I’ve noticed an uptick in dismissals of the concerns of teachers about AI. Some say that it’s *their* job to find a way to evaluate work that AI can’t replicate. I would just ask that you talk to real teachers and really listen. I’d also suggest reading a bit about writing and the brain. - ThreadSky

miriamposner.com • 22 days ago

I’ve noticed an uptick in dismissals of the concerns of teachers about AI. Some say that it’s *their* job to find a way to evaluate work that AI can’t replicate. I would just ask that you talk to real teachers and really listen. I’d also suggest reading a bit about writing and the brain.

Reposted from Jason Koebler

I talked to 15 teachers/professors about how AI and ChatGPT is ruining their lives:

www.404media.co/teachers-are...

Comments

katrinagrant.bsky.social•22 days ago

It's the erasure of process as part of learning and knowledge development, a real misconception that the essay is what we are after, rather than the process of writing the essay.

adamkotsko.bsky.social•22 days ago

In most public discourse, every external shock to higher ed is always a fun opportunity to do better, because what we were doing before by definition sucked.

miriamposner.com•22 days ago

It is so insulting. As the daughter of a public school teacher, it offends me in a visceral way.

stephensben.bsky.social•22 days ago

A lot of people just say “Handwritten tests in class conditions — easy!” as if (a) teachers hadn’t thought of that, and (b) that was possible in all subjects.

miriamposner.com•22 days ago

Right, and as if we hadn’t been yelled at for decades to end timed exams because of equity issues.

graynewt.bsky.social•22 days ago

There's also a tendency to go straight to "Solve this problem!" and no thought given to the question of "Why are students relying so much on AI?" The cheap, easy answer is that students are lazy. And sure, some are. But we've probably all known sharp, engaged students who use it, too. Why is that?

graynewt.bsky.social•22 days ago

Also, a lot of these same dismissive folks look at college as a matter of "preparing for the real world". Newsflash: People in the real world shortcut all the time. I struggle to not laugh in the faces of "college as ROI" types complaining about kids using AI when corps are currently AI obsessed.

miriamposner.com•22 days ago

Sometimes people have real anger about their own educational experience, and that is absolutely valid. But it can also get in the way of understanding the larger picture. Some people also have trouble believing that teaching is a skill that requires expertise, and I’d ask you to reflect on that.

miriamposner.com•22 days ago

I suggest talking to real teachers in part because I’ve noticed that many people have not totally thought through even the *practical* problems of abandoning writing altogether. Oral exams are fine, but if I were to administer one 15min oral exam to each of my 30 students, that’s 7.5 hours. When?

patrickmccray.bsky.social•22 days ago

Srsly...I'm teaching a 200 person survey right now. If I gave each student a 10 minute oral exam that would be (does some math)...impossible.

miriamposner.com•22 days ago

They just clearly have not thought it through, and they don’t care to.

miriamposner.com•22 days ago

For all their exhortations to “logic” and “reason,” I have witnessed many people confidently misdiagnose problems with (American) education, in ways that are contraindicated by data we all agree upon, perhaps because their own anger or self-interest compels them in one direction or another.

sumitapahwa.bsky.social•22 days ago

I've often said that people of all kinds believe they know how teaching should work, because they once sat in a classroom, in a way that the wouldn't believe they know how a car should be fixed because they sat in the driver's seat.

miriamposner.com•22 days ago

We have got to figure out how to cut that shit out. Invite every self-appointed teaching expert to hold the attention of my 250-person lecture course, for example. Or take a turn getting 30 21-yo’s who spent 4 years in Zoom school to open up their mouths and have a conversation about ideas.

lesterryan.bsky.social•22 days ago

Or walk into an 8th grade classroom and try to manage just their behaviors for a day.

kirkpams.bsky.social•22 days ago

I once talked to a tech bro who insisted that teaching was simple and he knew it because of his experience tutoring a single friend years ago. 🙄

21cpedagogy.bsky.social•22 days ago

Yep. I see this so much. I also believe b/c we don’t do effective teacher training is that a lot of teachers come into the profession trying to teach how they were taught even though education and our understanding of learning continues to develop and change.

miriamposner.com•22 days ago

If you have good ideas for education, I invite you into conversation with teachers. And as every teacher knows, a critical, irreplaceable feature of meaningful scholarly conversation is that the participants have *read what has already been written*.

miriamposner.com•22 days ago

Here's an example of this kind of dismissal, perhaps fueled by the author's dissatisfaction with their own educational experience. There are many more in comments and QTs. I don't know what this person is talking about. What boxes? It's a refusal to understand that people have thought about this.

georgemporter.bsky.social•22 days ago

Thank you! I think it's critical to talk to people who actually teach real students. So many of people's proposals just wouldn't work in the real world.

mdelange.bsky.social•22 days ago

True, it's hard to organize. Plus with oral exams there's the risk of new types of inequality and bias in the assessment process.

cdanby.bsky.social•22 days ago

Moreover speaking, like writing, is s skill and an oral exam, however patterned, is a social encounter. Results will be conditioned by class, gender, race, rapport in general. Written exams keep a record and are relatively standardized.

monicakeane.bsky.social•22 days ago

We don't have a culture of oral exams in the US. It'd be very difficult to start even if we wanted to

joannenelson.bsky.social•22 days ago

I think it’s being shoved down our throats at least in part because these AI salespeople are presenting it as a one size fits all “solution” to professional development trainings. Admins can send us all to the same thing without having to come up with something meaningful or listen to our requests.

joannenelson.bsky.social•22 days ago

Every training on “how to use AI in the classroom” skips the first step, which is an informed and thoughtful conversation about IF we should use it at all.

mathowitz.bsky.social•22 days ago

For as long as I've been in education, teachers wants/needs have been dismissed...

"New math"
Banning phones
SROs
Doors are the problem...

Bc everybody has been to school, they feel they actually understand what occurs behind the scenes. They don't.

joannenelson.bsky.social•22 days ago

I can’t remember who said it, but I remember hearing “I saw Star Wars but that doesn’t mean I know how to direct a movie.”

bigfrickinswede.bsky.social•22 days ago

The comment from "Donald" on the 404 site is like a direct case in point for this. Donald seems to think you can just submit student work to a plagiarism detector still and have it accurately catch stuff, and that's at the bottom of this article with experiences from all these teachers!

bittersnurr.bsky.social•22 days ago

The replies having some rather refreshing and clever solutions fills me with some hope as someone who had had to duct tape a pencil to my hand to take blue book finals from injury vs cheating fears.

Thank you to any teacher refusing to pass the unfair burden they've been handed to their students.

tharsen.bsky.social•22 days ago

So I just gave 2 final exams, allowing the students to use anything they want, but I told them out loud before the exams that I had designed the questions so that GPT would not be able to answer them well, and that the answers from their actual brains would be far better.

The result?

tharsen.bsky.social•22 days ago

The result was that those who used AI got scores in the 70s (out of 100) while those who used their brains and wrote their own answers generally scored in the 90s.

It was a stark divide.

tharsen.bsky.social•22 days ago

I think the hardest parts of this might be:

1) it took me a huge amount of time to figure out how to word the questions so the AIs failed to answer them well, and

2) ~70 is a huge step up from 0, which is what some students might have gotten without the help (i.e. on a pen-and-paper style exam).

tharsen.bsky.social•22 days ago

So it kinda worked, but this is not a solution.

graynewt.bsky.social•22 days ago

To your point about the time it took to develop the Qs, I would also be concerned about administrative complication. At my college, if a class falls under our Gen Ed umbrella there's an entirely separate evaluation process. Any big change you want to make to a course has to go through that, too.

werewolfteacher.bsky.social•22 days ago

I give assignments that ChatGPT can’t answer.

It doesn’t stop the students from turning in ChatGPT assignments. Because they don’t read the response to figure out if ChatGPT actually answered the question correctly.

So then I have to make kids redo assignment or fail.

notapodcaster.bsky.social•22 days ago

My favorite is when they don't remove the "let me know if you have any more questions about X" at the end because they never read it.

werewolfteacher.bsky.social•22 days ago

You know that scene in "English Teacher" where he shows the principal a response that starts with, "As a large language model...." (it was in all the ads I've never actually seen the show)

That's actually happened in my classes.

davidcrespo.bsky.social•22 days ago

could you give an example of such an assignment?

werewolfteacher.bsky.social•22 days ago

Every one of our assignments requires students to site textual evidence from whatever story we are referencing. ChatGPT often fails to include quotes from the text, often makes them up, or pulls them from later in the text than the sections we are looking at

davidcrespo.bsky.social•22 days ago

interesting! I hope they don't figure out it will do a lot better if they give it the full text of the relevant section

werewolfteacher.bsky.social•22 days ago

And part of the problem is thst the hand in the ChatGPTed assignment at the deadline so they have no more class time to work on it and get it right.

tharsen.bsky.social•22 days ago

This is a very valuable point; as long as the technology is available we have to expect that there will always be kids using it.

Teaching them how poorly GPT and other models answer some (many/most) questions is a valuable exercise but this only works with time for reflection, and to redo the task.

fatraccoon.bsky.social•22 days ago

Hand-written essays don't lie.

graynewt.bsky.social•22 days ago

It would have to be done in class in front of you. Because you can hand copy an AI generated essay.

brianwilcox.bsky.social•22 days ago

🎯 It's during the process of writing that I do some of my deepest analytical thinking.

I have used AI as a search tool, but would never use it to write for me.

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