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.”
This sounds like the same complaints math teachers had when pocket sized books or calculators or web search or many other technologies started becoming ubiquitous. And the same answer is true, these are tools they will have in the real world. It’s just as useful to learn to use tools as it is to learn to do the thing without tools. Test them without the tools available for those things they need to know from memory and with the tools for everything else. Make the tests, essays, etc. so the tools aren’t able to do the entire set of work in the test.
Wasn’t as big of a problem when text books helped with this like making lots of math problems that calculators couldn’t solve in a dongle step. The real issue is that textbook manufacturing consolidation has made text books fairly useless, so teachers are left to craft their own lessons if they want them to be worthwhile. And they don’t have time to create their own lessons from scratch because of some aspects of our education systems that are too much to go into here.