Recently, I got an email that opened with this following:
Really? A necessity? For whom? Why?
You know what is necessary in the classroom in the digital age? Screen-free learning where students use their own minds and opportunities to develop interpersonal skills through in-person, face-to-face interaction.
Look, if I had a problem and AI could solve it, I’d be psyched, but so far in my experience, it mostly causes new problems without solving any of the old ones. The two greatest problems I have faced in my classroom are as old as my profession: A lack of intrinsic motivation in my students to master the skills of English class and not enough time in the day to juggle the numerous demands of my job.
Theoretically, AI could help with problem number 2, except actually it can’t. My few efforts to use AI to do my work faster have been uninspiring and resulted in time wasted, not time saved. When I try to use it to create teaching materials, I waste so much time getting the prompt right that I could have just done the task myself. Even when it appears to do what I wanted, the stuff it spits out tends to be superficial and flawed, so I have to spend large amounts of time editing it.
As for using it to assess student work, I have strong objections. Education is relational. How can I form good relationships with my students if I outsource giving them feedback? And if I let AI assess them, why shouldn’t they let AI do their assignments?
Maybe we can just skip school altogether. My AI can give their AI assignments and then their AI can hand their assignments in to my AI which can grade and return them. And I can stay home and drink good coffee and read good books, and they can stay home and drink Celsius and watch YouTube videos of other people playing video games.
Students will not get intrinsic motivation from a bot. They get it by discovering their unique passions and by engaging in communities that value hard work and thoughtfulness.
The plight of educators won’t be fixed by a bot. Want to support teachers? Start by reducing class sizes and protecting teachers’ planning time.
You know what teachers are sick of? Being told to do more with less. Offering educators AI as a teaching assistant is one more way of saying, “We aren’t going to fix the structural problems in education or have meaningful conversations about cultural values, but we are going to give you this thing you never asked for and don’t want and it’s up to you to figure out how to use it. We good?”
I would love to see a side-by-side comparison of how teacher salaries have changed over the past twenty years versus how spending on educational technology has changed.
So, no, AI is not a necessity. Not in the classroom or anywhere else.
Sure, the tech companies want us to think it’s inevitable. Their wealth depends on it. But whatever they want us to believe, humans have lived without AI for millennia, and sometimes they have even lived well. AI is a product trap. I, for one, am not falling for it.
Perspective is all a matter of where you train your attention. From my perspective, there’s a lot of backlash against and mistrust of AI brewing, and I am here for it.
One of my hobbies lately is collecting articles on peoples’ attitudes toward AI, just to reassure myself I’m not alone. If you also need reassurance, allow me to present a a small collection of gift links so you can bask in some anti-AI solidarity:
What AI Kant Do - on the value of the humanities in the AI-era
Why College Grads are Booing their Commencement Speakers - kids who experienced the AI shift in the middle of their formative years aren’t in love with it
What AI did to my College Class - A Stanford student on the way AI has shaped his college experience for the worse
What Happened After a Teacher Ditched Screens - I’m not the only early adopter of educational technology who has made a reversal!
Why Silicon Valley is Turning to the Catholic Church - not exactly an anti-AI article, but a really interesting insight into how tech firms are approaching the moral dilemmas of their products
If you’re looking for a good book on resisting AI in the classroom, I recommend More Than Words by John Warner .
Remember, we get to decide if AI is inevitable. In the twenty-first century, the rule is that the loudest one wins, so let’s be louder than the tech bros.
If you’ve seen some good articles or resources lately, please share in the comments!
We don’t need it at all! AI is not part of my life and my wife agrees 100%!