A few thoughts on Chat GPT and my classroom...

 ChatGPT 

Recently, I received a department-wide email from my department chair. Email may be a generous word, Jeremiad might be more accurate. The topic was ChatGPT, and I am not sure what sent him into a tailspin on this topic, but it must have angered him quite a bit, because he came down really hard on the students he accused of using it. In the email he declared that students who were using ChatGPT were "Lazy, stupid, and apathetic”. Additionally, there was an implication that students who chose to use this program were incapable of doing the work. 

When I chat with students as to why they choose to use this technology, they make similar arguments to what I have come up with in my own head; to escape doing things I don’t find valuable, like creating rubrics. Students would much rather be hanging out with friends, playing video games, or getting jobs. Much like the time I would need to invest in making rubric being time-not-well-spent for me, some of my assignments simply aren't time well spent for them. 

So, what responsibility do teachers and admin need to take here? I see this as being two-fold. First, we have students who have fulfilling and complicated lives. For many of them, they are having experiences which could be amazing fodder for an English classroom. Yet, we choose not to tap into this as a resource, or we use it but with text which is so old and irrelevant that it's unrecognizable as having nothing to do at all with their lives. We need to be wrestling with questions worthy of our thinking. Right now the question seems to be, "How do we detect when students are using ChatGPT?" It seems to me a much more critical question is, "How do we create assignments worthy of our students working on them?" What if we saw this as an opportunity to create assignments which students will be interested enough to actually do, what if we tap into their ideas, their thoughts, their lives as they are right now. 

Another question this debate brings up; have we, in education, so dehumanized our assignments that a machine can do them? Have we kept things so text-based that our students have no place in the work. How can we expect students to see themselves in a work if we don't prioritize that?