{"id":719,"date":"2023-02-22T06:55:02","date_gmt":"2023-02-22T11:55:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/baldwin-clt-teaching-times\/?p=719"},"modified":"2023-02-22T07:09:37","modified_gmt":"2023-02-22T12:09:37","slug":"chatbot-gpt-and-the-end-of-high-school-english-daniel-herman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/baldwin-clt-teaching-times\/teaching\/chatbot-gpt-and-the-end-of-high-school-english-daniel-herman\/","title":{"rendered":"Chatbot GPT and The End of High School English (Daniel Herman)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Daniel Herman is a teacher at Maybeck High School in Berkeley (CA). He wrote\u00a0<\/strong><\/em>Zen and the White Whale: A Buddhist Rendering of Moby-Dick.<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0He lives in Berkeley, California. This\u00a0appeared<\/a>\u00a0in\u00a0<\/strong><\/em>The Atlantic<\/em><\/strong>, December 9, 2022.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Full article<\/a><\/p>\n

Excerpts:<\/p>\n

Teenagers have always found ways around doing the hard work of actual learning. CliffsNotes dates back to the 1950s, \u201cNo Fear Shakespeare\u201d puts the playwright into modern English, YouTube offers literary analysis and historical explication from numerous amateurs and professionals, and so on. For as long as those shortcuts have existed, however, one big part of education has remained inescapable: writing. Barring outright plagiarism, students have always arrived at that moment when they\u2019re on their own with a blank page, staring down a blinking cursor, the essay waiting to be written.<\/p>\n

Now that might be about to change. The arrival of OpenAI\u2019s ChatGPT, a program that generates sophisticated text in response to any prompt you can imagine, may signal the end of writing assignments altogether\u2014and maybe even the end of writing as a gatekeeper, a metric for intelligence, a teachable skill.<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re looking for historical analogues, this would be like the printing press, the steam drill, and the light bulb having a baby, and that baby having access to the entire corpus of human knowledge and understanding. My life\u2014and the lives of thousands of other teachers and professors, tutors and administrators\u2014is about to drastically change.<\/p>\n

…I have always said: You may not be interested in poetry or civics, but no matter what you end up doing with your life, a basic competence in writing is an absolutely essential skill\u2014whether it\u2019s for college admissions, writing a cover letter when applying for a job, or just writing an email to your boss.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve also long held, for those who\u00a0are<\/em>\u00a0interested in writing, that you need to learn the basic rules of good writing before you can start breaking them\u2014that, like Picasso, you have to learn how to reliably fulfill an audience\u2019s expectations before you get to start putting eyeballs in people\u2019s ears and things.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know if either of those things is true anymore. It\u2019s no longer obvious to me that my teenagers actually will need to develop this basic skill, or if the logic still holds that the fundamentals are necessary for experimentation.<\/p>\n

Let me be candid (with apologies to all of my current and former students): What GPT can produce right now is better than the large majority of writing seen by your average teacher or professor. Over the past few days, I\u2019ve given it a number of different prompts. And even if the bot\u2019s results don\u2019t exactly give you goosebumps, they do a more-than-adequate job of fulfilling a task.<\/p>\n

… I\u2019ve been teaching for about 12 years: first as a TA in grad school, then as an adjunct professor at various public and private universities, and finally in high school. From my experience, American high-school students can be roughly split into three categories. The bottom group is learning to master grammar rules, punctuation, basic comprehension, and legibility. The middle group mostly has that stuff down and is working on argument and organization\u2014arranging sentences within paragraphs and paragraphs within an essay. Then there\u2019s a third group that has the luxury of focusing on things such as tone, rhythm, variety, mellifluence.<\/p>\n

… Maybe every student is now immediately launched into that third category: The rudiments of writing will be considered a given, and every student will have direct access to the finer aspects of the enterprise. Whatever is inimitable within them can be made conspicuous, freed from the troublesome mechanics of comma splices, subject-verb disagreement, and dangling modifiers.<\/p>\n

…Which is why I wonder if this may be the end of using writing as a benchmark for aptitude and intelligence. After all, what is a cover letter? Its primary purpose isn\u2019t to communicate \u201cI already know how to do this job\u201d (because of course I don\u2019t) but rather \u201cI am competent and trustworthy and can clearly express to you why I would be a good candidate for this job.\u201d What is a written exam? Its primary signal isn\u2019t \u201cI memorized a bunch of information\u201d but rather \u201cI can express that information clearly in writing.\u201d Many teachers have reacted to ChatGPT by imagining how to give writing assignments now\u2014maybe they should be written out by hand, or given only in class\u2014but that seems to me shortsighted. The question isn\u2019t \u201cHow will we get around this?\u201d but rather \u201cIs this still worth doing?\u201d<\/p>\n

I believe my most essential tasks, as a teacher, are helping my students think critically, disagree respectfully, argue carefully and flexibly, and understand their mind and the world around them. Unconventional, improvisatory, expressive, meta-cognitive writing can be an extraordinary vehicle for those things. But if most contemporary writing pedagogy is necessarily focused on helping students master the basics, what happens when a computer can do it for us? Is this moment more like the invention of the calculator, saving me from the tedium of long division, or more like the invention of the player piano, robbing us of what can be communicated only through human emotion?<\/p>\n

… Everything is made up; it\u2019s true. The essay as a literary form? Made up. Grammatical rules as markers of intelligence? Writing itself as a technology? Made up. Starting now, OpenAI is forcing us to ask foundational questions about whether any of those things are worth keeping around.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Daniel Herman is a teacher at Maybeck High School in Berkeley (CA). He wrote\u00a0Zen and the White Whale: A Buddhist Rendering of Moby-Dick.\u00a0He lives in Berkeley, California. This\u00a0appeared\u00a0in\u00a0The Atlantic, December 9, 2022. Full article Excerpts: Teenagers have always found ways around doing the hard work of actual learning. CliffsNotes dates back to the 1950s, \u201cNo […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":104,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-719","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-teaching"],"featured_image_src":null,"featured_image_src_square":null,"author_info":{"display_name":"Kathryn Byrnes","author_link":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/baldwin-clt-teaching-times\/author\/kbyrnes\/"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/baldwin-clt-teaching-times\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/719","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/baldwin-clt-teaching-times\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/baldwin-clt-teaching-times\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/baldwin-clt-teaching-times\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/104"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/baldwin-clt-teaching-times\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=719"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/baldwin-clt-teaching-times\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/719\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/baldwin-clt-teaching-times\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=719"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/baldwin-clt-teaching-times\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=719"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/baldwin-clt-teaching-times\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=719"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}