I asked teachers to tell me how AI has changed how they teach.
The response from teachers and university professors was overwhelming. In my entire career, I’ve rarely gotten so many email responses to a single article, and I have never gotten so many thoughtful and comprehensive responses.
One thing is clear: teachers are not OK.
They describe trying to grade “hybrid essays half written by students and half written by robots,” trying to teach Spanish to kids who don’t know the meaning of the words they’re trying to teach them in English, and students who use AI in the middle of conversation. They describe spending hours grading papers that took their students seconds to generate: “I’ve been thinking more and more about how much time I am almost certainly spending grading and writing feedback for papers that were not even written by the student,” one teacher told me. “That sure feels like bullshit.”
“Work ethic” does not mean “appreciation of hard work for the sake of working hard”. “Work ethic” means, primarily, an appreciation for the maximization of your own productivity. That lesson is not being taught by compelling the student to spend excess time in a subject after achieving mastery.
The issue isn’t that homework is assigned. The issue is when it is a heavily weighted component of the final grade. The instructor can go ahead and assign homework to allow the student to learn the topic through “disciplined study”, but the effectiveness of that study (their developed “talent” for the subject matter) determined from testing and other in-class work.
The effort they put into their homework is irrelevant: they either master the subject matter, or they do not.
Bringing this back to “work ethic”, their failure to achieve demonstrable mastery of the subject matter indicates the ineffectiveness of their “disciplined study”. They should learn from this that “hard work” is a means to an end. “Hard Work” is not an achievement in and of itself.
Meanwhile, the students for whom such “study” is wasted effort are no longer unduly burdened. They are free to focus their time-intensive “disciplined studies” on subjects for which they need to make that effort, or they can take on additional non-burdened coursework. They can learn “work ethic” by mastering a greater variety of subjects, maximizing their productivity.
I don’t think we should send kids out to break rocks just so they experience hard work, what I mean is kids should be challenged enough that they have to do research and learn to study so they can come up with strategies that are useful in life.
I do agree, working hard for hard works sake isn’t super important, but being able to work hard when you need to is.
And as an example, I found pretty much all school easy until university, when I got a harsh reality check that doing the coarse work the morning it was due was a bad strategy in life. Avoiding that type of outcome would be preferable.