The loss that he describes is deeper and more existential than anything academic integrity can protect: a specific, if perhaps decaying, way of being among students and their teachers. “AI has already changed the classroom into something I no longer recognize,” he told me. In this view, AI isn’t a harbinger of the future but the last straw in a profession that was almost lost already, to funding collapse, gun violence, state overreach, economic decay, credentialism, and all the rest. New technology arrives on that grim shore, making schoolwork feel worthless, carried out to turn the crank of a machine rather than for teaching or learning.
College writing instructor. Most of my time is spent trying to get students to un-learn bad habits from high school.
I try to prevent those habits from starting but the standardized bullshit I am forced to teach sort of requires it to graduate. :doomer:
Oh I don’t blame high school teachers for their situation. Even if we didn’t have the testing regime they’re required to teach towards, good writing inherently requires students to interrogate authority (even the authority of the instructor), which isn’t something that most parents want their kids doing in a real way. After all, a good writer recognizes both why rules exist and under what conditions they should be broken. That kind of contingency is generally skeptical of authority, etc.
Of course the academy, with the hollowing of tenure, is doing its best to remove the possibility to do that even in college, so things will probably become pretty fuckt in the next few decades…
I remember my freshman university writing class and getting totally OWNED by the first assignment, I was so mad bc I had always gotten top scores in writing in high school, I was actually offended
Luckily I was able to pull my head out of my ass and learn to write from my instructor but not out of some desire to improve but bc I was a nerd that wanted A’s
I am lucky I went to a school that had uni writing as a requirement bc if I had gone somewhere else I probably would have never learned to write properly
It’s a blight elsewhere too.
I remember getting a stern talking to when I first read de Montaigne and tried to copy his structure in an essay instead of the standard one. Copying the guy who invented the essay is considered to be unacceptable innovation!
I hope to God the rest of the world doesn’t learn to write this way, but the way most Americans learn to write in high school is just these extremely formulaic intro 2 body paragraphs and conclusion scrawls.
Clever cute introductory anecdote.
With that out of the way, topic of essay.
Thesis statement and contentions.
References.
Counterpoint.
Refutation.
Cute ending that refers to clever cute introductory anecdote.
:congratulations:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-legged_essay but for burgers
was told sentences can never be paragraphs, a paragraph must have at least three sentences.
Yup, this messed with me when I was growing up because I was trying to write stories even when I was a kid and I’d try to follow this formula only to have disastrous results. Sometimes the idea you’re trying to convey can be summed up in one sentence, and sometimes it’s just snappier to just make it the one line. Third sentence.
but the way most Americans learn to write in high school is just these extremely formulaic intro 2 body paragraphs and a conclusion scrawls
The exports of Libya are numerous in amount. One thing they export is corn… or, as the Indians call it, maize. Another famous Indian was Crazy Horse. In conclusion, Libya is a land of contrasts.
Matthew Boedy, an English professor at the University of North Georgia, told me about one student so disengaged, he sometimes attended class in his pajamas.
THE INDIGNITY
I think the idea of AI as the last straw in education from your excerpt is very accurate. If a student is going to have ChatGPT write their essays outright you lost them ages ago, you just didn’t know it.
I also think this might not be nearly as much of an issue if the consequences for failing a course were not to the tune of thousands of dollars to retake it, as well as a setback to the piece of paper 80% of careers are locked behind
he sometimes attended class in his pajamas.
Of all the things that are hellish in hellworld, that’s so incredibly unimportant that its inclusion tells me that that professor has an awfully comfortable seat in hellworld at the moment.
The first year of what now
EDIT: Oh it’s just that this is the first year ChatGPT has been around, thought it might have been some truly hellish “university” where the teachers are ChatGPT.
Damn if ai is making schoolwork look pointless then maybe teachers should try assigning work that actually gets students to learn something other than how to properly format a paper in MLA
What a fucking stupid take. Just absolutely no thought put in dogshit opinion.
Man anyone remember when your parents trapped within that boomer mentality thought a college degree was all you needed to make the big bucks? :yes-honey-left:
Higher education was already dead and mutilated by capitalism and reactionary denigration, ChatGPT just made sure to double tap it and prove that most students are just attending college as a means of obtaining a piece of paper (I was one of them) and praying they can get a job that leaves them only semi in the near poverty zone. I’m honestly wondering what the educational makeup is going to be in the US within the next decade because as trends continue we are likely seeing how late stage capitalism is reinforcing that learning, just like putting effort into work, actually means nothing for your material wellbeing.
