Patience for learning wanes as students make AI a habit

It has been almost two years since ChatGPT burst onto the scene and made teachers’ lives a whole lot harder. A report from Common Sense Media this fall showed that 70% of teenage students used AI in some way for school or fun. But a majority of those students’ parents and teachers were unaware.

Leila Wheless, a seventh- and eighth-grade English teacher at ArtSpace Charter School in North Carolina, asked her students how they use the technology. She discussed her observations, including her frustrations with technology in the classroom, with Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino.

The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Leila Wheless: I took a poll, and [my students] admitted almost to a person to using AI in all sorts of ways, from the adorably innocuous, such as using them to help edit a TikTok video, generating a pumpkin template so that they could carve a jack-o’-lantern. I mean, there are some cute things that they do with it. But then there were some in the gray area, like getting AI to brainstorm for you, which I found problematic. But then there are some kids who just straight up cheated. I mean, they admitted absolutely to plagiarism and using AI to write paragraphs for them and turning those paragraphs in to be scored as if the work was their own.

Meghan McCarty Carino: Has this changed the way that you teach at all?

Wheless: That’s an interesting question. I have conflicted feelings about the technology. I don’t want to completely ignore it. I think it serves a purpose sometimes. If you’ve ever heard of — there’s fast food, and then there’s, sort of its counterpart, the slow food movement. I would say that same idea applies. What I’m discovering is that I’m tending to dig my heels in more and almost like create a slow education movement in my classroom, where I want them to do these things for themselves. I want to increase their stamina. There’s an expectation of students that things should be easy, entertaining, immediately accessible, and if it isn’t, they quit. And so my job is to teach them, hey, give this more than five or 10 minutes. This is a difficult task you’re doing, writing is extremely difficult, embrace it, go with it. It’s like training for a marathon: You can’t let somebody else run for you. You have to do it.

McCarty Carino: So how do you ensure that students are reading on their own and writing on their own?

Wheless: Well, this may sound incredibly old-fashioned, but what I do is, every single Tuesday in my classroom, you have a full hour of silent reading with a paper book you hold in your hand. For writing, I literally hand out pieces of paper and say, “Get out a pencil.” You can encourage those old-fashioned, simple, very inexpensive, by the way, techniques, brainstorming, using graphic organizers, discussing with a partner before you set out to type. What I found is that Google Docs, for example, and word processing, what a wonderful tool, right? And Google Docs will generate those little squiggly lines for you under your mistakes. Well, here’s the problem: The students are getting all those squiggly lines, but they never return to them. So they compose something quickly — typing, I mean, it’s faster, so it would theoretically allow you to generate more ideas quickly, and idea development is one of the keys of writing. First, you got to develop your ideas — so it enables a certain amount of flow. But every time there’s a subject-verb disagreement, every time there’s a pronoun disagreement, every time there’s punctuation or capitalization, some kind of convention that’s done in a nonstandard way, Google will tell you, but the students ignore it. So the one thing that I think would be the single most helpful editing tool that technology can produce for you, which is notifying you when you’ve made an error, the students do not use.

McCarty Carino: You said that you think there is maybe a small place for this technology. Have you introduced it in your lessons at all? Or are you thinking about it?

Wheless: So last year, my colleague and I — he teaches social studies, and we work closely together because we both teach all of the same 100 students — we both did units on AI at the beginning of the year. And I think the single biggest benefit to doing that unit was showing students what a hallucination was. So, kind of a comical anecdote was that last year, when the eighth grade was reading “Persepolis,” which is a graphic novel in which a young protagonist lives in Iran, when times are hard, and she dreams of becoming a prophet.

And so I wanted to kind of focus on the word “prophet” and have the students learn about it, its different uses and things like that. So I said, you can do this amount of work on the main character Persepolis, but if you would like to earn extra credit, feel free to find any prophet in any major religion, capitalize the name of that prophet correctly, tell me what religion it’s from, spell it right and find three things that the prophet is purported to have done. And so some kids are like, great. So they start Googling. Well, when I sat down to score the papers — which I do not use AI for, by the way — and start looking, and one group turned in Moses as their prophet that they had looked up. And it said, “No. 1, parted the Red Sea. No. 2, received 10 Commandments from Yahweh. No. 3, got chocolate stains out of T-shirts.”

And my immediate reaction was, those little scoundrels. This was the last question on the worksheet. They’re trying to see if I grade to the very end, or if I’m just looking to see if there’s some scribble scrabble and then give them credit, right? So I wrote this humorous note, like, “No, I really do read your work,” and turned it back in. Well, they were very quick to point out, “No, that’s what it said. We Googled it, that’s what it said.” So I would say, teaching them that it can go terribly, terribly wrong is perhaps the biggest benefit that I got out of doing that unit.

McCarty Carino: You have been teaching for three decades. You’ve seen a lot of disruptive technology either come into the classroom or sort of orbit the classroom. How disruptive do these tools look on the scale of everything you’ve seen?

Wheless: Oh, my goodness. So what I found is that in a classroom, I set the tone, and I want it always to be positive, and I want to say yes as much as possible and no as few times as possible when interacting with children. You want to build trust and a culture of kindness and respect. I find that phones, in particular, are the biggest enemy to that and that my job has shifted to policing phone use and computer use. And it’s too bad because I don’t want my interaction with children to revolve around me saying, “Put your phone away, put your phone away. Put that phone down, hand me that phone.”

But children are so addicted, and I use that word in particular, I think it applies. Children are so addicted to their phones that even handing them over to me for a few minutes creates anxiety in them, and they will go to great lengths to hide them, use them within a pocket or within a backpack by reaching down while I’m speaking. They’ll be communicating in various ways on the phone, and they will excuse themselves to the bathroom for long visits in order to check their phones. And I find that really disturbing. I think I’ve tried just about everything I can think of for them to intentionally agree, “You know what? You’re right. I don’t need my phone right now. You know, I can put my phone away.” But it’s really difficult for them, and I think that’s the single biggest challenge to me right now. Because I can see a Chromebook if it’s open, I can just tell them to shut it. But the phone is so small, it’s so portable, it’s so easy to use now. Smartwatches are the same way that it’s become a real battle, and it sets up a huge negative tug-of-war on a daily basis.

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