I homeschooled my children. More accurately, my wife and I homeschooled them; I taught some writing and some high-school level math, and she did most of the rest. Teaching in school now all too often is some teacher delivering rote assignments to students who do them by rote. I worry that, as bad as that…
The objective of teaching students to write is not to ensure they create content that can be graded. It is to get them to engage with language and storytelling. This is not a new story. Students learn arithmetic even though there are calculators and spreadsheets. They learn spelling even though there are spelling checkers. And…
Ethan Mollick, associate professor at Penn’s Wharton School, required his students to use the AI writing tool ChatGPT in his classes last semester. You should definitely check out his description of the experience; it’s full of real-world insights that are far more valuable than the noodlings of naysayers. Start with the intention to learn Unimaginative…
Associate deans at the Vanderbilt University office of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) sent an email to the whole Peabody College community after a man shot eight people at Michigan State University. The deans made the ill-considered choice to use ChatGPT to write the note. But regardless of that choice, such post-shooting sympathy notes are…
The New York Times published a piece regarding university policies and strategies for students using ChatGPT or similar tools to prepare coursework. For each strategy, I’ll assess how realistic it is and what the consequences might be. Articles like this one, as well as the policies they describe, are shortsighted, because AI text generation is…
As you structure your book, deductive logic is leading you astray — especially if you are an academic. State big conclusions first, if you want readers to keep reading. The logical, and wrong, way to structure a nonfiction book Here is the logical way to structure a book: Very nice. Very easy to follow. Very…
ChatGPT is a crisis in the making for professors who teach writing. Their administrations are attempting to cope. Their pathetic efforts will fail. Here’s what Georgetown is telling professors — and why it won’t work Here’s the text of a message from Georgetown University to professors there (posted by a professional friend of mine who…
ChatGPT undermines the traditional way we teach writing in high school or college. We can try (and fail) to preserve the old ways of teaching. Or we can develop new ways that assume future writers will have access to AI tools and help them to use those tools. Current ways we teach writing already stink…
Artificial intelligence writing software is now good enough to write decent student essays. If a student turns in such an essay, is that cheating? And what are we going to do about it? Aki Peritz wrote about the problem in Slate and Jeff Schatten pondered it in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Both pieces include…