Summary: John Warner argues that the rise of AI tools like ChatGPT should prompt us to rethink how we teach writing in schools. He believes current methods often lead to negative attitudes towards writing and fail to prepare students for real-world writing tasks. Warner advocates for a focus on the writing process and meaningful engagement, rather than just the end product or superficial skills.
If an algorithm is the death of high school English, maybe that's an okay thing. (View Highlight)
Modesty aside, and somewhat to my surprise, I have become an expert in how we teach writing. That expertise was birthed from the frustration I experienced in trying to teach writing to first-year college students over the years, and finding them increasingly disoriented by what I was asking them to do, as though there was no continuity between what they’d experienced prior to college, and what was expected of them in college. (View Highlight)
To cut to the chase, and to keep from repeating everything I cover in Why They Can’t Write, rather than having students wrestle with the demands of trying to express themselves inside a genuine rhetorical situation (message/audience/purpose), they were instead producing writing-related simulations, utilizing prescriptive rules and templates (like the five-paragraph essay format), which passed muster on standardized tests, but did not prepare them for the demands of writing in college contexts. (View Highlight)
My books are a call to change how we approach teaching writing at both a systemic and pedagogical level. What teachers and schools ask students to do is not great, but that asking is bound up with the systems in which it happens, where teachers have too many students, or where grades or the score on an AP test are more important than actually learning stuff. It’s not just that we need to change how and what we teach. We have to fundamentally alter the spaces in which this teaching happens. (View Highlight)
Many are wailing that this technology spells “the end of high school English,” meaning those classes where you read some books and then write some pro forma essays that show you sort of read the books, or at least the Spark Notes, or at least took the time to go to Chegg or Course Hero and grab someone else’s essay, where you changed a few words to dodge the plagiarism detector, or that you hired someone to write the essay for you. (View Highlight)
I sincerely hope that this is the end of the high school English courses that the lamentations are describing because these courses deserve to die, because we can do better than these courses if the actual objective of the courses is to help students learn to write. (View Highlight)
ChatGPT has not created a problem that wasn’t already present. (View Highlight)
One of the assumptions those who say this is the end of high school English make about students is that if students can find an end around doing the actual work of school, they will definitely take it. (View Highlight)
What does it say about what we ask students to do in school that we assume they will do whatever they can to avoid it? (View Highlight)
I stood in front of a class of first-year students on the second day [1] of our writing course and I presented a hypothetical where I give them all A grades, but class would never meet, they would no no assignments, they would get no feedback or instruction. They would learn nothing. That first time I did it, about 60-65% of students said they'd take that deal.
Disturbing.
The last time I did it, six or seven years later, 85% said they'd take that deal.
Disastrous.
The students were not lazy or entitled. They were responding rationally to the incentives of the system. An A without learning anything was far more valuable than learning anything, and risking a grade lower than an A. School had nothing to do with learning, and writing courses especially were unlikely to be interesting or engaging. (View Highlight)
Value the process, rather than the product. (View Highlight)
But the reason why I’m confident my pedagogy is not vulnerable to ChatGPT is because I do not only grade the end product, but instead, value the process it takes to get there. I ask students to describe how and why they did certain things. I collect the work product that precedes the final document. (View Highlight)
Unfortunately, for the vast majority of my career, I did not have the time or resources necessary to fulfill the highest aims of my own pedagogy. (View Highlight)
the system will not support the teachers who must do the work, we may as well let ourselves be overwhelmed by the algorithm. (View Highlight)
Raise the bar by getting rid of traditional grading. (View Highlight)
The AI does not generate excellent work, particularly not without the kind of tweaking you see me doing above, tweaking which I can do because I possess a relatively sophisticated understanding of narrative craft and know what to tell the AI to do. A student doing an end run around school would likely accept the first thing the bot gives it, turn it in, and hope for the best. It’s similar to how plagiarists are easy to catch. They’re not diligent enough to cover up their perfidy. [2] (View Highlight)
