In high school two friends of mine cheated on a calculus test - the teacher noticed and pulled them both out, teared up and said he had failed them by not preparing them enough to where they wouldn’t need to do that. Neither student was punished and the friend I’m still in contact with reveres that teacher, citing him as the reason he wants to eventually enter education once he feels he has something to share with the younger generation. This all to say, thank you for understanding the current adversarial aspect of education and working in your own way to improve it. I feel the system of comparison and documentation makes it hard on teachers too - I certainly felt this pressure during my time as a student-teacher. Glad your students, aware or innocent, were given the opportunity to do without it.
Wow, I must admit I had never considered the angle in which TurnItIn transforms papers into commodities to be bought and sold and divorced from their original context of authorship, presaging the rise of AI. Thank you for sharing so many wonderful resources and your own learning, and explaining how you've distilled your principles into your pedagogical approach -- I'll be sending along this piece to some of my colleagues who are at a loss of how to adjust to the rise of ChatGPT and its ilk in their writing-intensive courses, too.
(For the most part, my writing assignments are so specific that ChatGPT just cannot answer them on a content level, and so, like you, I don't have to litigate whether something is AI-written. But involving the student so actively in their revision process no matter the genesis of their work is a brilliant and empowering idea, I think. It helps students break through the sense of powerlessness and overwhelm at the prospect of writing that leads so many who do plagiarize/use ChatGPT to do so).
It's been a rough semester for so many of my students, which translates to a dispiriting one for me. This was exactly the shot in the arm that I needed. Thank you, Chuck.
This was wonderful, Chuck. I appreciated your push at the end:
"This is all to say that if you work in education at any level, or are even just in charge of people in one way or another, I think it’s your duty to take stock of when, how, and why you’re being asked to implement or enforce policies, practices, and technologies that are fundamentally unjust. I’m certainly not saying you have to do things my way, but I am saying that you shouldn’t let things keep going they way they’re going. It will never be perfect, and you won’t get it “right” the first time. But that fact creates no less of an obligation to try."
Beautiful, generous stuff. Thank you always for your work.
I think about “cop shit” at least twice a week and once again I’ll be thinking about these practices and how I can relate them to my own classroom. It’s such a tricky line to walk, especially when the students are so young and do need (?) certain tangible guidance and scaffolding (maybe not gold stars exactly, but…) for even the simplest practices and behaviors. I always try to make it a collective and good-for-its-own-sake type of system but I’ll be thinking about all this for a while for sure. Thanks again, Chuck.
In high school two friends of mine cheated on a calculus test - the teacher noticed and pulled them both out, teared up and said he had failed them by not preparing them enough to where they wouldn’t need to do that. Neither student was punished and the friend I’m still in contact with reveres that teacher, citing him as the reason he wants to eventually enter education once he feels he has something to share with the younger generation. This all to say, thank you for understanding the current adversarial aspect of education and working in your own way to improve it. I feel the system of comparison and documentation makes it hard on teachers too - I certainly felt this pressure during my time as a student-teacher. Glad your students, aware or innocent, were given the opportunity to do without it.
What a beautiful teaching moment. I’m going to remember that, thank you!
Wow, I must admit I had never considered the angle in which TurnItIn transforms papers into commodities to be bought and sold and divorced from their original context of authorship, presaging the rise of AI. Thank you for sharing so many wonderful resources and your own learning, and explaining how you've distilled your principles into your pedagogical approach -- I'll be sending along this piece to some of my colleagues who are at a loss of how to adjust to the rise of ChatGPT and its ilk in their writing-intensive courses, too.
(For the most part, my writing assignments are so specific that ChatGPT just cannot answer them on a content level, and so, like you, I don't have to litigate whether something is AI-written. But involving the student so actively in their revision process no matter the genesis of their work is a brilliant and empowering idea, I think. It helps students break through the sense of powerlessness and overwhelm at the prospect of writing that leads so many who do plagiarize/use ChatGPT to do so).
It's been a rough semester for so many of my students, which translates to a dispiriting one for me. This was exactly the shot in the arm that I needed. Thank you, Chuck.
This was wonderful, Chuck. I appreciated your push at the end:
"This is all to say that if you work in education at any level, or are even just in charge of people in one way or another, I think it’s your duty to take stock of when, how, and why you’re being asked to implement or enforce policies, practices, and technologies that are fundamentally unjust. I’m certainly not saying you have to do things my way, but I am saying that you shouldn’t let things keep going they way they’re going. It will never be perfect, and you won’t get it “right” the first time. But that fact creates no less of an obligation to try."
Beautiful, generous stuff. Thank you always for your work.
I think about “cop shit” at least twice a week and once again I’ll be thinking about these practices and how I can relate them to my own classroom. It’s such a tricky line to walk, especially when the students are so young and do need (?) certain tangible guidance and scaffolding (maybe not gold stars exactly, but…) for even the simplest practices and behaviors. I always try to make it a collective and good-for-its-own-sake type of system but I’ll be thinking about all this for a while for sure. Thanks again, Chuck.