wrestling, to resist easy answers, and to embrace the work that helps us to see clearly—even if we must look slant to do it.

© 2025 Colleen Ferguson. Republished from Slantwise.