Question for Boneyard teachers, particularly high school teachers

[CL82]

How are you adjusting to the potential use of AI to generate individually tailored papers? In the past, teachers could just search for familiar structure to see if someone pulled an answer off the Internet, but now, AI can tailor each answer separately. For example, "write a high school level 500 word paper on Milton's Paradise Lost using modern references to highlight key points." That query would generate a very solid paper that would be very difficult to detect.

The purpose of writing education is not to attain a specific grade, although that's always a goal, but rather to experience critical thinking and learn how to structure persuasive writing. Those are absolutely critical life skills that I worry about being lost when at 11:55 PM on the night before a paper is due, a student can put a short question into AI and have it generate the work that is needed for the following morning.

Is there any way to tap into whether a student is making "excessive use" of AI? Or do you just throw your hands in the air and not deal with the issue?

 

[Minicoop69]

I think and have been hearing of more in person essays on paper. I have taught math and am switching over to Engineering, but our English teachers are having kids write in person on paper more than they have done recently.

 

[UC1995]

I am a math teacher and AI is great for kids to get support at home if they don't know how to do a problem but cheating is so easy no for computer tests we do everything on paper in my school. My wife's school uses detection programs for longer writing samples.

 

[Man's Field]

Prompting is an art. Essays should synthesize and adapt rote AI output to match a writer's voice. Not sure what the answer is for the constant LLM inaccuracies other than to verify sources through more conventional means.

 

[husky99]

Our plagiarism program is starting to pick up AI content. Usually a teacher with a little experience can figure out if something is AI or written by their parent (LOL)

My step daughter workers at the Southern written lab and college kids will run their AI material through 3 or 4 different AI systems and tells it each time with proper prompting to get around the AI checkers

 

[OkaForPrez]

Small highjack of this thread: Would you go into teaching today as a late career hire?

I left my job at 42 this year. I had originally gone to school for English and Psych with the intention to teach. Way led to way and I ended up doing well enough in supply chain to be able to have lots of options now.

I have a 1.5 year old and a baby on the way in September and I want to be able to prioritize my family.

I was thinking of finally getting into teaching when I return to work in the next year or so, but one small peek at the teachers subreddit had me wide eyed.

For you career teachers, am I crazy? Is it possible to do that job for the love of it in 2025?

 

[kemba]

There’s a good chrome extension called brisk that does several things but one feature for google classroom assignments is you can basically watch a sped up video of a document, and it will show how long a student worked on an assignment, how many and what copy and pastes there were, and show when all the different typing was done. There’s ways around it obviously, a kid could easily chat gpt something and then retype it instead of copy and paste it, but most won’t do that and if they do at the very least you made them work harder to cheat lol.

Some in my school are doing more hand write essays and other assessments.

If you get something really suspicious and so much higher quality than their normal work you can kind of quiz them about it see if they actually know what they wrote about.

I know my district is going to make ai a big focus next year as far as teaching kids how to use it appropriately, which I think is good and necessary, but I hope they also make it a bigger focus to either help us detect cheating easier or at least come up with some common policies and standards for it because I know in my school some teachers are trying very hard to detect it and others aren’t doing anything

 

[kemba]

Small highjack of this thread: Would you go into teaching today as a late career hire?

I left my job at 42 this year. I had originally gone to school for English and Psych with the intention to teach. Way led to way and I ended up doing well enough in supply chain to be able to have lots of options now.

I have a 1.5 year old and a baby on the way in September and I want to be able to prioritize my family.

I was thinking of finally getting into teaching when I return to work in the next year or so, but one small peek at the teachers subreddit had me wide eyed.

For you career teachers, am I crazy? Is it possible to do that job for the love of it in 2025?

All the challenges you hear about are real to some degree. Just how challenging they are can really depend on the school you’re at, both the demographics and also the admin.

I’ve had lots of great experiences from it but I have plenty of days too where I wonder how much longer I want to do this about what else I can do. But if you think it’s something you’d enjoy and you’re in a position where you can give it a shot and if you don’t like it do something else I say go for it, it can still be a fun and rewarding job

 

[Minicoop69]

Small highjack of this thread: Would you go into teaching today as a late career hire?

I left my job at 42 this year. I had originally gone to school for English and Psych with the intention to teach. Way led to way and I ended up doing well enough in supply chain to be able to have lots of options now.

I have a 1.5 year old and a baby on the way in September and I want to be able to prioritize my family.

I was thinking of finally getting into teaching when I return to work in the next year or so, but one small peek at the teachers subreddit had me wide eyed.

For you career teachers, am I crazy? Is it possible to do that job for the love of it in 2025?

Personally, not sure if you do want to teach at this point. The money is most likely worse than what you were making. In my eyes, 17 year teacher whose is turning 40 this year, there are 2 benefits of teaching.

1. Being in same schedule as kids in summer is nice. No babysitting, daycare, etc for the summer. Can go on vacation without needing to figure out days off. But prices are higher in summer for vacation so that kind of sucks.

2. Retirement. For me the benefits are good when I retire. A pension at 55, plus 403b, plus everything else will allow freedom to do things provided expenses are low.


I wouldn't go into teaching if I were given another chance and I tell my students not to become a teacher either.

 

[gtcam]

Personally, not sure if you do want to teach at this point. The money is most likely worse than what you were making. In my eyes, 17 year teacher whose is turning 40 this year, there are 2 benefits of teaching.

1. Being in same schedule as kids in summer is nice. No babysitting, daycare, etc for the summer. Can go on vacation without needing to figure out days off. But prices are higher in summer for vacation so that kind of sucks.

2. Retirement. For me the benefits are good when I retire. A pension at 55, plus 403b, plus everything else will allow freedom to do things provided expenses are low.


I wouldn't go into teaching if I were given another chance and I tell my students not to become a teacher either.

it's ok in my mind to say that you wouldn't do it again but to openly steer your students away from the profession is highly questionable.
My whole family - Grandmother and Grandfather, my mother and my wife and daughter were/are teachers.
I have been in financial industry management for nearly 48 years, have had times when I just question my sanity to continue but I would never steer anyone away from it.

 

[upstater]

I don't think we should steer people away from teaching high school; it would be the end of us. I do however steer people away from academia. This country has made a cultural choice to deemphasize higher education, so it's wrong to put people on a career path to oblivion. I don't know of a single academic who isn't steering people away.

We have a new AI Department at our school. I'm part of the organizing team. We look at a lot of studies that explore its benefits and drawbacks. After last year, we all returned to discuss the fact that anecdotal evidence is much more important at this point than anything we get from a study. How students use ChatGPT and how we believed they might use it are two totally separate things. I'm steeped in this stuff and I had the top of my head explode at the end of the term 2 months ago. I never imagined people would be doing some of the stuff I saw.

I don't see the point in running a paper through plagiarism checkers. Students are getting mixed signals. The whole point of the software is to do exactly this so telling them not to is fruitless.

CL82 had the right idea by mentioning grades. That's the choke point. If you could get rid of grades, like Hampshire College does, you could only then talk about ethics, learning, individual empowerment to students.

But not having grades makes things time & work intensive. At Hampshire you have professors closely involved with student projects.

Heck, there are faculty now who are using AI to grade, and this -- ironically -- is pissing off students.

 

[Chin Diesel]

If it isn't being done in front of you in the classroom, it's being faked at some level.

 

[JakeTheDog]

I’m not a teacher but this video popped up on my youtube feed a couple days ago.

 

[Chin Diesel]

This is from the syllabus from one of the classes I'm taking this summer towards my M.Ed.

The university also has a generic blurb in the student handbook about using Turnitin to check for plagiarism.

 

[Minicoop69]

it's ok in my mind to say that you wouldn't do it again but to openly steer your students away from the profession is highly questionable.
My whole family - Grandmother and Grandfather, my mother and my wife and daughter were/are teachers.
I have been in financial industry management for nearly 48 years, have had times when I just question my sanity to continue but I would never steer anyone away from it.

Maybe you are in a state that sort of values education. That could be the reason you are saying this. Every career has its faults, but the state in which I teach has changed the rules for teachers and their pay so drastically since I've started that I am losing $10k per year to teach from where I should be when I 1st started teaching.

More and more is getting dumped on us for less pay than before. Obviously I have students who become teachers and they are teaching right along side of me, but teaching as a whole isn't the same as it was just 10 years ago and will forever be different in the coming years.

 

[Austin316]

Small highjack of this thread: Would you go into teaching today as a late career hire?

I left my job at 42 this year. I had originally gone to school for English and Psych with the intention to teach. Way led to way and I ended up doing well enough in supply chain to be able to have lots of options now.

I have a 1.5 year old and a baby on the way in September and I want to be able to prioritize my family.

I was thinking of finally getting into teaching when I return to work in the next year or so, but one small peek at the teachers subreddit had me wide eyed.

For you career teachers, am I crazy? Is it possible to do that job for the love of it in 2025?

I’ve always wanted to teach. My mom was a teacher and I went to college for History with the goal of teaching… I wasn’t a great student, not the best public speaker, and it ultimately scared me away. I thought I wouldn’t be good at it and the pay made me nervous. Ended up double majoring with Econ then got my masters in Technology and Supply Chain Management 10 years later. Now I teach people regularly as part of my job and it’s the most rewarding part about my job. Funny how that happens.

Anyways I’m right there with you. I wonder often what it would be like if there was a movement of private sector folks turning to teaching as education evolves. Plus I’d love to coach!

I have 3 kids and I wanna see them grow up without having to stress about my work email blowing up, missed calls, and what I have to do tomorrow.

 

[yungdowork]

If it isn't being done in front of you in the classroom, it's being faked at some level.

Unfortunately seems true. I spent a little time in a middle school last schoolyear while my wife was on maternity leave and the sheer number of things the kids would look up in ChatGPT was mindboggling. I'd heard a lot about students using it for essays and stuff, but it's even more pervasive than that. They'd get a (by middle school standards) fun assignment where they get at least have some individuality, and they'd be having AI do all the fun, creative stuff.

The only answers are either to embrace them using it or make them do everything on paper.

 

[Chief00]

How are you adjusting to the potential use of AI to generate individually tailored papers? In the past, teachers could just search for familiar structure to see if someone pulled an answer off the Internet, but now, AI can tailor each answer separately. For example, "write a high school level 500 word paper on Milton's Paradise Lost using modern references to highlight key points." That query would generate a very solid paper that would be very difficult to detect.

The purpose of writing education is not to attain a specific grade, although that's always a goal, but rather to experience critical thinking and learn how to structure persuasive writing. Those are absolutely critical life skills that I worry about being lost when at 11:55 PM on the night before a paper is due, a student can put a short question into AI and have it generate the work that is needed for the following morning.

Is there any way to tap into whether a student is making "excessive use" of AI? Or do you just throw your hands in the air and not deal with the issue?

I hate to say it, but if it’s very eloquent it’s probably AI.

 

[Chief00]

My other thought is and I don’t know where I come down on this - Is AI like the calculator was decades ago? Except it’s writing not math generally. Will it be so common to use AI in writing it will become accepted?
I 100% agree about critical thinking skills not being used and that will be a bad thing. I also personally think AI writing content is too flowery not direct or logical enough. But will the World care about my preferences? Probably not.

 

[JMick]

If I was a teacher and had to grade papers, my students first week of class would be hand written writing samples done in class so I had a reference for the future.

 

[JMick]

My other thought is and I don’t know where I come down on this - Is AI like the calculator was decades ago? Except it’s writing not math generally. Will it be so common to use AI in writing it will become accepted?
I 100% agree about critical thinking skills not being used and that will be a bad thing. I also personally think AI writing content is too flowery not direct or logical enough. But will the World care about my preferences? Probably not.

I hate getting AI generated emails. It feels so impersonal

 

[temery]

Teachers are just psyched to use AI to create tests, write ed plans, lesson plans, reply email to parents that won't get them fired, and letters of recommendation for colleges.

 

[M.S.G.]

I have a colleague who uses AI to make all of her slides for units and tests and quizzes, as an ELA teacher I just can’t, it’s a line I am not comfortable crossing.

I made the switch last year to 7th grade after essentially 20 years of high school. It was refreshing, kids not going to the bathroom to vape every 10 minutes. These next 2 HS classes should be the last of the Covid-kids so to speak. Those kids were sent home 5 years ago and left to their own devices. My former HS changed its whole approach to address “engagement” in the classroom, basically as a teacher you weren’t allowed to stand and lecture and if you did you got dinged - I did because I refused - they want everyone doing “stations” and rotations which isn’t teaching to me. I teach how I was taught and I’m damn good at it. I feel that all of those “new” fangled classroom techniques are for teachers who can’t teach.

As far as plagiarism, as someone said earlier, these kids run it through 4 different types of AI systems to avoid detection. That being said, I’ve always had the stance of: it’s actually way more work to cheat than just writing the paper. Good luck convincing a 16 year old of that however.

I tried desperately to leave the field last summer before I took this middle school job, it was refreshing until like April and then they all collectively became devil’s spawn.

I got like 14-15 left, genuinely don’t know either how I will make it there, and also can’t answer what education will even look like at that time.

 

[nelsonmuntz]

AI is plagiarism. AI is not constructing original content, it is finding existing content and repurposing it. That is literally what a LLM is. A full text search engine.

When we were young, we had old school plagiarism. You had to go to Homer Babbidge, find a book on your topic, write a synopsis, and then clean up the language to make it sound a little more like you. The biggest difference back then is that professors didn’t have AI tools to detect plagiarism, so they had to decide whether the student was too much of a moron to have written a particular paper. Or, find a friend who had written a paper on a similar topic previously.

We are not talking about some major ethical leap here, just the tools in which the current generation does the same things we did.

 

[nelsonmuntz]

We are in the “Golden Age” of AI now, and it may be ending soon. Virtually all website security programs will include AI blockers going forward. As a result, it is going to get much harder and more expensive to update and train AI systems going forward. I also expect copyrights to explicitly deny authorization for use in AI models going forward. Not sure how it will effect teaching, but it will definitely impact AI.