The Wikiness

This morning I was helping my neighbor, a recently immigrated Spanish-speaking man, prepare for an upcoming licensing exam. To find specific information about his job site, I suggested he call a colleague. He kept the phone on speaker and I heard her advice:

“Just Google it,” she told him, explaining that Chat GPT had gotten her across the finish line for her master’s degree. “You just put in your questions, and it writes an answer for you that you can tweak, and then it’s yours,” she explained. “It saved me so much time.” 

When my neighbor nervously asked if such assistance were permitted, she assured him. “Everyone does it.”

What a difference a few years has made. I inquired further into AI in the classroom and found Wired magazine reporting this month that students now have access to bots that can instantly give them what pre-AI students had to labor for. “These bots can generate quizzes, summarize key points in a complex reading, offer step-by-step graphing of algebraic equations, and provide feedback on the first draft of an essay.”

As good as they are, though, robots won’t instantly replace teachers. Not yet. It seems the large language models these apps are trained on can’t read paralanguage–subtle body movements, tonal shifts, and facial expressions. According to the article, there’s something “deeply profound about human communication that allows flesh and blood teachers to quickly spot and address flagging interest in real time.”

There it is, the “secret sauce” of learning: student engagement. Over my 35 years in the classroom, I was able to generate student interest in the subject through intriguing challenges and projects, and motivating routines. What wore me down and kept my job from being one long celebration of language learning was the endless paper grading and its countless spelling and grammar corrections. How liberating would it have been to off-load the most unpleasant part of my job to an uncomplaining, virtually impeccable machine? How much more energy could I have devoted to creating ever-more engaging lessons and activities leading to deeper knowledge and stronger skills?

Of course, I’d still be grading papers, but the drafts I’d be looking at would at least be uniformly coherent and syntactically correct. Gone would be a huge distraction from the student’s ideas the paper was meant to convey. A part of me feels that I left the Ed-Tech party too soon, just as a newcomer arrived with a magic wand to make the worst part disappear. 

On the other hand, when it comes to analyzing literature, I wonder what results from a class full of learners asking the bot to argue for what Shakespeare’s Macbeth suggests about human fate or destiny. Good or bad, in the past their responses would normally have been their own. But if an AI-assisted class answers that question, would I be interacting, in their papers, with the students’ brains, or with the Internet’s? How would I know what my students really knew, but by honest production of some authentic artifact?

I guess there might yet be a role, in final assessments, for bluebooks and oral exams. Forward, then, into the past!