This is not a research article. In fact, I’ll cite exactly zero sources in this manifesto. Instead, I’ll relay what should really matter — my experience, my feelings, and my expertise.
I started teaching 19 years ago this fall. I began as a 22-year-old high school English teacher who somehow wound up teaching freshman writing at the university level.
The change even surprised me, but what I’ve found is that students are much the same at both levels — with one main difference: university students make instructors work way harder to get to know them, to let them in in any way. Strangely enough, even though they’re older, they care more about what their peers think about them.
Gone are the days of me asking my students to be quiet so I could teach; instead, I find myself begging them to speak to each other to engage with each other in any meaningful way.
“Say words to the human being next to you about…” is a frequent phrase I say in my university classes. I’ve had to restructure the way I teach to make space for contrived conversations. Whether it’s technology or the COVID years, or a perfect storm of the two, the change in my students has been dramatic, and it’s become increasingly discouraging to try and connect with them and get them to connect with others — to get them to put down their phones, take out their AirPods, look away from their computer screen for just a second so that they can be in their bodies and in the moment, engaged with the task before them.
Struggle to Connect
But this fall has been different — worse than any other year before this. I’ve found myself more discouraged than I’ve ever been before. I fall in love with my students every semester. I form bonds with them and have inside jokes with them.
But this semester, I’ve struggled to connect with them like I normally do, constantly annoyed with the ridiculous questions they ask me directly after instruction when they are watching YouTube instead of listening to me. Their essays, an impossible-to-police mashup of AI-generated text mixed with haphazard edits to make it look like their own, are what have put me over the edge entirely, though.
“My life is a vibrant mosaic of cultural experiences, each contributing unique threads that have woven me into the person I am today. These diverse influences have enriched my perspective, deepened my understanding of the world, and shaped my identity in profound ways.”
These are the words that I’ve had to read over and over again, knowing full well that my students didn’t write them, didn’t think them. But most of all, I didn’t feel them. And that’s where my disconnect with them started to grow.
No Consensus on AI
My colleagues cannot agree on AI because teachers notoriously cannot agree on anything at all. They are among the most opinionated and stubborn people to walk this earth, and I include myself in that description.
It’s what makes us great at our jobs but immovable in other ways. There is no consensus about AI, even among foundations writing university lecturers at my institution. Some people are all for it; others are completely against it. Many cite not wanting to police students, so they just don’t care.
It’s not that I want to police students the way I once did at the high school level. Truly, I want to do anything but that. But I cannot find a foolproof way to hold my students accountable for writing anything or even thinking about anything.
One of my final straws this semester came when I gave what I thought was a simple yet engaging activity. I asked students to get in groups and find a blog on the internet, naming several blog norms and conventions using a QR code to share with the class.
The responses that popped up on the screen were unmistakably AI. Those same robotic words that I’ve read all semester rang in my head as I looked up at the screen. It honestly astounded me to the point that I didn’t even say anything about it.
My students, freshmen at an R1 university, could not work in groups of three and find an example of blog norms and conventions without using AI.
The simplicity of this assignment is what astounded me the most. Working collaboratively, talking, and even getting something wrong was nowhere in the process. I left campus that day angrier and more frustrated than ever.
What Am I Even Doing?
I’ve taught for so long for pay below the poverty line and worked countless hours, often volunteering to go far beyond my job description. I’d laid awake at night worried about my students, given my soul to my profession — which remains one of the least respected in our society — but yet, I had never felt as discouraged as I had this semester.
What the hell am I even doing here? I asked myself.
It all felt like such a waste of my time and theirs. So empty, so unfulfilling. I tried to incorporate handwritten activities and made daily journaling mandatory. Only like previous semesters, I didn’t check the journals until the very end of the semester, offering it as my only extra credit opportunity for students.
By the time the end of the semester rolled around, I was dragging myself to work each day. Something I hadn’t done even under the toughest of circumstances I’ve taught in.
And after teaching public school through COVID, the university is a more manageable schedule than I’d ever had before this. And yet, each day in November and December had me dreading going to work and walking into the room to say good morning to my students with no response from them. Like I was teaching to a wall.
Finally, the end had arrived. I had my students turn in their journals, handwritten notebooks that they’d kept since August. As soon as I held the first notebook in my hands, I knew I had made a mistake not having them do more activities this same way.
Humanizing Words
The feel of their work in my hands, their words scribbled across pages, made me feel something that I hadn’t felt yet that semester. With the first entry I read, I felt what I had always felt for my students. That connection, that thread to them, returned quickly.
The small errors stretching across their scribbled pages, remnants of their voices, their cultures, their very identity shining through. I noticed then the real difference between authentic writing and AI.
I also realized that the majority of my students had been using AI all semester, at least in some capacity, and what it did was shocking, disturbing. What it did was take away who they really were. What they really sounded like.
Those small things — even grammatical errors that I would once run a red pen through — humanized the words on the page, and I realized how much I missed them.
I realized how much of my students I had been missing by not reading their words in this capacity sooner in the semester. Granted, some of that was their fault for leaning so heavily on AI, but part of that was on me, too.
Even though it came at the very end of the semester, I’m grateful it did because it will change how I teach from here on out. I’m going to rewrite my course entirely. Although I know I cannot avoid having my students use technology completely, the day I read those journals, I resolved to have days dedicated to pencil-and-paper work. To “computers and phones away for the class” work.
I’m not sure how this will work at the university level. No matter what, I’ll always have students who may need assistance with computers due to disabilities or other reasons, but I think it’s worth a shot.
I think that emphasizing to our students that their voice, who they are, matters more than a robotic paper is important. It’s an impossible battle, really. One that most would deem not worth fighting for, but for me, it is. Because without it, a job I love, a job I’m damn good at, doesn’t feel the same.
Our Voices
I don’t deny the benefits of AI-generated texts; I’ve even used it myself on occasion. But as a writer, as a thinker, and as a teacher, there is nothing else that compares to my own thoughts running through my head and onto a page. Nothing to take the place of thinking and creating for myself.
And I’m not sure how researchers could argue that with me, but I assure you that many of them will. But as an experienced teacher who has seen trends in education come and go, I can say with all certainty that AI is the biggest threat to education that we’ve ever had.
That it has the power to take something away from us that, if left unchecked, humans will not be able to get back. Our voices.
Katie Johnson is Writing Program Lecturer at the University of Arizona.
DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of The College Post.