Teachers Are Not OK | AI, ChatGPT, and LLMs “have absolutely blown up what I try to accomplish with my teaching.”
https://www.404media.co/teachers-are-not-ok-ai-chatgpt/
Teachers Are Not OK | AI, ChatGPT, and LLMs “have absolutely blown up what I try to accomplish with my teaching.”
https://www.404media.co/teachers-are-not-ok-ai-chatgpt/
10 Comments
From the article: Last month, I wrote an article about how schools were not prepared for ChatGPT and other generative AI tools, based on thousands of pages of public records I obtained from when ChatGPT was first released. As part of that article, I asked teachers to tell me how AI has changed how they teach.
The response from teachers and university professors was overwhelming. In my entire career, I’ve rarely gotten so many email responses to a single article, and I have never gotten so many thoughtful and comprehensive responses.
One thing is clear: teachers are not OK.
They describe trying to grade “hybrid essays half written by students and half written by robots,” trying to teach Spanish to kids who don’t know the meaning of the words they’re trying to teach them in English, and students who use AI in the middle of conversation.
They describe spending hours grading papers that took their students seconds to generate: “I’ve been thinking more and more about how much time I am almost certainly spending grading and writing feedback for papers that were not even written by the student,” one teacher told me. “That sure feels like bullshit.”
Meanwhile Estonia teaches programming since first grade, and has introduced personalized learning using AI in schools.
https://www.educationestonia.org/ai-in-education-establishing-foundations-for-personalised-learning/
https://e-estonia.com/estonia-announces-a-groundbreaking-national-initiative-ai-leap-programme-to-bring-ai-tools-to-all-schools/
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2025/may/26/estonia-phone-bans-in-schools-ai-artificial-intelligence
>While many schools in England have banned smartphones, in Estonia – regarded as the new European education powerhouse – students are regularly asked to use their devices in class, and from September they will be given their own AI accounts.
>The small Baltic country – population 1.4 million – has quietly become Europe’s top performer in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s programme for international student assessment (Pisa), overtaking its near neighbour Finland.
>In the most recent Pisa round, held in 2022 with results published a year later, Estonia came top in Europe for maths, science and creative thinking, and second to Ireland in reading. Formerly part of the Soviet Union, it now outperforms countries with far larger populations and bigger budgets.
This means it’s time to abolish homework, keep kids and extra hour, and have them do assignments in class. We don’t have a choice anymore, lest we allow a generation of children grow up to be adult idiots worse than what we have today.
Simple solution – assign reading-only homework. Spend part of class taking written tests with pen and paper, no technology. Scan and grade materials with ChatGPT. Fail the poor performers.
I think the internet has solidified to everyone scrolling on social media what school really is, what it came from and why it’s the way it is.
When I was in school the internet was a thing but no one was really getting a ton of views about anti work, school history and corporate abuse.
Then you learn modern school was heavily influenced by an ultra rich man that basically kicked off industrialism in the US in the 1900s , Jonh d Rockefeller that later created the general education board.
He made it to create factory workers. And today you have a sort of modified version of that that just isn’t engaging.
Some people push on and find meaningful work, but honestly most students just get lost.
You just lose the trust of students. They can tell school is not up with it’s time. They can tell it’s shooting them straight to dead end work like it was always designed to be.
Why would they do the effort?
Same issue as calculators in school back in the day. Strategy may need to change
There’s been a strong movement for years niw advocating for video-based teaching and basic exercises as ‘homework’ and then using the school time for doing the homework in class, where teachers can help where there are problems.
I don’t see a problem. I don’t understand why we insist on testing proxies for what we actually want to test instead of just testing the thing as closely as we can.
If “ability to produce a short essay on X topic” is not what you wanted to test, *why* are you testing that??? If it is what you want to test, the use of AI is irrelevant. Judge on the quality of the essay.
This also reveals that “critical thinking” is not a thing you can test btw. You need to be way more specific, e.g. “ability to identify misleading arguments”. Once identified, just give them a test that actually directly tests that ability, without giving a shit about the tools they used (because why does that matter?), and grade based on their ability.
In class, by hand, on paper, with a pencil. Phones in cubbies. Less is more.
Our principal actually set aside time during a recent staff meeting to encourage us to use and incorporate ChatGPT and similar engines into our practice and programming.
I found this extremely alarming. It must be similar to the advent of the calculator. I’m not only worried that our students are going to lose the ability to think for themselves or think critically – I’m deeply concerned about the number of educators that are using these engines and allowing they’re brains and thinking skills to atrophy.
Yes, students need to be aware of these engines, as they will have to navigate an increasingly AI heavy world, but kids need to know how to think, create, edit, review, summarize, etc… I’m afraid it’s already having a terrible effect.