In December 2022 I experimented with a letter to my 8th grade son’s english teacher telling her about chatGPT. It was already big news in tech circles but hadn’t taken the world by storm as it has now.

14 months later teacher’s are still trying to figure out how to teach kids when in their ears a GPT is whispering “let me write that for you, I’ll get you a good grade to you can go do something else”. To the slacker, the over-scheduled, and the disinterested that’s a siren song too sweet to resist.

Teachers know it. Some are calling for restrictions or tools to catch cheaters, limitations are showing up on syllabi, but that’s plainly an unwinnable game and will only catch the least savvy kids; most will skate bye, powered by the motivation that so often shows up in children trying to skirt tech restrictions.

All this raises the age-old question, what are we trying to accomplish with these kids?

TODO

Even if it was doable, it’d be unwise. These tools are here to stay and it’ll be hard for a teacher to feel good about what they’ve done if their pupils can’t keep up in a world of AI.

So what to do? The technical landscape is changing fast so specific rules are too bittle to work. We need a flexible heuristic.

Use AI. Not too mcuh. Test the output.

Use AI.

People who can know computers can seem like magicians to those use it only to tap on apps and use search engines. AI is supercharging that and just it’s irresponsible not to teach kids about it

Not too much.

Just as with food, tv, exercise, rest, and other good things it’s easy to overdo it.

Test the output

AI tools work best when you can test the output quickly. This is why AI tools have taken off in coding—if there’s an error you need only to hit ‘run’ and see what happens.

Writing assignments can be tested to, but here a crucial distinciton. Ideally both student and teacher would see the learning as end an assignment is after and the grade merely as a measure. For most kids they usually care about the grade. Sure this kid or that might be fascinated in this or that topic, but most kids aren’t excited about most assignments. Maybe no kids are excited about most assignments.

Writing assignments differ too. Some are about style, in some the vehicle is relaying of facts.

When it’s about the style and skill of writing, ask why they wrote something that way. Teach them how to keep a reader’s attention, how to persuade a reader. Have them then take a test in the classroom where they have to answer a question about their own paper. Even if they used AI to write the paper if they can understand what makes it good or what makes it bad then mission fucking accomplished.

When the writing is a means to show knowledge, test them live. In the real world today lots of people are using GPT to look up information before a meeting. The ones who get something wrong look like buffoons and so are trusted less, but the ones who make sure something is right are more productive.