except for this song, it is perfect
I’m sure it’s not just me, but it definitely seems tough out there, right? Leaving the destabilizing world of geopolitics out of it, it seems like everyone I know is going through something these days. Frequently cited Academic Scholar Smash Mouth (1999) really did say it best when he said “the years start coming and they don’t stop coming.”
I’m quite aware that recency bias tells us this is the worst it’s ever been. And the thing about worst is that it’s relative. No matter how much it would give us psychic pleasure to do so, quantifying worst probably doesn’t do anyone any good. Perhaps a more worthwhile endeavor is the understanding that each of us has a very different set of situations, experience, and biology. Several years ago, as I lay on the floor of a lunch meeting with sciatic pain from a herniated disc, I was told that I’d really know what pain was if I had ever given birth, and that I was actually lucky in this moment. And maybe that person was right. There is a good likelihood that a small taste of birthing would have been a fresh perspective, one that freed me from my attempts at back pain relief on the floor of that conference room. But acute and chronic pain are two completely different things, and in that moment I left feeling that A) I couldn’t win (take time off and be lazy/weak, or fight through and be weak/dramatic), and that B) someone else would always have it worse. But I don’t want to be the worst. In fact, I spend most of my time thinking about how to make things better. And as another adage goes, comparison is the thief of joy – and I think that goes just as much for comparing hardship.
Students live inside that kind of comparison all day: marks, rankings, the classmate who finished first. So I don’t blame them for taking the quickest path, which these days is a chatbot. When a curriculum values breadth over depth, there’s always another thing to hand in, and the work becomes something to finish and never think about again. A student who treats it that way has missed the point of learning, but the system taught them to.
I’m not sold on AI being the all-powerful entity that will destroy humanity. Cory Doctorow’s argument, that the stories of awe-inspiring terror are mostly a ploy to justify sinking unimaginable sums into projects that are about to go public, is more persuasive to me. But in my daily grind as a high school teacher-librarian, I do wonder what even the non-Doomsday outcomes mean for student learning and life opportunities.
When it’s not Minecraft open on one of the library’s PCs, I’d say that approximately 1/3 of the time I see some variant of an AI tool open and being engaged with – mostly ChatGPT and the automated Google AI response. Heck, even I struggle with it – the quality of search engine responses has declined so much in the past several years that I will occasionally find my way over to Claude for help finding a useful site. I worry about this for a couple of reasons. First, the AI we are getting now is going to hit a point where, to defend each company’s bottom line, it gets degraded with advertising and reduced in quality to keep you engaging with it. See planned obsolescence in light bulbs, or the enshittification (another Doctorow-ism) of Google. This is the most free it will ever be, and because these systems are proprietary, we’ll have no say when that changes. Second, the more we lean on it, the more we lose the skills needed to exist without it.
And AI is basically catnip to anyone. All of us feel short of time. All of us have things we would rather be doing, and often we feel like we are just jumping through the hoops of our responsibilities. And yes, there is a place for following procedure and i-dotting and t-crossing. But when AI makes most of the assignments we have been handing out over the past 20+ years irrelevant, we have to ask what we were using those assignments as a proxy for.
What is our goal? I think it has to be development and growth of students – not to some standard and a mark on a bell curve which probably reflects socioeconomic status better than growth – but to people who know their own strengths and weaknesses and know how to develop onwards. One of the most frequent arguments against changing how we mark and assess is that marks motivate learning (they do for some, though they demotivate others), and that dropping them lowers standards and flattens growth and excellence. But is that really the case? I think about “gifted” kids who make their way through elementary and secondary school without much effort, only to struggle in a world that doesn’t rely on tests and grades. What if, to pass a grade, they had to show growth and development beyond the limits of the curriculum? That’s not a lower standard, just a different one.
This past August, MIT released the Report of its Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training. Several of its ideas, I think, should shape our thinking well before post-secondary education. Three stood out:
- Shifting assessment away from work marked solely on the product, toward oral exams, semester portfolios, and out-of-class work paired with in-class discussion
- Building structured in-person social learning into every subject, with check-ins and graded discussion
- Floating, as a thought experiment, the idea of going gradeless, since without grades many of the incentives to cheat might disappear
We’ve always had an assessment problem. In the world before AI, product had its issues too – think of the middle school science project that was very obviously made by the parents. But now that a finished-looking product is accessible to everyone, this is a good time to ask what we were trying to assess in the first place.
This will require shifts in our curricula, but we can’t afford to wait for that to happen because we are moving at a pace about 20x faster than curriculum development (and honestly that’s probably generous).
So I ask you: in your subject area, what skills are the crucial ones – the things that Chemistry, or Grade 3 Science, or Grade 11 History couldn’t be without? Try to set aside your love of your subject, and focus on the things that will impact the life of a student who may not be exposed to those ideas again. What are your five?
If you have your department or colleagues teaching the same class – compare your notes and make your case. How would you see a student doing this, with or without AI in the room? What does success look like, and how can you gather evidence without relying on product?
Oh, and if anyone with policy or budget power is reading this: we need help with traditional literacy skills in high schools. I know early investment gives the best return, but the gaps are real, and these students deserve better. A magical word generator doesn’t mean much when you don’t understand the words.