My Former Boss Told Me to Do Better — So I Did and Reimagined Everything
I left a broken system behind—And built my own instead
I write about leadership, education, AI, and why teaching critical thinking about it is more important than ever.
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Anyone who’s ever worked on a large, repetitive project knows what happens after a while. Your brain starts to fog. You stop seeing typos. You can’t tell if you already checked something. Every form looks like every other form.
By the end, I was bleary-eyed, cross-checking it all and everything blurred together.
When it came time to review them, no one wanted to. The plan for a team session vanished. Everyone glanced through their own programs, said, “Looks fine,” and that was that. Then my boss went through them herself and came back with pages covered in red ink.
“You need to do better,” she said.
I remember standing there thinking: Are you kidding me? She didn’t go into anyone else’s office and tell them to do better. She didn’t remind anyone that this was supposed to be a joint project. It was easier to scold the new hire who had actually done ALL the work.
The body really does remember
That was the first time I realized how institutions handle change. They say they want improvement until improvement shows them how broken their systems really are. People don’t resist new ideas because the ideas are bad. They resist them because they expose the comfort of dysfunction.
Even when your work works, it comes at a cost.
As I was thinking through the outline for this article, my body reacted hard. I was replaying the moment I just wrote about, and suddenly I started shivering. Not from fear or from anxiety, but just a full-on body memory. My nervous system remembered exactly what it felt like in that position: to feel so helpless, frustrated, and angry without ever being able to do anything except leave.
As soon as I recognized what was happening, it passed. But it reminded me how deeply those old environments can live inside you. I left that particular job about a year later, but I stayed at the university for another twelve years and finally walked away three and a half years ago from extreme burnout.
Connection to the present
All these years later, I’m seeing something similar play out with AI. It reminds me of that office where no one wanted to switch to digital forms. People kept using the same outdated, inconvenient carbon copies that made no sense, just because that’s the way it had always been done.
It’s not the technology people fear. It’s that they’re comfortable with the status quo and have no real interest in changing it.
There really is a split. On one side, AI is producing staggering breakthroughs in medicine, science, research, and accessibility like I wrote about in my Weekly Reboot. Quietly, it’s reshaping core systems.
But on the everyday side, education, workplaces, and leadership, it’s chaos. Tools like ChatGPT are showing up with no structure, no boundaries, and no shared understanding. Students are either punished or pushed into using it blindly. Workers are shamed for using it too much or forced to use it in ways that don’t help.
Leaders are told they have to integrate AI but don’t know how or why, only that it’s supposed to “save time.”
So you end up with a cultural split: AI as a scientific miracle, and AI as a workplace and educational nightmare.
Until there’s stronger digital literacy, ethical understanding, and critical use built into the human side, that split is only going to widen.
Education and readiness layer
If we’re not teaching students how to question AI, how to build with it, how to verify and extend what it gives them, then we’re building a massive gap between innovation and education. The breakthroughs are accelerating, but the systems meant to prepare the next generation stay frozen in time.
Right now we’re so focused on catching cheaters or banning ChatGPT, and that’s small potatoes compared to what’s really at stake:
Who’s going to understand the science deeply enough to push it forward?
Who’s going to know how to collaborate with AI, not just consume its output?
Who’s going to ask better questions, design better experiments, and see around corners?
If our education systems don’t catch up, and fast, we’re creating far more than an innovation gap. We’re guaranteeing the next generation won’t be equipped to keep the momentum going. That’s the real crisis that no one is talking about.
The tragedy is that AI could actually help close these gaps. It could personalize learning, provide real-time feedback, and offer scaffolding for students who need it. But we’re so busy treating it like a cheating epidemic that we’ve completely missed its potential as an equity tool. The same technology that’s accelerating breakthroughs in labs is being banned from the classrooms where it could do the most good. That’s the disconnect and it’s costing us a generation of prepared learners.
In my home state of Michigan, about 72% of high-school students are not considered “college-ready” based on SAT or ACT benchmarks. Those bare minimum requirements are meant to reflect a student’s ability to succeed in college without remediation, and right now the majority of students aren’t meeting them.
The world isn’t waiting for us to catch up. Other nations are expanding STEM and AI education while we argue over policy, panic headlines, and how to keep the government functioning. The same split between innovation and education is right there in the data.
These aren’t just numbers. They’re a neon flashing sign that, Houston, we have a major problem. Add in the dismantling of the Department of Education, discouraging NAEP scores (National Assessment of Educational Progress), and a declining birth rate, and that picture gets even bleaker.
In this case, I have to agree we need to do better!
Coming full circle
I don’t miss the office politics. I don’t miss the carbon copies, the meetings, or the people who were more invested in preserving their routines than improving anything.
What I do carry with me are the lessons. Broken systems don’t fix themselves. People do, but they have to be given the authority to do it or the freedom to build it their own way.
I couldn’t fix that office from the inside or change a university that preferred dysfunction over disruption. So I did what anyone does when the system won’t let you build better: I left and designed something that could. Outside the politics. Outside the bureaucracy. Outside the institutional paralysis that keeps us stuck with the equivalent of carbon copies while the world moves on without us.
And that’s exactly what I’ve done.
After months of creating, testing, and refining my AI literacy program, it’s ready. I’m officially out of the beta phase and moving into full launch mode on November 3, when I’ll be opening enrollment for founding members at an introductory half price.
I’ve built an entire learning ecosystem from the ground up. It’s a full framework for understanding and working with AI and large language models. The program includes eight video modules, an extensive workbook, and customized GPTs that help students explore majors, identify career paths, and understand their personal values.
I started this because students deserve more than trial-and-error when it comes to using AI. Contrary to what some are hoping, it’s not going away. And with tools like Sora bringing AI-generated video into the mix, when it’s harder than ever to tell what’s real and what isn’t, it’s time we start figuring this out.
© 2025 Bette A. Ludwig: All rights reserved
My AI Literacy Program launches November 3rd with founding member access at half price. This is the framework education won’t build—so I did.
👉 Details: www.betteludwig.com
❔ Questions? DM me here on Substack
Dropping in to say I intend to come back and read this properly. Thank you again for today!
I’ve experienced the same and like you, went my own direction after being frustrated with a system that resisted change.
Institutions like academia and government can be the worst because the incentives (or lack thereof) are different than business with competition and constant pressure the pay the bills.