This is a moment of stark introspection for educators. AI has surged into our classrooms, wrecking pedagogical best practices developed over centuries in its wake. This situation has sparked a wave of conversations about AI and pedagogy in books, online essays, and social media. A consensus has begun to crystallize around a new framework for responding to this situation. Good pedagogy, this new framing insists, is about process over product. The verbs of education—writing, reading, talking—are irreducible ingredients of pedagogy.

But what, specifically, is being transformed? What is being developed, exercised, and cultivated through pedagogical practice? I contend the area we need to explore to respond to this question is how education trains emotions. How can we talk about the intellectual affects practiced in the classroom as a form of emotional habitus? What are the emotional aspects of intellectual faculties like creativity, critical thinking, critique, debate, and introspection?