A student I like turns in an essay. (She won me over because she brings “Crime and Punishment” to class, and her last name is Russian, which makes me think of the great-grandparents I never met who left Russia for the reasons many Jews left.) A few sentences into her essay, I know she didn’t write it.
Teachers all over the country are getting these papers. The essays seem only distantly related to the question you posed to students — and the AI machine drags in a few quotations and combines words in a way a high school student never would. As a teacher in this day and age, you’re tired, so you don’t even keep reading. The student comes in to meet with you. The website you use states that it is 89% certain that the paper you’re reading was written by AI. Your student squirms.
Your student asks how you know for sure. She says she used AI to check on her sentences. She wrote them, she insists. She says she loves to vary sentences to get the reader’s attention. OK, you say. She says she didn’t use it for the next paragraph and you should add that in the site you used and see.
So I copy and paste in the first two paragraphs, and it says it’s 100% certain that the content was generated by AI. But I still trust my student. What is teaching if you can’t trust your students?
I’ve always been a bit of a fool for my students. I have a gift of seeing their potential no matter their behavior. Even the one student who threatened my life, who was murdered by rival gang members. I grieve the loss of what must have been the potential of a teenage nihilist. My fingertips sweat as I write of him. In 1995, he told me American education is dead. He was a student in a public high school in the sixth-poorest city in the United States, a school with a dropout rate in the neighborhood of 50%.
There were kids in that school who were wiser, faster and sharper of intellect than 100% of the people I met as an undergraduate at Princeton University. They also knew American education was dead. But they weren’t nihilists, and those who survived the streets of Bridgeport, Conn., carry on with their lives and care for their children. Some of my students were grateful back then that at least banana trees weren’t exploding over their heads, such as when their family escaped the war in their home country, or that their family was able to make a new start after President Richard Nixon bombed Cambodia.
The death of American education began at inception. Teach a few years in a city school with students who are immigrants who can’t return to their home countries. Real immigrants. Not those Europeans who show up with cultural capital, who go back and forth with their parents who have PhDs. If you do teach in a city school like the one I taught in in the 1990s, you’ll get a front-row seat to what isn’t working. While across the street, the suburbs increase their stranglehold on resources, generational wealth and luxury, unchallenged and unchanged. At least until the recent minute I copy this head-exploding sentence: “When rules sort people by property and pedigree, care and labor makes no difference in one’s outcome.”
I went to English-teacher war on the phrase “rules sort people by property and pedigree,” even though I sensed the shadow of an idea in there. And the care and labor of teachers in our American education system should make a difference to a student’s life.
As a teacher in an American school who is inundated by AI-generated work masquerading as human thought, in a system that maintains power and privilege for some who own property that is kept in place by a violence no less destructive than atomic bombs dropped on civilian populations or the protection of American “greatness” through the funding of a genocide in Palestine, I’ll go to work on Monday. And I’ll think that maybe a few teachers will make a difference despite the death of American education.