When Carlo Rotella, professor of American Studies, English, and journalism at Boston College, penned a New York Times Magazine article titled “I’m a Professor. AI Has Changed My Classroom, but Not for the Worse,” he was tired of seeing the media’s constant “doom and gloom” coverage surrounding artificial intelligence’s impact on students. In the article, Rotella argues that the ubiquity of AI chatbots has forced him to “make humanities instruction even more human.”
“I wanted to write something that said, ‘Well, actually, we don’t have to just lay down for this.’ This is a time to think about what it is that’s unique and rare and precious about a college classroom,” Rotella tells The Progressive. “Let’s double down on that.”
He says fellow professors and students who read the piece have been encouraging. But the resistance he’s gotten from general readers—who have told him to find a use for AI in the classroom—is indicative of a widespread push to embrace and invest in AI across sectors and areas of social life.
“Somehow it’s our job as teachers to amortize the massive investment our society has made in technology,” Rotella says. “It’s not our job to make it OK that we’ve spent so much on this technology. It’s our job to produce more capable humans.”
To detail the endless challenges AI has posed for educators over the past few years, The Progressive spoke with English and writing teachers at the high school and college levels about the everyday realities of navigating AI usage in the classroom. Among these teachers, there were a few common short-term solutions: a return to hand-writing essays in class, more time spent on fewer assignments (mainly for required writing courses), and extra work to help students understand why the reading and critical thinking they do in any writing course isn’t “busy work,” but rather a fundamental part of their development.
Megan Cooley-Klein, an English and journalism teacher at Quince Orchard High School in Gaithersburg, Maryland, has focused on reshaping her ninth grade English course with more class time dedicated to working on take-home assignments.
“The main issue is that it’s pretty easy for me to catch kids who use AI in a dumb or obvious way. But it’s a little harder to tell when kids are using it in sort of a partial way,” she says, noting the big indicator is when a student not paying attention in class suddenly turns in a complete, thorough essay at the last minute. However, the different ways students implement AI, from finding sources to conducting research, raise hard-to-answer questions. “It’s not [always] like, ‘You used AI or you didn’t.’ Sometimes it’s a little bit of a grey area.”
Quince Orchard High School already had an academic dishonesty policy in place for plagiarism, and Cooley-Klein says the English department uses those same guidelines for students who are caught using AI. “We treat it exactly the same way as any other kid who cheated and used the exact same paper as their friend,” she says. “You get a zero. You get one opportunity to redo it satisfactorily.”
For Academic Writing, the required college writing course that assistant professor of writing Priya Sirohi teaches at Ithaca College every semester, cutting down on the number of assignments has proven to be an effective focus on quality over quantity.
When talking about her approach with students passing off AI as their own work, Sirohi, who is also the director of Ithaca’s writing center, says they almost always attribute it to stress: “It’s something they felt they had to resort to because they had a problem or inconvenience or some kind of barrier that they felt they couldn’t overcome on their own.”
“More students are working part-time jobs, stacking extracurriculars on top of other extracurriculars, because they count as job experience,” she continues. “And that’s something that everyone’s anxious about. A degree is just seen as something you just need to get, and Academic Writing is ground zero right now for inappropriate AI usage.”
Sirohi has found it helpful to describe students increasingly relying on AI for all their assignments as an “addiction,” especially when discussing AI with the writing tutors she oversees every semester.
“This is something that people get hooked on, and it is designed for [that]—it’s mass-produced and made as potent as possible to undermine our ability to resist it,” she says. “It’s not because you don’t care about your education, but rather it’s because you just need to get through the day. And that’s what people use drugs to do.”
AI in the classroom is certainly a new challenge for all teachers to deal with, but even more so for newer teachers who are navigating a rapidly changing education system. Liam Conner, who recently started teaching accelerated writing classes at Needham High School in a suburb of Boston, Massachusetts, says AI usage is constantly at the “forefront” of what he’s thinking about as a recent college graduate.
“The biggest thing that maybe I didn’t expect is that kids in high school don’t see a problem with it as much,” Conner says, noting how college students often rely on AI as simply a time-saving tool—they recognize that AI is not actually making their writing or work better. “That’s been the hardest adjustment.”
Conner’s approach, in line with his school’s department-wide policy, is to have at least two of the three required writing assignments per semester be done completely in class. Conner will even have students handwrite each paragraph on a separate piece of paper to help them visualize the length of each and compare them, per the wisdom of a veteran English teacher. “It’s those little things the teachers have adapted,” he says.
Professors are taking the extra time to explain to their students why writing, reading, and doing their own work is crucial for critical thinking in life. Many say they see a positive impact on their engagement in class, especially with assigned readings and participation. On the other hand, research conducted at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology reveals that AI-assisted essay writing led to weak brain connectivity, with users “consistently underperform[ing] at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.”
“Ideally, if you explain it well, you’re telling students to go ahead, make a transactional choice—make the most selfish choice,” Rotella says. “It’s in your own self-interest to actually learn this stuff and not come out of college completely replaceable by AI, right? You’re either practicing to be replaceable by it, or you’re practicing to be able to provide something that AI can’t provide.”
Rotella’s approach to each class has three legs: class participation and discussions as the “main event,” monitored pen and paper tests, and essays designed to be worked on outside of class. “I’ve taken some steps to make the assignments more scaffolded,” he says. “I have colleagues who have the students do all their papers in class, but I don’t do that. I still think you have to read and write outside of class.”
For English and writing instructors around the world, there are varying attitudes regarding how optimistic the future is looking. Some teachers, like Conner, wonder how well they’re servicing their students with the current focus on writing by hand. “I think we can all see that AI is going to be the new Internet. And so are we failing our students by not teaching them safe and valuable AI practice and instead just kind of pushing it all away? That’s a big thing that’s going on in our department,” Conner says.
Other teachers, like Cooley-Klein, have noticed students distancing themselves more from AI.
“Part of a reason for me to be optimistic is that this year, there is starting to be that shift where kids are realizing that it’s not going to help them in the long run,” Cooley-Klein says of her high school students. “They’ve gotten to the point where they will make fun of each other and accuse each other of using ChatGPT, which is not a very mature thing to do, but it’s like, ‘Oh, this is a [socially] negative thing now.’ ”
This semester, Sirohi even helped organize the Students @ IC event, where nearly 200 Ithaca College students gathered for a counter-protest against the school’s all-day event promoting AI resources. Students asked each other questions about topics they feel they were experts on, leading to passionate conversations.
“It seemed to have freed the humanities faculty, who had been feeling just so frustrated, boxed-in, and not listened to,” Sirohi says. “We have our frustrations around AI. We know that it is harmful in many ways. Surely, there are benefits to it. I just think they are probably far fewer than we think and in more limited circumstances. In the meantime, can we please pay attention to what’s being lost?”