Microblog Memes

I do not see the problem in "AI can write essays in seconds better than the teachers can." There's a problem but it's kind of not that.

I was in high school 20 years ago, long before LLMs were cokesniff in a silicon valley board room. Back then, you could buy essays off the rack. You could commission a custom one if you were bougie enough, or "Okay I got one on Hamlet, Othello or Much Ado About Nothing. Take your pick." Some of these were "I wrote this for my senior project three years ago." The ability for students to get an essay from somewhere without having to work for it has existed for awhile.

What's the entire point of essay writing? Someone who hasn't ever studied the fundamentals of instruction is about to lecture me on the importance of literacy as a whole, as if I don't understand the value of the skill I'm using right now. No, that's not how lesson planning works. A lesson plan must be specific and goal-oriented. "Upon completion of this lesson, the student should be able to demonstrate knowledge and skill in the subject of persuasive writing by:" followed by a bullet point list of things students who have successfully completed the exercise can do. "List four logical fallacies and describe techniques for avoiding each. Identify strong versus weak arguments. Detect unsupported statements of fact. Locate an original source given a citation."

I'm not convinced we're working on that level much anymore; I think a lot of school is simply daycare busywork crossed with a long and elaborate hazing ritual. I hear teachers and administrators talking about how "hard" or "challenging" it should be, as if they're developing a video game. See, the first few levels should be pretty easy, but then it gets harder and harder so that people who beat the whole game really feel like they deserve it.

We're told that the point of scholarly writing is to maximize correctness. Someone somewhere does original research via the scientific method, they publish their research, it gets peer reviewed and then published. Then, authors with a point to make gather up several such primary sources and cite them as supporting evidence when making some broader point. As we say on the internet, sauce plz. This is how we maintain a chain of factual custody, as it were, how to tell the genuine from the bullshit.

That's not how essay writing gets assigned or graded, though. It's assigned in terms of page, paragraph or word counts. Font, size, spacing and margins. It will be graded on spelling, punctuation, grammar and correct adherence to MLA formatting, "When citing a work from an anthology the title of the work is rendered in bold while the title of the anthology is underlined, whereas when citing a work from a periodical" fuck. that.

Because they're not training scholars. They're babysitting. Actually grading essays like that based on correctness of sources is asking every high school English teacher in the nation to do 90 research projects of their own three times a semester. It's a stupid amount of work compared to skimming and turning commas into semicolons.

I think you could actually get the point across better by handing the students completed essays and having them peer review them. Hand your students an essay and ask them "is this valid, does it hold water?" That process is at least as important as writing an essay from scratch. Proper scholarly writing is a task that requires more reading than writing; you have to be able to vet the sources for your essay before it's even written. So starting students out by vetting existing articles would be 1. possible to efficiently grade and 2. actually build the relevant skills. Compared to dumping kids down in front of MS Word telling them to fill ten pages with filler.