How do teachers let go of a new and consequential thing we can’t control?
The Profession
Most teachers get the opportunity to teach their own generation at the beginning of their careers. I remember it being an exciting moment, as if I had come back to save my fellow Millennials from the obliviousness of Gen X and the Boomers.
When you are new to teaching, it’s hard not to think that your freshness to the profession will help create some sort of jazzed-upness in the classroom that has yet to exist. No doubt this is a sort of newbie idealism that exists in any profession. And like most noobs, my own idealism was thrown in my face pretty early on.
For instance, I thought worksheets, tests, and quizzes had had their death, and I tried my best not to assign them. I believed that my students would be just as excited as I was to try this new thing called “Google Docs.” It would transform the way they saw writing. In Google Docs, writing was a community-oriented work of charming revision and play. There was interesting conversation to be had. I relaxed all rules and made anything revisable.
Meanwhile, I scrutinized all work turned into me. I remember spending breaks on my computer, typing out tons of comments on student essays. This was important work.
There was no doubt I was driven, and I hoped that my drive would infect my students.
The ideas themselves were not bad–as of this writing, I do not test; I use Google Docs; and I allow revisions–but the complete lack of structure and my hope that student motivation would fill such a void was severley problematic.
Throughout my own journey through school, college, work-life, and the unique experiences I have accrued, I had created a general theory of how to make learning and education work for me. I was expecting my students to have the same epiphanies I had without the experiences that were so essential to me. My idealism had translated my own perception of learning onto theirs. My students were not me–and that’s pretty obvious when “my students” means 150 teenagers–and I was not them. Instead of a room full of budding autodidacts, with me as sage teacher, I released 150 zoo-grown animals into the wild with a simple, “You’re free!”
So I read a lot of education books, learned from colleagues, earned my masters degree from the Ohio Writing Project, and basically turned myself into a sponge in terms of finding my “way” to being a good teacher. I even tinkered and tried things I thought were anathema to education, like worksheets. Somewhere along the way, I may have turned into a competent teacher.
I bring all of this up because just the idea of being a good teacher, that wonderful idealism, is not enough to be a good teacher. Even in the best of times, a teacher might not garner the total buy-in of an entire class of students. That is a tough thing to come to terms with–that some students might not be ready for what you have to give them or might not be mature enough to sit still in a classroom of almost thirty or might not see themselves as someone who likes to do English. Each student adds so many variables to classroom learning environment.
Obviously it is an absolute wonderful thing to put a random sample of students in a room. In the classroom, different perspectives have no choice but to interact with each other, building even more perspectives. It is the absolute power of a classroom, this diversity of experience in one room. Classrooms are essential to education.
But one also must think of teachers as a kind of “manager,” a boss in the classroom, where expectations are set and maintained. And since a classroom is assigned a randomized student population, teachers have no choice in hiring and firing. This is because a classroom is a place for empathy and aid no matter the managerial issues. This is the agreement every teacher makes when they choose to teach.
Therefore, teachers need to be somewhat thick-skinned, a role model of composure, allowing for a narrowing of emotional focus to protect our human social muscles that always crave acceptance. This can be quite difficult, especially so that many students won’t realize our gift to them until they are in their mid-twenties.
Here is where I could go into each aspect of teaching that we deal with every day–the arc of a daily lesson plan or a unit; effective communication; classroom setups; formative and summative assessment design; feedback practices and the time management that comes with it; etc.–but what I want to point out is that the teaching profession can easily be overwhelming.
Each day is different and the tasks are of a wide variety, especially if you teach more than one core class. Adaptation to change is baked into the profession. This is why I love teaching, but it is also why teaching is very difficult and why many teachers feel immense imposter syndrome.
The knowledge and skill one must have to lead a classroom in learning, let alone six in one day, is just crazy. Get enough teachers together, and we can tell stories and debate for days the various elements competing for our day-to-day attention, let alone year-to-year.
And so it is that teachers take an immense amount of care and thought in their practice of educating a large group of people. We are constantly trying to adapt our skills betwixt our strengths and personalities and our various students’ strengths and personalities.
We do this intense job while being evaluated by heavily invested parties: students, administrators, parents, the public in general, and ourselves.
All this to say that educational good intentions are not enough to make a class conducive to learning. And that’s just conduciveness. What’s needed after that is professionalism and creativity. This not only takes skill but deep-seated wisdom.
Like any tough job, teachers have their fair share of kvetching and worrying. Some of it can be ascribed to the age old “kids these days” mantra. But this AI business, holy gadzooks! It’s a lot. All of us are in such deep trenches.
What Adults Know That Teenagers Do Not
An adult who has made it long past teenagedom will always find the world teaming with cultures and hobbies and identities to the point that said adult realizes that one’s own teenage-driven “originality” (that teenagers have come up with solutions no one else has) is not quite original at all but generic-ish idealism. Perhaps this realization rather than age makes one an adult. Because how could your mind not go to those places as you enter the world?
Even though this sort of wisdom trajectory is built into human growth, we yet look upon teenagers with unease as they attempt to enter into the world of adults. Teenagers lack a ton of agency and power to affect the world, but we still worry about it like they could change it very permanently tomorrow. And then we also forget that we once were in the same growth pattern ourselves.
But this is all too sidebar for what I want to say here, which is this: the choices of those you feel responsible for cause a sort of exhaustion. Us humans derive all our fears from control. Sometimes we call this the fear of the unknown, but you can find it in most popular fears. We fear air travel because we are not privy to the machinations of the airplane or the control of the cockpit; we fear spiders because we can’t control what they’ll do and, because of their size, they can go places where we might not see them; and we fear sharks because they live in a habitat that we are very much not accustomed to, let alone adapt at navigating.
And in some sense, we fear teenagers. They quickly create cultures that do not adhere to the status quo and venture forth visions and rationale of idealism us adults know to be false gods. (Here I must say that the exuberance for making the world a better place is a refreshing teenage attribute that I wish all adults maintained. And furthermore, not all teenage thought is unoriginal. It is the complexity of reality that teenage idealism does not account for.)
What happens when this sort of being is confronted with AI? Well, a lot. There is cheating and rationalizations that may seem logical to the teenager but not so to a veteran learner. Stories abound about the student uses of AI, and after more than two years, teachers have been addressing a Caddyshack-esque gopher problem.
A Reading Problem
Being an English teacher means that you have a certain love for story. But being human itself also means you have a certain love for story. Humans communicate and gather information best through story. It is how we are built. But the English teacher, we revere it, are its biggest fans. We are reading nerds and reading technologists. It is an obvious pairing of profession and hobby. And it’s because of this drive and our professionalism that we are always hungry for new materials, be they contemporary articles or a YouTube video that pairs well with a novel we are reading. We are constantly looking for ways into texts. Every year presents a new possibility to do it all better than the year before, and oftentimes the core texts remain unchanged (another issue of ELA).
It was already impossible to read every issue of legacy media delivered to our doorsteps, let alone all of the books both in and out of print. But the internet supercharged this constant tapping on attention’s door. So we skim and create piles, digital and analog, for later. It is a wonderful problem to have but also, in its infinite abundance, a reminder that we are not capable of fulfilling all of our intentions.
Well, now AI can fulfill the intentions we never will. Some AIs, in order to make themselves smarter, have already imbibed the entire corpus of reading material online. In some sense, the plight of the internet, that supreme of all digital databases, has always been to outdo the last iteration of the “encyclopedia”: Britannica, Encarta, Wikipedia, Google, and now AI.
And thus the plight of the English teacher–tasked with reading 180 days worth of work from 150 different people each year while living in the age of AI, while also reading for planning and while also reading for pleasure, because why else would you become an English teacher if you didn’t like such things?
That is exhaustion. This is why AI is tantalizing for any teacher but also complete abhorrence. Good education comes from humans helping humans. As we are learning more and more when dealing with writing addressed to us that is touched by the forces of AI, intentionality matters. We swoon over the handwritten letter, and now we swoon over the human crafted email.
We Need a Recharge
So AI is everywhere, and we are busy pointing fingers and worrying and making mistakes and all sorts of drama. This happens when new and powerful technologies are unleashed to the public.
Plagiarism is nothing new, and with advent of the “copy/paste” function of a computer, rendered very easy indeed. But the teaching profession, what used to be a profession of very good critics (teachers) espousing knowledge and criticism upon students who produced all of the work–a sort of rite of passage of reading and writing that held all its cards in the classical liberal arts world and not in the complicated world of government, employment, information triage, and the various communication tools of this modern world–is now something more akin to a philosopher coach. We model, sometimes in real time, the skills needed for a fulfilled life and a better humanity: empathy, thoughtfulness, openness, grit, confidence, etc.
But AI has perhaps turned us back into the teacher and student of old, rekindling that old rite-of-passage-ness.
For a long time, students that see school as a hurdle to college or life in general, have dealt with studenthood in ways all humans deal with pesky problems: they look to efficiency. Therefore, AI as a place to do all of one’s thinking is an easy addition to such a toolbox. If students see school as a series of end products needed for the grade and for the degree, to see the product as the only necessary end result of any sort of project, AI is a very wonderful invention.
It is not my goal in this essay to evaluate how AI will eventually merge into the education world in a positive way, but I think it’s important to discuss that, for teachers, AI is a new addition to our already overloaded awareness.
In practice, teaching in an AI world is not that big of a deal. Just like teaching in a smartphone world or an internet world. You make rules and rationale, and students make their choices, and you hopefully help to guide them to the right choices. But this itself is idealism. The addition of the AI part of the brain in the teacher toolkit, a toolkit driven by a deep urge to help students confront learning and not shirk it, is not simple.
For instance, as English teachers, we cannot live in a world where we relegate writing to an end result. (John Warner’s recent book, More Than Words, is a wonderful argument for this.) If I allowed for a blackbox approach for students to draft and revise their work in my classroom, whether these processes are AI-aided or not, my job becomes far more difficult.
Perhaps a student uses AI to write an argument, and it’s too formal, as AIs are wont to do. My only teaching feedback cannot just be what I would normally do: write more for your audience. How does one know their audience if they have not thought through how they understand the argument? A whole breadth of empathizing and creativity is lost. Not to mention that I basically gave the student the answer to their problems. For if they do rely on AI to write, the could just go back to the chatbot and type in this: “Change this piece of writing so it is for [insert target audience here].” No doubt the product that appears is better, but what changed in the student who is attributed as the author? And perhaps they revised and edited it the old school way: would I need to verify this? That is even more reading.
It is hard to describe the exhaustion many teachers feel at this point. It has never felt good to suspect plagiarism or students cheating the system. And it has never felt good when students (or any other stakeholder in education for that matter) treat their time in school as a rite of passage instead of a place to grow. AI exacerbates these effects, creating a need for some sort of teacher blinder, like those for a horse pulling a carriage.
At the most basic level, any competent English teacher can teach a high school English class with just a notebook, various analog reading materials, writing utensils, and a classroom. We need only ourselves and each other to practice our minds’ capabilities. But it’s even more basic than that. You can do pushups at any time in your life, even now as you read this, but when someone else holds you accountable, makes a plan for your fitness, helps you understand said plan, and pushes the horizons of your creative-outlook, it pushes you far more than you’d ever go. This is teaching.
Perhaps in five years, we will still be chugging along with the same educational mindset, maintaining the exhaustion of the teaching profession without any recourse. Teachers were never in it for the money. We were all once strong idealists and still are. We believe in education, and we do not leave such an important and revered calling without strong opposition.
And perhaps we just need to stop worrying so much about holding students accountable. Maybe we should allow students what experiences they wish and let them go out into the world to see what comes of it. No doubt colleges would surely mind this approach and the employers after them and the country after that, but what else is there to do to solve such exhaustion?
Oh yeah, class sizes.
What else makes a human feel seen and heard and invested in, propelling that human to action, than time spent interacting with that human? Doctors see about 20 patients a day; teachers see about 125-150.