AI

Best. Professor. Ever.

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ Leave a comment

To start, one of my students wrote this sentence: “The iridescent luminescence of the phosphorescent fungi, a phenomenon both ephemeral and mesmerizing, cast an ethereal glow upon the cavern’s labyrinthine corridors.”

I am a bloody brilliant professor. It took me more than thirty-five years to reach this level of excellence as a teacher, but at last I have proof of my abilities to teach college freshman to produce excellent work. Allow me to set aside any semblance of humility for this moment to suggest some rewards should be forthcoming. Teacher of the year, perhaps; a newly-imagined accommodation introduced this year for the purpose of honoring me, maybe. If there is still a Department of Education, maybe a plaque on a wall. 

For the first time in my career, more than fifty students (out of sixty five) wrote nearly perfect papers. Every sentence structured with absolute perfection, diction equivalent to PhD candidates of some Ivy League institution after the work has been combed by editors with a thesaurus, and not a single comma out of place, even the Oxford commas; every single one of them exactly where they should be. 

There’s more. Oh, and wait for the Big Reveal.

The expert sources, despite their association nearly exclusively with universities in Southeast Asia and India, all precisely attributed. What is especially satisfying is that I managed to enable my students, on only their second paper ever in a collegiate class, to write better than any student I have had since the end of the Reagan administration. These magnificent students used compound sentences with five-syllable words with such accuracy and topic-specific precision I have a renewed faith in this country’s education system. Bravo! primary, middle, and high school teachers! You have passed to us college instructors the finest composition writers in a generation.  

But here’s the real reason to celebrate: These students are all high school students taking my college writing class in a Dual Enrollment Program. Again, Bravo! And, well, just Wow! And imagine, they’re almost all just seventeen-years-old.

Okay, so this can’t be a unique situation, one might think, and therefore not worthy of the accolades I suggest. So here’s more: This all happened in the past few weeks in West Virginia where 27% of high school students failed to meet the reading proficiency. And according to an extensive study by the University of Wisconsin of English Learners in Middle Schools and High Schools Pre, During, and Post Covid, English scores declined steadily and significantly just about the time my current students were in ninth grade. The most dramatic decline was in writing skills, followed closely by listening skills. And yet, I pulled their previously unrecognized talents out of the hidden depths of their inattentive minds and produced extraordinary students writing exquisitely ideal papers. 

I’m that good. 

Some suggest I investigate the possibility the papers were ChatGPT generated, but I say there’s no need. I understand their defense of AI with the car-replaces-the-horse analogy, and that the need to know how to write the essay is secondary to their ability to know how to find one that meets the requirements when they need to do so. The previous example in education might be the Texas Instruments primitive calculator replacing the slide rule. I do understand. But these seventeen-year-old Best-Essay-Writers EVER students would not use such devices since I specifically and clearly instructed them that to do so would result in failing the course and possible expulsion from the university for Academic Dishonesty; why would anyone smart enough to write such pristine essays at the same time be dumb enough to risk their entire college career and subsequently their livelihoods by cheating on a college essay by plagiarizing, even if from a computer? Nay! This work must be original! 

Honestly, I had doubts at one time that I ever should have been teaching college. I wanted to raise goats. But I’m convinced now that this path I stumbled onto was the right one. I have written my own essays for more than forty years, shared them with best-selling authors and acclaimed writing faculty at the finest colleges for suggestions and assistance, and have an extensive publishing record–pardon my lack of humility here. I just write this to highlight the fact that I find myself surrounded by minors–for only a couple of these students are yet eighteen-years-old–who have clearly surpassed anything I have been capable of, editing and sentence structure wise, I mean. Nothing can be done about how dreadfully boring their essays are. But I do not grade college compositions based upon their level of “excitement.” No, these 900 and 1200 word essays, all in perfect APA format, stand alone as unblemished. 

I’ll be straight–I was a bit worried at the beginning of the semester when I posted on the online discussion board for each of them to explain their interests, hobbies, and hopes for their future, and the responses were riddled with incomprehensible fragments and more dangling modifiers than I’ve ever seen dangled before. But my worries where unfounded. After just five weeks I have successfully produced a stellar group of writers, all in a school district ranked 41st out of 55 in the state. All in a state ranked last–50th–in overall education.

At the very least I deserve a raise. 

Life in the Margins (Part two of two)

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ Leave a comment

When I was in my late teens my father and I played golf one afternoon at his club in Virginia Beach. About the third hole a man caught up to us and played along. He was good; a driver, short chip, one putt player. I was not. I had the same clubs but more often than not sliced it to the right or bounced it into a water hazard. I didn’t have a temper, but it wasn’t unusual for me to put my club back in my bag with some force, as if to say, “Don’t even think about coming back out until you know how to hit the ball straight!”

I did this after I butchered an easy fifty-yard chip shot by clipping it straight to the right into a lake. I cursed, of course. The golfer was standing nearby waiting to hit his second shot to my fourth.

“Can I give you some advice?” he asked. I sighed. First of all, no, no you cannot, because I’m nineteen and I don’t take advice, and because I don’t even know you. But noting my dad just a few yards away I opted for sportsmanship.

“Sure,” I sighed.

He paused. “You’re not good enough to get mad.”

I stared at him.

He continued: “Really, how often do you play? Do you take lessons? Do you have the best clubs? If you played all the time and took lessons, well then you could be upset at not improving. Otherwise you’re just wasting good energy.”

Ever since then, I have not only relaxed and enjoyed the game, I play better. After a while I applied this to most aspects of life, not in a way to find an excuse to not try, but to relieve the stress that comes from going through life doing things everyone else seems to simply be better at than me. It also motivated me to get into the game a bit in those areas I do have some game.

Awkward Transition Section:

I gave an assignment not long after September 11th, 2001, when my students would have been in their teens during the attack. I wanted them to reflect on what will remain one of the most significant days in our lives. How, I wondered, do they remember that day? I thought it was a good assignment—a specific event but a vague enough request for them to wander where they wished.

One student wrote of her aunt who never made it out of the South Tower. Another wrote about her sense of horror and disbelief, which, she wrote, she could never correctly capture on paper. Several actually commented they didn’t think it affected their lives at all while others spit out what they kind of paid attention to with one ear from local television reports—about heightened security, conspiracy factors, the indescribable loss of life that spontaneously erupted on TV that morning. But one student’s piece caught my attention. He wrote, in part:

“In a way, September 11 demonstrated, more than any one phrase can contain, the strength of our Constitution. The day became the beginning of a new era of the democratic process, and the definition of how we will defend our liberty, maintain our principles and remember our purpose—to stand as an example of humanity’s potential. It was Memorial Day. It was Victory Day.“

I read this with amazement. I asked for the rough draft and received exactly what I knew I would: A similar, hand written version with some words written differently and others crossed out. Excellent.

“You plagiarized this,” I said, which, understand, is rare for teachers to say. We receive copied material all the time, but nearly never have enough proof to say, directly, “You didn’t write this.” In a world of AI generated essays, it gets even tougher, but I ask them to ask themselves if they’re good enough to plagiarize correctly. I remind them in order to pull off an AI paper or plagiarized work they need to have a deep understanding of my requirements for the essay, the style I’m looking for, the specific language, the relevant references, and to be frank, I let them know, most of them aren’t good enough writers to plagiarize that well.

But this kid nailed it. “I didn’t plagiarize that!”

I smiled. “Yeah, you did.” My small laugh, I think, pissed him off. He continued to challenge me. Normally, plagiarized papers frustrate faculty members when they know an assignment was plagiarized—either from another student or from one of the many web sites offering papers for sale, or more recently for various AI sites— but can’t prove it. So when proof does come along, while it’s disappointing to have such lazy ass students,  it’s not just slightly satisfying to stop them in their tracks.

“Yes, you did. Tell me why you shouldn’t fail.”

“Because I didn’t plagiarize it.”

“Okay, I’ll tell you what. I want you to bring me a copy of the original. If you do, I’ll let you redo the assignment without penalty.” I figured the embarrassment would be sufficient.

Once a student turned in a paragraph she plagiarized from our own text. Another time a student turned in a paper right out of the psychology textbook assuming I wouldn’t recognize that his in-class writing had the ability of a seventh grader and the essay he turned in was written by Freud.

I don’t think they’re simply overworked. They’re bored. What they’re doing is staring at me and thinking of everything else. In the front row is the guy with his fingers in his mouth, gnawing on his fingernails, pulling them out wet every once in a while to observe his work and then shift his focus to a different cuticle. In the back row some dude’s pretending to write notes while he’s reading his text messages on his cell phone.

Certainly, some things really are boring, and sometimes it’s difficult to find the relevance. I know; I was a student.

Too many aren’t listening. And I totally understand. There’s too much noise. Streaming services, reels, TikTok, internet scrolls, deadlines, term papers, credit card bills, car repairs, moving in, moving out, daycare, spouse abuse, deployment, speeding tickets. The pace of life is at Mach 7, and we’re teaching from a stage coach—no wonder they’re bored. They haven’t yet realized that life is infinitely more interesting from the stage coach; that life exists in the margins as well as the headlines, and we should not simply focus on the large, obvious lessons we underline but the small details where we learn what we are and are not good enough at to get upset to begin with.

We’re too busy for that. Before they’re out the classroom door, students are calling each other, talking and walking from building to cars, elbows bent, phone tucked tight to their ears. We’re completely plugged in. There’s no time to think. Don’t stop, don’t listen, and don’t figure it out. Just keep yourself plugged in to create the illusion that something’s getting done.

And we keep missing the good stuff because we don’t have time. A college where I used to teach had a reading by one of America’s leading poets, Reetika Vazirani. Maybe a dozen people showed up. There was enough room for her cute two-year-old to run around the auditorium, climb across chairs and make everyone laugh. Reetika’s poetry was magic. Students who did show up sat looking at their laps while Reetika read:  

Little by little, I’ll figure it out

I’ll say to them, Relax, we’ll live to be a hundred

I’ll sort things out.

And her child danced down steps toward the small crowd. They missed that for the noise. Noise, that unlike the rest of our lives, won’t ever fade but instead will grow in intensity until it blends to the point of saturation, and becomes inaudible, an undercurrent of indiscernible distraction.

I can’t help but sympathize with students. They see the careers of their parents or friends, and they know at best the future holds the slow erosion of enthusiasm.

Early before class one day, I waited for my student with the plagiarized 9/11 paper to show up. Some papers are so moronic I pray they were plagiarized just so I don’t have to believe one of my students wrote that crap. I read a paper once which began, “Shakespeare wrote Hamlet almost a decade ago.”  Another paper I received once had the same page printed three times. When I pointed out the mistake, he said he couldn’t think of anything else to write but knew the paper had to be 800 words, so he just copied it a few times.

When the student with the plagiarized paper returned, I was ready. “Ah, did you find it?” I asked when he came in and tried to sit down without looking at me.

“No,” he said, as I knew he would. Pride sucks.

“It’s okay. I brought a copy. Shall I read it to you?”

“No.”

“Great! Here goes:”

I believe our best education has nothing at all to do with the classroom or the assignments or the degree. It’s between the lines and off to the side of the narrative where we discover the best of what we need. This isn’t original; in fact, it’s a thought and practice older than formal education.  I don’t remember much from grammar school, which they called it then because they still taught grammar there. But I do remember my teacher taking us all out one April afternoon to lie in the grass on our backs and stare at the sky while she told us about the tragedy aboard Apollo 13 going on right then in space above us. All the discussions about what went wrong and how they might not make it back were irrelevant until we rested in the grass and stared at the sky.

The thing is, we’re all the same. Conditioning has them believing that life is supposed to be some Reality Television show. There’s no plot, no writers, no purpose.  Suicide is the second leading cause of death among college students behind accidents. In fact the rate is higher among college students than it is for the same age group who aren’t enrolled in college—you know why? Because life is infinitely more interesting than most of the crap we’re fed in school. No one cares about most of the material we spend so much time preparing.  In the real world, however, we tend to seek out challenges we know we are up to, where in college students face new levels of expectations, and when they’re not up to the task they complain instead of asking themselves if they’re good enough to be there to begin with, if they’re willing to get better. They’re trying to make sense of it all—or want someone to help them, and when they can’t they rely upon what others have done and plagiarize that.  No wonder they’re bored. Hell, I’m bored.

Sometimes I try and picture my students as toddlers and help them not in a childish way but in a way which I hoped faculty had helped my son, as if he were their own. Was he paying attention when teachers taught?

Was I?

Recently I remembered Reetika’s son, who ran through the vacant auditorium while his mother read poetry. Shortly after that reading, just before taking her own life, Reetika—riddled with psychological challenges—killed her son. I’m tuning that one out. There’s no lesson there. Sometimes I picture my son at twenty, wondering which of my students he would have been like and how would I have answered his questions, approached his plagiarized paper.

I stared at the young man that plagiarized the 9/11 story and asked if he were ready. He turned his head to one side, trying not to make eye contact. “Hey, it’s from the local paper! Well, let’s see:

“There are still no words for September 11’ by…”  I stared at him: “Oh my god, Dude, should I go on?” He laughed a little at my sarcasm because he knew what came next and because, really, it’s so laughable.

“There are still no words for September 11’ by…” I stopped and looked at him. “You’ve got to be kidding,” I said.

He spoke quietly: “I didn’t know you wrote it.”

“Where’d you get this?” I asked. A friend of his gave it to him from his developmental English class but had taken my name off his copy.

“I was set up,” he said.

“You think? Do it over. Here. Now. You’ve got the whole class.”

I opened the door and the class came in. I talked about something, I forget what since I wasn’t really listening, and after class everyone left and he gave me his paper. He wrote:

September 11th scared the hell out of me. I was only fifteen and our country was being attacked. I remember rumors that a bomb had been planted at the State Department and I really thought it was just starting, that we were at war right here in America. My brother was nineteen at the time and in the Army in North Carolina, and I couldn’t sleep. Our teacher talked to us about it during the following period at school, but I wasn’t listening. I was thinking of my brother and about war. I was thinking about how a few hours earlier my friends and I were talking about how some guy bought us beer that weekend and we hung out in Croatan, and suddenly none of us was talking at all, and no one wanted to. We just stood around and said, “Damn,” and we were scared.

He found his voice. “I’m disappointed,” I said. “This is way better writing than the one I wrote that you tried to plagiarize.”

“See you Thursday.”

Most students don’t find their own voice or would even hear it over all the noise. When things finally do settle down and it gets quiet and the cell phones are turned off, most of us wouldn’t know our own voice. Maybe we’re scared. I know I am. Maybe we don’t want to know what we sound like, preferring instead to fall into some mainstream composite of expectation and predictability. I tried to tell my son to figure things out for himself. Don’t rely upon being taught, but instead, learn. They’re not the same thing. I hope he listened.

And I’m certain he hoped I listened as well. I tried to pay attention, but it was hard back then with the constant noise of students and papers and classes and all the other voices in my head. So sometimes, too often I suppose, it was difficult to always pay attention and listen to everything. And that scares me.

Turns out it is the small stuff that mattered. It’s the details I should have paid attention to. In class I wonder if I have any right to get angry when they’re cheating with AI; I mean, maybe if I were a better professor they wouldn’t do it. But it’s more than that: In the hallways, in conversations, in all lessons I want to drill into them that the larger objective is not difficult to digest; it is the details that we need to spend more time focusing on. It’s the same for college students as it was for toddlers. You see, I had this fear when my son was little that I would get mad at him one day and he would turn to me and say, “Dad, you’re not a good enough father to get mad. Maybe if you’d practiced a little more.”

The $5,000 Question (part one of two)

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ Leave a comment

The following piece originally appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education, June 2009, and has since found its way into other journals and texts.

PART ONE:

Wherein our protagonist discovers the first of two important life lessons

Almost every day I hear my fellow professors complain about their students’ poor writing on papers and tests. The papers lack depth, my colleagues say, and reflect a lack of commitment to good writing. Having read countless examples of such sloppy college writing over the past three and a half decades myself, I’ve identified the main cause. Weak writing has little to do with students’ innate writing ability, even less with how much time they spend working on their papers, and less yet with how ill-prepared they are to do college-level work.

The real problem is this: Students know that professors must read their papers, no matter how poorly they might be written, how irrelevant their cited examples, or how “un-collegiate” their content. Poor writing persists because students know that professors are obligated to suffer through endless garbage in hopes of finding something salvageable. They are well aware that many professors will highlight their papers’ weaknesses and then allow rewrites, and that some professors will accept nonwritten extra-credit projects to improve their final grades. In short, students know there are usually ways to avoid putting forth a gallant effort.

I realized this great truth some years ago at the beginning of a semester in a composition class after I finished reading a paper by one of my students. During our next class, I asked everyone, “If I were to skim only the introductions of all twenty of your papers, but read in their entirety only the five papers with the best introductory paragraphs —the ones that entice me to continue reading —and automatically give the rest failing grades, would your introductions improve?”

They all said yes and admitted that they would put more of an effort into capturing my attention and solidifying their theses. I’ve continued to ask each new class of students the same question, and I invariably get the same response.

So a few semesters later, I added to my proposition a more tangible, albeit hypothetical, reward. I asked, “What if I had a check on my desk for $5,000? And what if I rewarded the writer whose introduction most caught my attention, who most effectively made me want to continue because of a solid and clear thesis, with a check for five grand? Would your introductions improve even more?”

Cries of “Absolutely!” filled the room. I stood and stared at them for a solid, uncomfortable minute, nodded, and said, “There it is.” They looked confused, so I added, “You always could do it. You just couldn’t be bothered. You just admitted that to me.”

Silence followed.

I still do this, pointing out to class after class, “You know you write better than these half-baked attempts you typed up late at night. There just wasn’t anything tangible in it for you.” The students will agree. Some will even acknowledge that conditioning throughout high school left them believing that a “good” attempt is good enough.

Now, I’m confident that my students aren’t sitting at home saying, “I’m going to make this as pathetic as possible.” There is no malice on their part. But there’s little “real world” risk involved, either. “What’s an A on a college paper worth in the grand scheme anyway?” they reason.

While the answers are obvious to those of us who do the grading, to the average student with 12 credit hours, a full-time job, a family, and essays to write, excellent work is often simply getting it done at all. Professors are in competition for attention not only with family, friends, classes, and jobs, but also with ever-increasing news-media onslaughts that rarely require students to focus for more than 20 seconds at a time. Our competition is TikTok and Reels on social media.

We must reshape students’ thinking so they understand that “good enough” isn’t, and that doing better is simply a matter of seeking the rewards of excellent writing in the same way one might seek a bigger paycheck for working overtime. We aren’t offering them real training in earning rewards if we allow them to pass their courses despite weak effort and poor results. In the real world, people often get only one opportunity, one job opening, one chance to move ahead. Most of us know that the amount of time that a person commits to a project usually leads to better outcomes, but many students work under the delusion that almost any result is acceptable.

But what if we teach students to write their essays as though professors simply won’t read them if they are of unacceptable quality? What if we all asked ourselves if we would be doing better if the reward for our actions was more enticing? Shouldn’t we be operating at that level anyway?

By driving students to improve their efforts, we can teach them how to maximize their ability and overcome their lack of motivation. We must repeatedly remind them that doing poorly in college through halfhearted effort and mediocre work could lead to doing poorly in the real world, too, damaging their reputations and chances to advance in their careers. We want our students to view us as gatekeepers to what comes next in life instead of as mere grade distributors. Combined, those strategies are often sufficient wake-up calls for students to improve their efforts.

We need to show students that we expect the same effort to get an A that they put forth to get a job, establish a career, or win a trophy. They can do it; they just need to be reminded of the difference between short- and long-term rewards, between internal and external motivation.

And so do I. Sitting in classes now I think about all the times I did “good enough” work—to this day—when had there been more of a tangible reward I’d have made more of an effort, until I trained myself to understand that the effort is the reward.

Anything less than a fully-committed effort should mean an F —failure in college, fired in the real world.

Next time: Our protagonist learns the lesson of his life on a golf course

Copy That

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ Leave a comment

This week the assignment in college comp is to write an essay about the positive and negative effects (or short term/long term; physical/emotional, whatever) of involvement in extracurricular activities. Research and valid support from experts are required. Today I read some rough drafts.

Out of twenty something papers, fourteen of them quoted as their source the same “study” done by two professors at the University of Pakistan. Their papers “reflect” the findings in a predictably vague and non-committal way, with language intended for fifth graders and excessive repetition for extreme ADHD readers. My students have not yet figured out that AI writing generally sucks anyway.

After some frustration, I took a moment to Google “Studies of the effects of extracurricular activities,” and the first six or so hits were UCLA, University of Wisconsin, Oklahoma State, Notre Dame, US Department of Education.

National Institute of Health, Texas A&M, Nature. The list of accepted expert sources is extensive.

So what gives?

Ah! I thought. I know exactly what gives.

I Googled “information about the effects of extracurricular activities,” and the first five hits? University of Pakistan. I googled “statistics and quotes about extracurricular activities” and the same Pakistani people popped up. Then I Googled “Essays about the effects of extracurricular activities” and the same people showed up. Go figure.

Quick recount: Test scores started to drop at high schools and universities about the time technology slipped into the curriculum, not unlike obesity showing up more often after the explosion of fast-food restaurants nationwide, or the numbers of hyperactive and anxiety-prone students skyrocketing with the introduction of specialty coffee shops and power drinks. After Texas instruments introduced the calculator to the classroom, the slide rule (kids, look it up) slid out of use. The conversation in the seventies was that students weren’t learning math, they were learning how to use a calculator.

This has been going on since some Bronze Age dad figured out a flint stone started fire faster than rubbing together two sticks. At the time, if he handed his preteen two sticks, the kid might have stared at them like they were relics from the Neanderthal Age.

In all math classes and for all homework, teachers used to exclaim, “Do your own work.” Not meaning don’t cheat, though I suppose that too, but meaning do NOT use electronics such as a Texas Instrument calculator to figure out the solution.

Writing terrifies students because they simply don’t do it. And if they can use AI programs to complete their work AND know the material, well, whatever. But writing is different; it is organic, but most importantly it has been proven to be the most effective tool in learning. It directly aids in retention, and we can actually teach ourselves material and figure out solutions to problems simply by writing about them, page after page. It is called Writing to Learn, and in Days of Yore, it was standard practice, wherein an eighth-grade class might be assigned Hamlet to read, and then their homework was to write two-thousand words about “Hamlet’s madness” or “Laertes revenge,” and so on. The process of writing exposed the characters to the writer with far more accuracy than “thinking” about it, or even talking about it, and the students became better writers, learned to do their own work, and gained valuable confidence in the process. That’s the key issue here—the absolute lack of confidence on the part of the student to write coherently.

But that individual, organically generated (OG?) writing ebbed during a time when individual assignments were sacrificed for “Group Work.”


But I digress. I got carried away as is apt to happen when writing. I do it a lot, though, so I don’t mind. But my students do not do it and they apparently do mind, even in a class they know was a writing class. They avoid it anyway and would rather spend time finding other people who already wrote what I’m looking for. The problem is this isn’t a history class where all I really want to know is if they understand the pressure felt by a group of soldiers on D-Day, which still should be met with original writing of course. No, this IS a writing class, where the lesson we learn is how to actually do it and the subject matter is secondary. We don’t learn how to steal it or copy it or get through by being so howl-at-the-moon lazy that I question how they got through high school to begin with.

(breathe in, breathe out)

Don’t be so quick to assume the student with the 4.0 GPA earned it. Don’t assume the new hire knows the material; they might have just learned how to present information as if they know what they’re doing. Do not automatically believe the students would make good graduate students because they seemed to excel during their undergraduate studies. They may have actually excelled at finding material, not figuring it out on their own.

So how can we tell if students are doing their own work?

Here’s what I do:

I get to know them. I pull a chair into the middle of the room, and we talk about their hobbies, their siblings, their experiences being away at college for the first time, and what they do for fun to relieve the stress of classes. I adopted Leo Buscaglia’s requirement of a “Voluntary-Mandatory” meeting at least once a semester, where every student was required to volunteer to go to his office at least once for five minutes, introduce themselves, and talk about what they want out of the class. So I do that, and I have thoroughly enjoyed getting to know my students better now than I did in the thirty years I was at a different college.

Does it work?

NO! Half my class thinks Hamza Abbasi of the University of Pakistan is the source for all things extracurricular in the American schools. And they all told me so using exactly the same words as each other.

Tomorrow I’m handing out slide rules and asking them for the square root of 3987.5. That will give me time to read more rough drafts.

AI AIN’T

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 4 Comments

A student actually asked me if it was okay to allow artificial intelligence (I see no reason to capitalize that) to write his paper. He didn’t try and plagiarize and pass it off as his; he didn’t unintentionally use someone or something else’s material and mistakenly claimed it to be original. No. He sat at his computer, opened his browser, addressed an email to me, and wrote, “Is it okay if we allow ai to write our papers? Will I lose points for this?”

Once again, we have slid right past the founding problem and into the next level, where we have already accepted the premise but now we must fight small issues. It happened with cell phones when we moved from not allowing them in class at all to penalizing students if they use them at the wrong times or for the wrong reasons. What happened to “No cell phones. Pay attention to me”?

We have so much technology in our lives and in our classes that time must be spent powering up and down, downloading, transferring, waiting, and on and on that the actual time a student is truly “present” and looking at who is talking, making notes, discussing, has diminished by nearly eighty percent according to Pew Research and a study at the University of Pennsylvania. The productivity and scores at every level of education in this country suck and we cannot figure out why. Here’s why: No one is paying attention.

Problems:

*As soon as cell phones or laptops entered the classroom, teachers had competition for already questionable attention.

*Students who consumer energy drinks have an attention span nearly twenty minutes shorter than just one generation (pre-cell phone and energy drinks) ago.

*It was proven many decades ago that writing things down, even just once, increases the ability to remember information tenfold. It is called “writing to learn.” But today students do not write down a single note choosing instead to take a picture of the information.

Education is easy: Listen intently (that means with intent to learn) to the person who knows what they’re talking about, ask questions of those areas you are not sure you clearly understand, write it down somewhere to see if you will remember it all. This is how it was done by slaves like Frederick Douglass who battled opposition from overseers who would whip him for reading, plantation owners who would kill him for learning, national laws forbidding him to read and write. This is how it was done by the Irish who were forbidden to learn in their own land so they had to hide behind the hedges in small groups to learn reading and writing from their “hedge master.” This is how it was done by immigrants who needed English to get a job and wanted to make a better life for themselves. This is how it is done. All the technology available will not replace internal motivation necessary to achieve your purpose. Nor will it explain to you what that purpose is.

But students today read texts from friends, use a program to write their papers, believe they can only get through the next five minutes with another Five Hour Energy drink.

There is no more quiet, no more earbudless, phoneless people walking peacefully from one place to another, listening to nature, listening to each other, listening to themselves, thinking about the day or about the moment. There is no more sense of now. They don’t yet realize that you have to put down the past and the future if you want to learn to unwrap the present.

There is no more sense that people are paying attention. Not on the highway where distracted driving is the number once cause of accidents; not in the classroom where distracted students are missing nearly eighty percent of the material. Not in our souls, where we need to pay attention to our own compass, our own course.

Artificial intelligence can certainly write a pretty decent paper, but it will read like the blind date pretending to get along with you so that the night isn’t a complete waste of time. Yes, it will fulfill the requirements and might even be acceptable, but I won’t feel it in my soul. When I read someone’s writing, I need to believe they stood in that spot, felt the sand, tasted the old wine. Ai cannot make me believe your heart raced when you got closer to some destination. Ai cannot convince me you actually lived.

Ai is not alive. Cell phones are not alive. The energy gained by ingredients in even the most natural of power drinks is not the fire you need to be truly alive, present.

We are dying. Slowly for certain; but dying equally for certain. And the only way to make that worthwhile is to be absolutely present on the way. To do the work, to grow tired from trying so hard.

Our pace is all wrong. Somewhere we believed that advances were always a good idea. We convinced ourselves that convenience was the best approach. The number of people fighting depression is at unprecedented levels; the suicide rate is increasing nearly daily; the dropout rate is growing exponentially; and our success in English, Math, and Science is nearly out of competition with all other industrialized nations. Our priorities are wrong.

Artificial intelligence assumes some level of intelligence to begin with. But it is not intelligence that is the problem to begin with that we need to use artificial versions like we do with sweeteners and flavors and levels of energy. It is purpose.

On the first day of class I ask my students to put everything away—laptops, cellphones, notepads, energy drinks, earbuds, bluetooths, all of it. We sit and I ask them where they’re from. Then I ask them this: Why are you here? What are you doing here? You can be anywhere–tending bar in the Caribbean, backpacking around Europe, working and making money at some resort hotel, absolutely anywhere you want. But you’re here. Why? And we spend the rest of class exploring purpose.

Does it work? I have no idea. But on my long drive home I ask myself that same question trying hard to answer it before my mind melts and I put on the radio instead, relying upon some noise to fill that dangerous space of silence.

Life is paper thin, Toni Wynn wrote. How are we spending it?

What did I really do with my time?