AI Is Not the Wave of the Educational Future

Q:  What is worse than spending ten straight hours grading narrative essays?

A:  Spending many of those hours grading narrative essays that are obviously generated via AI.

Q:  What is worse than grading AI-generated narrative essays?

A:  Knowing that the students who used AI will be incapable of and unwilling to write the MCAS essays when the state tests occur in five weeks.

I have been teaching for a really long time, and my areas of expertise are subject-specific, grade-based, and test-prep informed. The required state standards for my subject matter are no longer mastered in elementary school through no fault of the teachers and through the entire fault of the business-based school model that stresses social-emotional content over academic proficiency. This model has been crashing and burning for years now with no apparent slowing. The wreckage has been visible through both state testing and the rising need for academic triage.

You might be tricked into believing that I am untrained in the latest and greatest trends in my field. We "elderly" educators are just as savvy as (and, in some content, more so than) the newest churned-out crop of professional teachers. That's one of the benefits and also one of the curses of state-mandated professional development. Here's what you should never be tricked by: AI is not the wave of the educational future. 

Before you jump all over me with the "You just don't understand technology or how it works" blasphemy, I'm quite certain that technology has its place even in my field. After all, I use technology when I write. I rely heavily on an electronic classroom platform to post assignments and to do my planning and to track the standards. I integrate all kinds of technology-based lessons to teach, to reinforce, and to chart data.

Here's where I will go toe-to-toe with you: AI has zero place in graded writing at the middle school level. (Okay, at any academic level, but I digress.) Zero. And that's the grade that I am tempted to give my 20% or so students who clearly used AI (and also cheated with each other using AI). 

The irony of all of this, of course, is that technology is supposed to make our lives easier, more efficient, and less mistake-filled. Instead, these AI-generated narrative essays are grammatically muddled, difficult to grade, and full of topical errors. King Arthur's wizard Merlin working at Market Basket and driving a Tesla? Yeah, I doubt that, especially when the same key words end up in a dozen essays that all suck as much as the other AI-generated ones do.

Recommendation to parents: Buy your kids some pencils and pens (and please tell them that highlighters are NOT writing utensils). I'll provide the lined paper. We are going old-school for writing. It's a sad day when I would prefer to slog through handwritten essays by kids who never mastered holding a pencil (lest it hurt their fragile psyche) rather than grading typed essays using premade rubrics. I much prefer students who are willing to try and actually think than those who coast through a few key strokes and hit "print."