1/ Learning to write is learning to think; it will always be worth it
2/ As teachers, we must continue to do our job in the face of technology that enables students to fake the final product
3/ The answer, as far as I can see, is a renewed emphasis on process — The Writing Revolution, also known as The Hochman Method, provides an excellent template for doing so
Writing is evidence of thought. We’ve all received (or sent) texts or emails obviously written in states of frenzy: scattered ideas, anemic or over-bloated paragraphs, claims jumping to claims with no evidence.
Conversely, we've all also found ourselves innately appreciating work an author has taken her time to carefully arrange, be that in the form of an argument, story, or poem.
Incidentally, this careful arrangement is why formal poetry such as sonnets are at first so difficult to appreciate but so rewarding once they’re understood: their arrangement begins at the syllable, extends to the word, the phrase and clause, the line, the stanza, the complete poem itself, and sometimes even beyond. (To say nothing of the creative pushing of boundaries that occurs at every level.) Shakespeare’s Sonnets is comprised of 154 exquisitely crafted sonnets that all together form a narrative.
But the relationship between thought and writing goes both ways. To write is to make material an immaterial thought. Have you ever had the most awesome story in your head only to sit down, begin writing and… nothing? The epic tale in your head turned out to be vapor. At best a series of disjointed clichés, more like a stereotypical movie trailer than an actual narrative. This frustrating experience is a feature of writing — not a glitch of it. In fact, it is a challenge to the would-be writer: those stalled words are actually calling out to you, “Use us! Wrangle your thoughts and bind them to us! Why was that climax so heroic in your mind? Arrange us into plots, characters, and settings to share your vision with the world!”
The same goes for arguments, explanations, and the entire domain of human thought.
Needless to say, a “large language model AI assistant” can’t give us a mastery of our own thoughts — rather it compiles a dark mirror of a single shallow interpretation of them. And losing our ability to wrangle our thoughts into words and arrange them coherently represents a risk to something far greater than the 5-paragraph essay.
What are teachers (especially composition teachers) to do in the face of this technology making obsolete our tools of assessment? How can we check students' ability to select appropriate words and properly arrange them into propositions and arguments if a web app can fake it for them?
We’ll want to start with explicit vocabulary instruction, ensuring that students have the terms they need to craft a proposition. After that, we move to sentence structure, as the sentence is the form of a claim. Then we’ll want to make sure that students can support propositions by developing a claim with evidence, that is, the paragraph. And then, of course, combining several well developed claims and arranging them in a logical and easily-understood form: a multi-paragraph composition, or essay.
Looks familiar, right?
I have in the past joked with my students that I secretly work for “CER Corporation,” to whom I sell the Claim-Evidence-Reasoning paragraphs I assign them. The implied punchline: we don’t assign writing for our benefit (certainly not with grading time!), but for the student’s intellectual development. The term, the sentence, the paragraph, the multi-paragraph composition are tools for thinking, and the practice, application, and mastery of these forms sharpens one’s thinking, first specifically on whatever topic one is writing about and then generally, as one builds the habit of analyzing and creating increasingly complex arguments.
But they’re going to cheat! They’re lazy! We’re all lazy, and now everyone has an unstoppable writing machine!
Penmanship is making a comeback. Anything written on a screen should be immediately suspect. My school is introducing one penmanship class a week next year as part of our focus on ensuring original student work.
Resources:
We only adopted the machine-made answers, but our colleagues in the math department who have been dealing with calculators for decades were born into them, molded by them. A final draft alone turned by itself after a night at home is now as suspect as a correct answer without work.
Resources:
An large language model cannot recite Prospero’s epilogue with a sense of finality. Nor can one take part in an extemporaneous debate. It also cannot come into an electronics-free testing environment to brainstorm, outline, and draft an essay (or poem) on a hitherto undisclosed topic. These may require changes to scheduling, as 45 minutes simply isn’t enough time for some of these alternatives.
Generally, apply the above rules to every aspect of intellectual production:
Ultimately, English teachers should rejoice for these incredible AI chatbot-cum-premium-mediocre-essay-writers, for they represent a profound opportunity to reorient towards what matters in education. And don’t let clueless micromanagers in admin or district offices take this moment from you. This is not 2020’s lockdowns and school closures, which required school- or district-wide coordination; this is a battle that is being fought on the front lines (I personally have the good fortune to be writing from a position where admin trusts us to teach — and that is how I’ve refined my approach so far). You are in front of your students every day while they are browsing LinkedIn getting scammed by textbook and edtech salespeople.
Pens, penmanship, the Writing Revolution, and evidence of thought every step of the way. Remember, we are here to give young people an invaluable tool for thinking, not to crank out x-number of y-number-paragraph essays per year. We can do that without screens 99.9% of the time and get better results to boot. It’s time to teach.