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ChatGTP came to my school and threatened to retire my co-workers early. This new artificial intelligence tool flew from my Twitter timeline and New York Times headlines into my school classroom in just a few weeks. As a dean, I am inundated with fear of new technology from teachers of all disciplines.
But math teachers have experienced this. Calculators are long gone, Photomath’s homework smartphone app is recent. History teachers weathered the Wikipedia and Google storm. Some have promised that this means that students “do not need to know anything”. Now is the time for English teachers to rack their brains and jump into the fray.
Just days after it was released to the public, we saw students ask this AI bot to interpret a poem by Emily Dickinson and write an entire essay about the same poem in an oval, enigmatic style. At the same time as amazement and dismay (ChatGTP’s current strength turns out not to be his ventriloquist one of the country’s poetic geniuses), my students will tell me that I am 17 years old. I was quick to voice my concerns about the existential doom I had come to expect. “What was my education for?” they lamented. “Why do you have to go to college?”
Though posed with a renewed urgency, their question has been asked with increasing enthusiasm by students in the last few decades as technology and finance have replaced the pride of the humanities in the liberal learning firmament. My answer, then and now, is very simple. Education is where, if we are lucky, we can train our minds to be worthy companions for the rest of our lives. Reading and writing critically and creatively remains at the core of that project. When we apply these skills, we not only think better. I think that the loneliness of being human will be relieved.
Years ago, I ditched the dominant paradigm of high school writing: the five-paragraph essay. I was disgusted by its wooden structure and skeptical of its simple epistemology, which taught students that three pieces of evidence and a neat conclusion could reveal the truth.
Instead of the fabricated arguments and hand-picked evidence of a five-paragraph essay, we created an exploratory assignment to find dissertations that began with students’ curious observations, topical questions, and tidbits of speculation.
The essays students write in my class might best be characterized as walks with no destination in mind. As they write these essays, they’re tying their shoes, leaving their homes, and roaming through endless landscapes. They stare curiously at the muttering of a starling circling overhead. Like a wandering Walt Whitman, they tuck the ends of their trousers into their boots and have a good time. They turn, get lost in the thorns, find companions to walk alongside them for their spells, and eventually find themselves in places they never knew existed before. Their writing portrays this journey in unabashed first-person voice.
These are highly personalized challenges that must take precedence in the era of AI essay writing.
First, ask students to describe where they sought their initial answers and the nature and limitations of these initial discoveries. My students might start with a dusty book in the library basement, an arcane academic paper, or a conversation with their grandmother. Revise your question by explaining the shortcomings of your initial findings, encouraging you to reconsider your fledgling claims.
Soon they will start spinning a web of new and better questions. To answer these, they either follow the footnotes or go back to the novel they liked a year ago. I often see them drawing maps and showing the paths of their wanderings. Every time they step into a new source, they practice critiquing and synthesizing, asking, “What does this help me understand?” “What if I add to what I already know?”
Some paths lead to unexpandable brick walls. Other roads are three-way intersections. Still others need bridges and giant leaps to get to the other side of ignorance.
I ask them to train their critical eye on ChatGTP’s ready-made answers and decide which ones deserve more investigation, as I’ve done.
As a teacher, I support them from behind the hedge. Occasionally, I whisper compass readings and hand out new binoculars. My first task is to make sure they have the tools to get to a new place of understanding, but just as important is the path they follow, even if the final destination remains elusive. After all, sometimes their questions should outweigh their answers.
Whether I like it or not, I think ChatGTP will soon be a place on the map that will make students stop for a while and look around. I wouldn’t say it’s dangerous like quicksand or insurmountable like Everest. Instead, as I do, I ask you to train your critical eye on ChatGTP’s ready-made answers and decide which ones deserve more research. As always, I ask them to move forward to new and different places so that the path they finally write down will be theirs alone.
So what am I telling teachers now that ChatGTP is here? It’s time for us teachers to do our own thoughtful wanderings. must decide what it means to guide students toward skills that enable I will be asking my colleagues to consider the following prompts in the coming weeks. [insert your subject] teacher. Here’s how I treat ChatGTP. ”
The extent of our answers may only temporarily stave off the rapidly changing tide of AI, but as we gather, think, and distill—on our journey—together we can You will no longer feel lonely.
This article was written by a living, breathing teacher.
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