Oh Chatbot, My Chatbot??
New piece on negotiating the AI Question while becoming a high school English teacher.
Two years ago, at the age of 39, I began training to be a school teacher. I wanted to teach English—to help young people become stronger readers, writers, and thinkers, with a deeper connection to literature. After 15 years of working mostly as a freelance writer, and as a novelist myself, I felt confident that I had something to offer. But the further I progressed in my training, the more uncertain I felt. One particular question taunted me for my lack of an answer. What to do about artificial intelligence?
So begins my latest essay, published as today’s Guardian ‘Long Read.’ In it, I attempt to reconstruct my thinking over the last year about AI chatbots and the high school English classroom, focusing on what I saw and what I tried as I re-entered the classroom myself, first as a student observer, then as a student teacher.
People are writing a lot about AI. I get it. We’ve collectively agreed to believe that AI is on the brink of changing, well, everything. Or at least a whole lotta stuff. And maybe it is! There’s a massive appetite out there for writing about what these changes mightlook like, for debates about how inevitable they actually are, and for broadsides about WHAT IT ALL MEANS and WHY MY OVERARCHING THEORY IS THE CORRECT ONE and WHY THE OTHER THEORIES ARE JUNK.
I confess that, as I began this piece, I was sorta looking forward to writing in this mode, maybe popping up on the AI discourse leaderboard for a day or two. It’s fun (or tempting) to write bigly about the big topic of the day. It’s fun to poke at insane quotes from tech executives and their boosters. I’ve always wanted to write a manifesto…
But after a few days of hammering away, I was forced to accept that the result wasn’t very interesting. I don’t know enough about AI—or even AI in education—to write a manifesto about it. (Neither do most people who write manifestos on these subjects—but c’est la vie.)
What I did know about was my own experience: the questions I faced, the anxieties I felt, the choices I made in the classroom, and how it felt to watch them play out. So this piece is focused mostly on that material. I’m hopeful that this makes it more valuable and interesting, albeit less sweeping or conclusive. No one will be nailing this to the door of a church (or even a data center) anytime soon.
The piece contains: a bit of World War I literature; a bit of post-colonial criticism; a bit of Freud; a bit of Mark Twain. Which bits? Read it to find out. I also speculate a bit about the baseline teacher psyche—and share some of the assignments I came up with in hopes of making writing interesting enough that teenagers actually want to do it. ✹
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This is very good. I've been teaching for 15 years, mostly in urban schools but now in a suburban school that sounds like the one you are describing, and you are on the right path to keep questioning and philosophizing about AI rather than rejecting or cheerleading it. I love the mention of Gallagher and Readicide; I have a colleague who is about 12 years younger than me who was never exposed to Gallagher in undergrad and when I gave him the book last summer he sticky-noted the shit out of it and gave it back to me and now our planning conversations for the class we both teach are much deeper.
The situation with AI is not dramatically different than it was before: most students need all of the strategies in Gallagher's (thankfully slim) book to enjoy reading; some students can be exposed to all of the strategies and still hate reading; many students who love reading hate English classes; only students in AP and honors classes actually read outside of class. This was and is true in high and low SES schools across the U.S., and I doubt AI changed it or will change it.
Model-based writing like the activity your supervising teacher did at the end of the year isn't immune to AI and in fact the models are sort of built to do it, but if students draft and submit model-based writing in-class along the way, it's much harder to get AI to do the whole thing for them, and if students are using google docs that they share with you, it's perfectly valid to say, as I did in a poetry unit, hey, why did this whole poem appear in a 30 second chunk in your revision history, rather than in line by painful line as it did with other students? I don't think students have a right to not be surveilled; they're not adults yet and they need adult help to write a poem or short story rather than having an chatbot do it for them do it for them.
Nice piece, Peter. I’ve been an ESL teacher for about 10 years and for the last 5 have worked in a university bridging program (basically an extra year for international students to improve their language before starting as first years). When ChatGPT came out we had to completely revamp our assessment process, making all the writing happen in class. It worked pretty well but, tbh, it’s a losing battle because of all the cultural forces aligned against humanistic education. Last year I switched to a different program within the university doing one on one tutoring, mainly helping students with speaking (they don’t come much for writing help, although apparently they did in the past). It’s been a big boost in my job satisfaction because I don’t have to worry about grading students’ writing. All this to say, I have great admiration for what you’re doing. It’s not easy but the positive impact you can make on students who care (by being a teacher who cares) is invaluable.