“I’d become a teacher in large part because I wanted to spend time with young people’s writing, honouring it with close attention,” writes Peter C Baker in this piece for The Guardian. But what happens when writing—and even reading—without the help of AI becomes a foreign concept in the classroom? This topic is not new, but Baker’s passion for creating AI-free teaching is inspiring.
Emily’s students all had school-issued laptops, and her computer had a program that allowed her to surveil the content of every one of her students’ screens; they all appeared on the screen simultaneously, in a grid that recalled a bank of CCTV monitors. Using this program was always discomfiting – Big Brother, c’est moi – and always transfixing. Some students didn’t use AI at all, at least in class. Others turned to it every chance they got, feeding in whatever question they were working on almost as a reflex. At least one student was in the habit of putting every new subject into ChatGPT, having it generate notes that he could refer to if called on. Often, I saw students getting funnelled toward AI use even when they hadn’t necessarily been looking for it. I got used to watching a student Google a subject (“key themes in Romeo and Juliet”), read the AI-generated answer that now appears atop most Google search results, click “Dive deeper in AI mode” – and suddenly be chatting with Gemini, Google’s chatbot, which was always ready to advertise its own capabilities. “Should I elaborate on one or more of these themes? Should I draft a first paragraph for an essay on the subject?”
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