I'm a teacher — AI is beating us in the fight for kids' minds
For almost two decades, my best friend and I have taught together in the same social studies department in the dusty urban landscape of California's Central Valley. He teaches US History to juniors; I teach government and economics to seniors.
Twenty years of summer conversations have centered on how we can get better as teachers, diving into granular elements to improve the quality of our classes.
We have refined exams, tweaked schedules and assignments, and altered our classrooms in countless ways in hopes of offering a better academic product to our students.
For many years we would read a book together that had relevance for both of us, such as Jon Meacham's magisterial 'American Lion' on Andrew Jackson or a history of the Cold War by John Lewis Gaddis.
We would joyfully discuss the books, pulling out different threads to bolster each of our courses in different ways.
Not this summer.
This year we're grappling with a Herculean task: how to counter the reality that our students, armed with artificial intelligence technologies that were the stuff of sci-fi just a few years ago, can cheat on virtually any assignment we give them.
You name it, they can use AI to cheat on it.
Math equations. Writing assignments. Document analysis. Research. Practice tests. Reading tasks.
And it's doing measurable damage, according to a new MIT study that found diminished memory and learning activity in the brains of students who use AI — a result completely and utterly consistent with what so many of us are seeing in the classroom.
Before ChatGPT, Claude or Perplexity, students had to take time to complete assignments.
After all, that is the point of academic work: Committing time to focused mental labor — reading books, practicing math, writing essays — trains students' minds to process and comprehend new ideas.
Whatever students were asked to do, they were expected to take time and use their own brains.
Until recently, this wasn't considered unreasonable or outrageous.
Mental labor, we understood, was transformative; becoming educated, obtaining knowledge and cultivating rational thought were treasures leading to a meaningful and full life.
My students are casting those treasures aside as they choose AI's easy path.
That's the deeper, more penetrating tragedy we teachers are coming to accept: AI is a classroom Gordian knot that cannot be untangled.
Because it's not just homework — students use AI to write their emails and clean up their text messages, too.
And with the ubiquity of personal tech, teachers witness it everywhere. Students offer up precise summaries of complex novels in seconds and solve difficult math equations in an instant.
Large language models generate in moments lengthy essays that creepily mimic the quirks of human writing.
Our students are normalizing mental mediocrity through an endless expectation of ease.
Pew Research reports that 26% of US teens 'have used ChatGPT for schoolwork,' doubling the number that did so just two years ago.
No offense to Pew, but that figure is absolute, unadulterated, unbelievable hogwash: I'm sure the number is much higher, and that it will meteorically rise in the years ahead.
The truth is, the tools meant to catch cheating — plagiarism checkers, AI detectors — are deeply flawed. Teachers who think they can outsmart AI are fooling themselves.
As one philosophy professor observed on Substack, 'Whatever success they imagine they have today in spotting computer-generated work will disappear with the next generation of AI, or the one after that.'
Silicon Valley titans have spent the past decade destroying the mental health of my students via social media, siphoning off their time and attention spans so thoroughly that not even Ivy Leaguers today can read a complete book.
Now they have come for the high-school classroom, where the surge in ubiquitous, no-apologies and guilt-free cheating has forced teachers like my friend and me to treat our students with potent suspicion in every academic interaction.
Which begs the question: What new classroom innovations are we coming up with this summer?
I'll admit, the homework quagmire continues to baffle us. But we have agreed, sadly, that exam days this fall will resemble contraband searches.
We will require our students to leave backpacks at the back of the room. Pockets must be emptied. Phones and devices surrendered.
We will provide paper and pencils like it's the 1950s, ensuring that at least some brain work will occur in our classrooms.
Problem solved . . . right?
Not so fast. I mentioned our new policy to an incoming senior who quickly warned me, 'You better watch for the Apple Watches — kids are using those, too.'
For teachers in the trenches, this battle never ends. Never.
Jeremy S. Adams is a high school teacher from Bakersfield, Calif. and author of the book 'Hollowed Out: A Warning About America's Next Generation.'
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