AI & Me

I thought about starting this section on teaching insights with a flashback to how I was damned sure I would not become a teacher. There were a few things on my I-don’t-want-to-end-up-as-list. Becoming a teacher was either last, or next to last on my list. The other one in competition for the last place on my list was getting married.

I have been both for more than thirty years.

I know… go figure.

But that was a long time ago and I could recount here my many experiences, frustrations and victories, however small, in both the classroom and my marriage. But that would only be digging up the past and although it all lends itself to who we become as teachers (or wives) I am going to start in the present. (The teaching part is easier for me to explain than the marriage part, so I have left that story for one of the two books I have on the burner.)

I have never taught in pre-school or elementary schools. I don’t feel that I have the patience for young minds. I have never taught in junior or high school. I know I don’t have the fortitude to counter all the hormones that run wild in those age groups.

I have always taught the “mature student” i.e. adults ranging from GED and ESL classes to my present career of college History classes.

As teachers I know we can all see where we have been, but by God, I have to ask, “Where the hell are we going?”

To be upfront and honest I will say right now that I abhor AI. Any of it. In any form, for any reason. All the haters can have their way with me, but I hold fast. If we continue to use AI, to accept it in our classes, we are not teaching our students anything except how to think in the short form, bullet points, and jerky one-line thoughts that when strung together, God bless them, still don’t make sense.

(And I thought we had a problem ten or so years ago when students would actually submit papers written with text language shortcuts. I wish that was all we had to worry about now.)

I am not going to drone on about how when I was in school we had to….

Yeah, I know, we all had to walk a mile or more in snow up to our knees, and we had to stoke the coal stove before we left the house, we had to walk on campus from classroom to classroom, had to take notes with pencil and paper and had to line up in the gymnasium to wait for the profs to tack the long, handwritten pages with our names and grades on the bulletin board.

And we all knew that we’d get a fail for the course if we were caught peeking over our friends’ shoulders for the answer, or if the proctor caught us looking too often at our arms for the ink-smudged answers we hoped we would still be able to interpret after we scribbled them on our arms in the bathroom just before the exam.

If only that kind of cheating was all we had to worry about now.

Nope. Now I have to double-check every paper that I grade through an AI, a Similarity and a Synonym dector feature that the college updates every semester to hopefully catch up with, or at least jog behind the advances in AI writers today. I wonder how the students think that I would not detect a highly academic term paper when they cannot string together a few sentences in an oral discussion or a classroom project presentation.

Do they think I’m stupid?

And every time that happens, I am discouraged. And outraged. And insulted. And I have to remind myself that this generation has grown up in an entirely different world than I did and in one that is in some sense, alien to me

I try not to take it personally, but I must wonder why I went through the ardor of post graduate work to end up being no more than a moderator for computer-generated research papers.

I feel like its time I bowed out. I have been in this education game for more than 40 years,  but I tell myself that small accomplishments are huge victories.

I often receive emails from former students whose faces and achievements I have forgotten among the folds of the years that have passed one semester at a time. They tell me with great pride that they have accomplished a masters’ or a doctorate, or are now employed in their field of choice in engineering, biochemistry, education, nursing, finance, cyber security,  etc. They tell me how much I have made a difference in their lives, how they remember that I said this or that to them, how I encouraged them when they wanted to quit, how I required them to rewrite the paper in their own words while I sat staunchly in front of them at my desk waiting for the clock to tick the hour away. And they tell me  that was the  hardest, but the best lesson they have ever learned.

And when I read those emails I have to wonder, can AI, with all its bells and whistles, with all its 21^st-century flair, come close to teaching what those students learn with me?