100% yes on the "students are using generative AI as part of/in lieu of doing complex reading." I've got a student in AP US History who started the semester totally bamboozled by the textbook, which was a major roadblock for him. Clearly he'd never had significant reading expectations prior to this, and the book was a major ramp-up that he didn't know how to address, which led to panic, magical thinking, and a lot of bargaining with himself. He admitted later to a strategy of feeding chapters through ChapGPT (he had to come up with a workaround given the copyright restrictions on the e-text), and then studying the results. We've had a lot of discussions about this - lots of ex post facto justifications, most of which I've shot down - but on the other side, he's mostly judging the attempt unfavorably because it wound up being more time-consuming than he had expected, not on any other basis. It's the wild west out there right now, and we're playing whack-a-mole, to wildly mix the metaphor.
Thank you for sharing! When I was at the high school level, I thought all the time about how 99% of my students didn't have good textbook reading skills (fundamentally different from narrative reading skills, I think). And I realized it was going to take a lot of time and effort on my part to teach those skills. I tried, but not with a wild amount of success. Your last point is so telling; I worry that too many schools are either implicitly or explicitly building altars to the Gods of Ultimate Efficiency at the expense of any and all other values, and too many students will grow up a) not knowing how to slow down, b) not knowing that they can or even what it feels like, and c) having no idea what is worth their extra time or attention.
Fabulous start to The Important Work! And thanks for introducing me to another great Substack.
I especially like the conclusion. Helping students learn how to live in the world, which includes when and how to resist social forces pressing upon them, as well as ways to use new technology to respond to human challenges, seems like exactly the right frame.
Glad to see someone raise the question of ways students might be using AI to read, not just to write. As a secondary English teacher, reading is an integral concern of mine, and I'm going to be very interested to follow this discussion.
Agreed. In some ways, my first instinct was a higher level of frustration about use for reading than for writing. I'm obviously frustrated by both, but I'll be thinking a lot about the reading issue and ways to combat this. It starts with assigning books at the K-12 level...
This is very interesting and I love to see the combination of Rhetoric with data-informed insights! On the writing side of things, the optimist in me wonders if AI, used judiciously, could help students get over the intimidating and often steep hill of getting started with a writing project. I spoke with a programmer last week who suggested this is a benefit of using AI when coding and his argument is making me think. As to reading, and using AI to summarize readings, well the hallucination problem remains very real and for now if students rely on it they may end up turning things in with very mistaken arguments. Something to monitor, perhaps.
Something that worries me about how AI might be used to get started: I want my students to be writing things because they care about them and want to think about them. But it's so easy to just get AI to "brainstorm" an idea--which feeds into the writing-as-jumping-through-a-hoop-to-a-product framework. That is not to say it *can't* be used to get started but that this is another area where how it can be used seems at odds with how it is likely to be used. Which leads back to what we're trying to do in the first place, etc., etc.
I agree, and as someone who spent eight years teaching high school students, I think there is something fundamentally important about inhabiting that feeling of "blankness," learning to pay attention to the fact that ideas seem to spring out of nowhere if you allow yourself to get comfortable with the discomfort for long enough. I think it is probably *the* key moment/method by which students learn to trust themselves as thinkers, and believe in themselves as idea-havers.
Agreed that this is worrying. I feel like writing skills help you (1) come up with interesting ideas and (2) articulate them well. But outside of the classroom the former seems like a necessary prerequisite to the latter. If you aren’t able to really develop thoughts on the world happening around you, it’s not much use being able to articulate those lack of thoughts to others. It’s the kind of thing that probably makes life richer even if you don’t share these observations with anyone else and it’s a shame if students will have less practice refining those skills. This was just a small sample of mixed data but yes hopefully building the skill of “starting” can be protected
Thanks for sharing these survey results. I actually shifted the assignment in my US history survey course from a short analysis paper to a book hunt assignment that requires them to locate, check out, and explore a book from the library. It can't be done by AI, and the goal is to make them more comfortable with both finding books and actually reading at least part of them. Here's a blog post I wrote about the assignment: https://cassandragoodhistorian.com/2024/11/12/the-book-hunt-assignment/
It concerns me that students didn't apparently understand that entering someone else's book, or any intellectual property, into Chat GPT without explicit permission is intellectual theft. Did you discuss this point? Not all writers want their books chopped into AI slop. I don't. Would they consent to having their work chopped up and given away? Seems like a teachable moment.
Also seems like a moment to discuss the value of originality, critical and creative thinking. You might find this series of posts on originality relevant:
100% yes on the "students are using generative AI as part of/in lieu of doing complex reading." I've got a student in AP US History who started the semester totally bamboozled by the textbook, which was a major roadblock for him. Clearly he'd never had significant reading expectations prior to this, and the book was a major ramp-up that he didn't know how to address, which led to panic, magical thinking, and a lot of bargaining with himself. He admitted later to a strategy of feeding chapters through ChapGPT (he had to come up with a workaround given the copyright restrictions on the e-text), and then studying the results. We've had a lot of discussions about this - lots of ex post facto justifications, most of which I've shot down - but on the other side, he's mostly judging the attempt unfavorably because it wound up being more time-consuming than he had expected, not on any other basis. It's the wild west out there right now, and we're playing whack-a-mole, to wildly mix the metaphor.
Thank you for sharing! When I was at the high school level, I thought all the time about how 99% of my students didn't have good textbook reading skills (fundamentally different from narrative reading skills, I think). And I realized it was going to take a lot of time and effort on my part to teach those skills. I tried, but not with a wild amount of success. Your last point is so telling; I worry that too many schools are either implicitly or explicitly building altars to the Gods of Ultimate Efficiency at the expense of any and all other values, and too many students will grow up a) not knowing how to slow down, b) not knowing that they can or even what it feels like, and c) having no idea what is worth their extra time or attention.
Fabulous start to The Important Work! And thanks for introducing me to another great Substack.
I especially like the conclusion. Helping students learn how to live in the world, which includes when and how to resist social forces pressing upon them, as well as ways to use new technology to respond to human challenges, seems like exactly the right frame.
Glad to see someone raise the question of ways students might be using AI to read, not just to write. As a secondary English teacher, reading is an integral concern of mine, and I'm going to be very interested to follow this discussion.
Agreed. In some ways, my first instinct was a higher level of frustration about use for reading than for writing. I'm obviously frustrated by both, but I'll be thinking a lot about the reading issue and ways to combat this. It starts with assigning books at the K-12 level...
This is very interesting and I love to see the combination of Rhetoric with data-informed insights! On the writing side of things, the optimist in me wonders if AI, used judiciously, could help students get over the intimidating and often steep hill of getting started with a writing project. I spoke with a programmer last week who suggested this is a benefit of using AI when coding and his argument is making me think. As to reading, and using AI to summarize readings, well the hallucination problem remains very real and for now if students rely on it they may end up turning things in with very mistaken arguments. Something to monitor, perhaps.
Something that worries me about how AI might be used to get started: I want my students to be writing things because they care about them and want to think about them. But it's so easy to just get AI to "brainstorm" an idea--which feeds into the writing-as-jumping-through-a-hoop-to-a-product framework. That is not to say it *can't* be used to get started but that this is another area where how it can be used seems at odds with how it is likely to be used. Which leads back to what we're trying to do in the first place, etc., etc.
I agree, and as someone who spent eight years teaching high school students, I think there is something fundamentally important about inhabiting that feeling of "blankness," learning to pay attention to the fact that ideas seem to spring out of nowhere if you allow yourself to get comfortable with the discomfort for long enough. I think it is probably *the* key moment/method by which students learn to trust themselves as thinkers, and believe in themselves as idea-havers.
Agreed that this is worrying. I feel like writing skills help you (1) come up with interesting ideas and (2) articulate them well. But outside of the classroom the former seems like a necessary prerequisite to the latter. If you aren’t able to really develop thoughts on the world happening around you, it’s not much use being able to articulate those lack of thoughts to others. It’s the kind of thing that probably makes life richer even if you don’t share these observations with anyone else and it’s a shame if students will have less practice refining those skills. This was just a small sample of mixed data but yes hopefully building the skill of “starting” can be protected
Thanks for sharing these survey results. I actually shifted the assignment in my US history survey course from a short analysis paper to a book hunt assignment that requires them to locate, check out, and explore a book from the library. It can't be done by AI, and the goal is to make them more comfortable with both finding books and actually reading at least part of them. Here's a blog post I wrote about the assignment: https://cassandragoodhistorian.com/2024/11/12/the-book-hunt-assignment/
It concerns me that students didn't apparently understand that entering someone else's book, or any intellectual property, into Chat GPT without explicit permission is intellectual theft. Did you discuss this point? Not all writers want their books chopped into AI slop. I don't. Would they consent to having their work chopped up and given away? Seems like a teachable moment.
Also seems like a moment to discuss the value of originality, critical and creative thinking. You might find this series of posts on originality relevant:
https://open.substack.com/pub/janetsalmons/p/encourage-originality-create-a-culture?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=410aa5