This week I’m reconsidering how to teach AI, and looking to a different sort of master to do it.
Tony Stark’s workshop, filled with glowing interfaces and obedient AI assistants, represented everything I thought I wanted to build for my students. The American entrepreneur techno-archetype felt like the right model for an educator preparing students for an AI-saturated future.
Channeling the passion for technology and start up entrepreneurship, I designed curricula around tools and frameworks, structured my courses like engineering blueprints, and believed that mastery meant control.
But AI has changed me to become more philosophical. Reaction to someone or something has begun to feel… wrong.
As I prepare content for my students, I find myself wrestling with questions that have no neat technical answers.
I wasn’t looking for him. I was researching pedagogical approaches, trying to articulate why my “Boss Fight Pedagogy,” (the idea that students should master fundamentals before gaining access to AI automation) felt right but somehow incomplete. I wanted to follow up with real research.
Something about the traditional hierarchical model of education, where teachers dispense knowledge to passive students, felt increasingly misaligned with the reality of teaching with AI. Then I encountered Lee’s philosophy of Jeet Kune Do, and suddenly the framework I’d been groping toward began to crystallize.
Lee is like water, not rigid like Iron Man. Formless, adaptive, flowing into whatever container the situation demands.
Bruce Lee’s central insight was radical for his time and remains radical for ours: rigid adherence to any single system is a limitation, not a strength.
In traditional martial arts, students spent years perfecting the forms of a specific style. Lee studied Wing Chun, but it could be Karate, or Taekwondo.
Lee saw this as “organized despair.” This is a phrase that I can’t seem to shake. (And it motivated the essay.)
He believed that clinging to established patterns, no matter how time-tested, created fighters who could only respond to situations their style had prepared them for.
To Lee, forms became prisons.
In teaching AI, we face an identical trap. We can teach students to master specific tools like Midjourney for image generation, ChatGPT for text, or particular Python libraries for machine learning. We can drill them in best practices and established workflows. But if we stop there, we’ve simply created practitioners of a style that will be obsolete before they graduate. The tools will change. The interfaces will evolve. The very paradigms of how we interact with AI will shift.
Lee’s answer was Jeet Kune Do, which translates to “The Way of the Intercepting Fist,” but his deeper principle was “having no way as way; having no limitation as limitation.” He encouraged students to research their own experience, absorb what is useful, reject what is useless, and add what is essentially their own.
We need to teach students to be philosophers of their own practice, constantly questioning what serves their purposes and what constrains them. To struggle as an artist.
Rather than teaching “the right way” to prompt an AI, I present my approaches, encourage experimentation, and most importantly, ask students to articulate their own emerging principles. Only Nye-style will work with Nye.
I ask you… What works for you? Why? When does this approach fail? What would you add?
Water has no fixed form, yet it’s incredibly powerful. It finds every weakness, and flows around every obstacle. Lee wanted martial artists who could similarly read each unique combat situation and respond appropriately, not with pre-programmed sequences but with adaptability.
AI demands this same fluidity. The field is changing so rapidly that rigidity is professional death. Consider what’s happened in just the past three years: AI has moved from specialized tool to general interface and from something requiring coding expertise to something accessible through conversation.
The students who will thrive aren’t those who’ve memorized current best practices,
they’re those who can flow into whatever new paradigm emerges.
This is why I’ve become skeptical of curriculum design that’s too detailed. When I lay out learning objectives that specify particular tools or techniques, I’m creating a cup, a bottle, a teapot. I now believe these containers will be obsolete.
I’m focusing on what I call “adaptive fundamentals”: critical thinking, creative problem-solving, ethical reasoning, the ability to quickly learn new systems. We all need to be comfortable with ambiguity and experimentation.
Perhaps Lee’s most challenging principle for educators is his insistence on individual expression.
The ultimate goal cannot be producing students who all use AI the same way. The goal must be cultivating individuals who can find their own way, who develop their own relationship with these tools, who become their own kind of AI practitioner.
I’m learning that my role isn’t to be Iron Man anymore, dispensing technological solutions from a position of mastery. It’s to be more like a martial arts instructor as Lee taught. Someone who can provide rigorous fundamentals, demonstrate possibilities, but ultimately step back to let each student discover their own path.
I teach them the cup, the bottle, the teapot. But I’m trying to teach them to be water.
The irony isn’t lost on me: I’m using a martial artist from the 1970s to think about teaching AI in 2026. But perhaps that’s precisely the point.
Lee’s principles transcend their original context because they’re fundamentally about human adaptability and the courage to question received wisdom. These aren’t martial arts principles or AI principles. These are principles for navigating any domain characterized by rapid change and uncertainty.
Iron Man had all the answers. Bruce Lee had better questions. And in a field that’s rewriting itself every few months, questions might be the most valuable thing we can give our students.
The cup will change. The bottle will change. The teapot will change. But water remains water, powerful in its adaptability, finding its way forward.
Nye Warburton is an educator and part-time philosopher from Savannah, Georgia. These essays are improvised with Otter.ai and refined with Claude Open 4.
