Teachers, Students, & A.I.

Reflections on Our Educational Hostage Situation (Messed-Up but Managing #18)

I was in school for 26 years. That’s a long time. It’s 52 semesters, in fact, not counting J-Term and Summer courses. I had 26 first days of school! My last day of class was 8 years ago in May of 2017 when I finished my 5th degree at the University of Kentucky. I’ve since completed a few professional development courses and even finished two certificate programs from a university in Australia. I hold 1 Bachelors, 3 Masters, and 1 PhD. I love learning and I love teaching. As someone who grew up in a context of very little, education has given me great opportunities. I’m thankful for my many years of schooling and it’s no coincidence that I myself am an educator, a college professor. So, please, bear with me while I switch off my comedian hat in exchange for my professor hat here.

Way back when I started school, back in ancient times, back when teachers wanted you to write a paper on paper, things in the classroom were quite different. In middle school and high school for instance, writing a paper meant at least three things: 1) Learning what a paper was and how to structure one; 2) Opening books to do research; and, 3) Crying into my Trapper Keeper at 2am while trying to remember how to spell words like “Renaissance” and “Mississippi” and “gauge” (that a-u combo still eludes me sometimes).

It’s a different world today. Maybe a different universe. Now, students can just type “compare Marxist theory with the gospel of John” into ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini, take a puff off the vape, and wait for 10 seconds to get “their” paper. And I’m telling you, when you tell them you suspect A.I. usage, they will often lose it. They will fire off angry email responses and act like you just murdered their puppy. They will argue to the death. This new breed of student is willing to die on that hill. The student of today will stand firm that they did the work and even complain about how hard it was. I’m not kidding. I’m not exaggerating.

Aside from the ethics of student honesty, one of the absolute worst things about A.I. from the educator side of things is the absolute time suck it is. A student cheats by using A.I., without a single thought of or care about how it will affect me, and suddenly I’m not just a professor, I’m a detective, defense attorney, judge, therapist, and part-time exorcist. And don’t forget hostage, because that’s really what it feels like. Students will accuse you of biases and targeting and distrust faster than ChatGPT writes their next essay. It sucks! But there I am, now I’ve got to email the student, meet with the student, fill out paperwork, file reports, notify department heads, and sit through meetings where everyone pretends this is a “learning opportunity.” No! No, it’s not!

I’m not against technology at all. I’m writing this on a device that once would’ve been considered a wizard box. It is, however, an HP, so a wizard box that only works part of the time. I’m also the proud owner of wireless Bluetooth headphones, a smart phone, a home camera system I can access from anywhere. I’m not a Luddite by any means. But, as I said, I am a professor. My title: “Professor of Bible & Writing.” That means I am in the absolutely unenviable position of trying to get 18-year-olds to care about writing.

I have heard from more than a handful of now-retired professors that what made them get out of education when they did was A.I. It caused them such problems and such headaches that it was no longer worth it. I totally get it. You spend decades perfecting your craft of teaching students how to think critically, how to get those thoughts on to paper, how to organize those ideas, and how to revise them and then, here comes A.I., strutting on to the scene like that cool new youth pastor who smokes cigars and ruins everything with his fake relatability. I get it.

I think most people get it. It doesn’t take a genius to see the dangers that A.I. presents for education. Don’t get me wrong, I think there are times and places and ways when we should utilize it and lean into it. But I also think there are times it should be banned. If all students learn to do is write spectacular prompts without ever having to think critically, organize their thoughts, and revise them, in a generation or two, we are going to see the crippling effects of that on our society.

I didn’t have A.I. growing up and, if you’re reading this, you likely didn’t either. If you were born in ancient times, getting an education meant standing in a toga, listening to and engaging Socrates, and praying you didn’t get sent to the cave for detention. Then came the Medieval monks, guys who copied entire books by the inconsistent flicker of candlelight for fun, guys who chose the beauty of calligraphy over the beauty of women. And…fast forward to the 90s, my old stamping ground, when learning still meant you had to put in the effort. Move forward to the 2000s where, if you wanted to cite a work, you had to go through the grueling process of reading books about formatting, not just clicking a button and trusting the machine to get it right.

It’s different for students today. Even if you teach in-person classes in a library, as soon as you tell them they need to use actual print books for their sources, they look at you like you’re Amish. Today’s students are so used to A.I. that they’ll use it in class, during a lecture about not using A.I. It’s like that one time I was preaching a sermon at a youth rally on lust and two teens were caught making out in the back pew. (It was a United Methodist Church so not really that surprising.)

So, as a prof, here’s how I’m handling it in my classes, whether in person or online. First, in my in-person classes, we’re going full Little House on the Prairie. No devices. No laptops. No phones. No screens. Just pencils, paper, and grit. If we need to read an article, I project it and we read it together. I’m basically running a little one-room schoolhouse in 2025. But hey, if students are writing like it’s 2099, a reset to 1895 might just be what’s needed.

And, frankly, the tradeoff isn’t that bad: no homework. That’s right, no take-home essays. No discussion boards. No I-forgot-to-attach-the-file emails to deal with. Students just have to be awake, which is quite the feat for some of them!, and write words by hand like their grandparents used to before they had arthritis and loads of resentment toward this generation.

For my online classes, it’s trickier. I have to outwit the machines by assigning work that machines can’t do well. So I give assignments like this: “1. Read this article in full; 2) Choose a favorite line or quote from the article; 3) Upload an original photo, tell me in detail about it and, find a way to work the quote you selected into the paper.” I make the writing a) so specific, b) so personal, and c) so awkwardly human that bots don’t stand much of a chance.

I’m not saying students won’t try to use what a bot said. They will. But it’s a lot easier to notice things like sudden font changes, two pages of rounded apostrophes suddenly turning straight on page 3 and beyond, the use of the word “delve” (if you know you know). Nobody says “delve” unless they’re writing like a botanist from the 1800s! That’s totally ChatGPT! Paragraph indents changing out of nowhere then going back to normal is another clue. Then there’s an “I” that suddenly isn’t capitalized and all sorts of silly punctuation errors like an exclamation point or question mark immediately followed by a period, a telltale sign of the student telling A.I. to make errors and “humanize” the writing. Oh, and don’t forget students suddenly quoting philosophers you didn’t assign and who don’t even exist. Same with sources. You haven’t lived until you have a student who cites the Journal of Trauma & Calculus, Volume 9. There is no Volume 1. There is no Journal. But there are probably enough stories from every student who has ever taken calculus to start one.

But what’s really important here are those short photo + writing assignments early on. Once I get 4 or 5 of those low-stakes submissions, I have enough of a portfolio to capture the student’s writing style, voice, ability, and so on. Then I can use those as a litmus test against anything that might appear to have A.I. influence later on. This protects my neck and stands as irrefutable evidence. Of course, if you’re a good teacher, their writing will improve over the semester. But if you’re a good teacher, you’ll be able to follow that growth and tell whether they’re going from Dr. Seuss style to Harvard-hopeful overnight.

I’ve recently and repeatedly described education these days as the Wild West. Except, of course, the cowboys back then couldn’t try to cheat their way out of lasso practice. What I mean is: it’s madness. Educators are arguing about whether we should integrate A.I. into learning and to what extent. It is tough. As someone who makes use of certain A.I. resources, I’m not anti-tech. But I am anti-plagiarism and anti-laziness. I still value hard work and good work.

If you’re still reading and you’re a parent or teacher who survived school before A.I., congratulations. You did hard work. You put in actual effort. You learned cursive just so you could sign checks, which will likely be out of existence soon. You printed out MapQuest directions. Remember those days? You highlighted books. You tried to type papers with WordArt titles and made PowerPoints with animated letters and sound effects. You earned your anxiety. And now, like me, you get to feel smug about it while wondering, late at night, “Did I waste years of my life doing things the hard way?”

But for me that’s where the tension lies. Part of me looks at this generation and thinks, “You’re cheating yourselves!” And another part of me thinks, “But if I had access to this in college, I’d have been able to spend so much more time playing hockey on my Sega Genesis. All of this is crazy and confusing and wild. But whatever else we do, we have to teach our students how to be human. Because the machines are coming and they’re coming fast. And they’re coming for everything. Except maybe your ability to draw doodles in the margins of your spiral notebook while pretending to take notes. That skill is still safe, at least for now.