With Artificial Intelligence waiting in the wings to summarize the main themes of The Great Gatsby for you—or even write a pretty good draft of your essay on Gatsby’s obsessions with wealth and the American Dream—I’ve wondered lately how I would go about teaching literature were I still in the classroom. How would I dissuade students from engaging with these robotic brains that can write acceptable essays for them in minutes given just a few simple prompts? At first this was alarming to me, especially given the steady increase of plagiarism I saw in my over three decades of teaching. The temptations now are surely much greater, the detection tools more difficult to program to discover the AI behind the words (especially with AI teaching itself to be less detectable). The more I think about it, however, the more I’m confident this sudden technological leap may well force English literature (and other) courses to become more dynamic and engaging.
Given the advent of AI, the old standby of requiring students to submit essays worked on largely at home as major assessment tools needs to be fundamentally re-thought. The era of handing students an essay prompt with a deadline a week or two away then waiting for them to dutifully submit it may well be over, especially at the high school level. Enough students will seek out help from AI (or have it simply do their assignments for them) that I’m sure I would become more and more suspect of student work, knowing the temptation may well prove to be simply too strong. With the written-at-home essay no longer a fundamental feature of the course, teachers will need to rethink the role of the English class from the ground up—and that’s potentially very good news.
My go-to analogies for how I liked to run my literature and writing classes were sports and music performance. Much as the soccer player has to come to practice each day, steadily honing and sharpening their skills under the tutelage of their coaches or a young musician works closely in a lesson with a teacher to master a difficult piece, English classrooms can strive for something similar. Neither the tennis player nor the violinist can pretend to have made accomplishments at the end of the day. Their progress becomes undeniably evident in their performances on stage and on the field—just as their work in practices/lessons can be clearly seen by the coach/teacher and often the entire team (class). Conceiving of the literature classroom as a studio space/training ground/performance stage/arena—the ball field, court or concert hall where the thing students do happens—leads to more engaged and ultimately better educated students.
Increasingly, teachers may implore students to leave their computers outside the door, to come in with book, notepads, favorite writing implements in hand, to roll up their sleeves, and get to work. In the same way that ChatGPT4 won’t ever create a virtuoso pianist or the next Heisman trophy winner, English classes should be redesigned so the same holds true there: good students of literature should arise from the in-person work they do with their teacher-coaches assisting them along the way.
Classes will hopefully start to more regularly consist of a broad range of activities (not just a teacher/prof professing)—writing exercises, reading silently and aloud, sharing ideas, collaborative tasks…working together to unravel the complexities of literary expression. Assessments will surely need to be fundamentally reconsidered as well in this new world where just about everything happens in the classroom. At-home practice (reading, ungraded journaling, other tasks AI cannot easily accomplish) will still be important (think a pianist practicing scales, a tennis player hitting balls off the garage wall). And here, too, practice and in-class training/guidance will help prepare students for the “game/performance,” (a higher-stake activity, like writing an in-class essay in response to a prompt).
Grading will also have to change so that all facets of the class count and bear appropriate weight. The student who excels at illuminating complex ideas in class discussion should get adequate credit for practicing and mastering this important skill—and this credit shouldn’t necessarily be limited to 5 or 10 or, god forbid, 15% of their final grade. Where I last taught, curricular admin were increasingly unhappy with “participation grades" weighted at anything over 10%. What they really valued were those finished essays written at home and submitted on time. Oddly, these same admin were often hesitant to hold students accountable who had clearly plagiarized passages and ideas in their finished essays. Still more surprising, I was discouraged from allowing students to rewrite essays for a better grade (this might well “teach” them not to try enough on the first effort). While I imagine my conflicts with these people might have grown as I moved more and more squarely away from stock high school English class paradigms, I can also imagine them starting to really see the value in prioritizing getting young adult readers to enjoy the task of discovering how literary meaning works—whatever it takes.
The advent of AI could well lay bare the flaws and shortcomings in our traditional literature classes as teachers are forced to find things to do during class time other than lecture and then see which students can best gather up and present the major themes and ideas in their formal papers.
When I was teaching, I became known for encouraging students to find ways to respond to a literary text with an artistic response of their own. The work students submitted was often breathtakingly original and dynamic (and lots of it decorated the walls of my classroom and filled my bookshelves— I’ve included 3 great examples in this post)—witty and wise rap videos, paintings that juxtaposed thematically relevant imagery, board games, original music scores, sculptures, avant-garde installations, poems, character journals, dioramas…. Over the years, I regularly witnessed students working singly or collaboratively on forging creative, original responses to texts we had discussed with real passion and excitement. They were not simply answering my questions or trying to gather together bits of pre-digested information. Rather, they were constructing art works of their own, using these to reach toward and better understand another work of art. In the end, their understanding of the literature they were responding to often grew to such a degree that it was no longer seen as something utterly foreign and unfamiliar, something only people with the right kind of brain can decode, but rather as something not unlike the very creations they conceived of and then constructed with their own two hands.
The same admin who frowned on high percentages for participation often frowned on these. For them, these kinds of creative exercises were well and good, lest you not forget the real job—to teach students how to write concise, well-argued, error-free essays. But now that AI can easily do that task for them, I’m hopeful more dynamic, creative approaches to teaching literature will rise to the foreground, that traditional approaches will be rethought and challenged, invigorating an all too often ineffective and stale approach to teaching/learning.
Finally, I’m not suggesting that writing a well-orchestrated, academic essay should not occur, nor that it isn’t something teachers should make central to their teaching goals. So long as extensive, un-AI-assisted writing happens regularly in classrooms with limited access to technology and is accompanied by a range of more collaborative, human interaction, the literature classroom (especially the high school English classroom) will have been well-served. My hope is that AI gives teachers a firm nudge toward finding these new, more innovative and authentic ways to approach teaching.
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Writing skills in class: This is so obviously a great idea that I had Doh! moment realised I had lacked the wit to think of it myself.
Tangental to this, I learned to write on the front line of the eternal war between the subs desk and the news desk back when print journalism was hard copy. That might also transfer to a classroom.