The loss that he describes is deeper and more existential than anything academic integrity can protect: a specific, if perhaps decaying, way of being among students and their teachers. “AI has already changed the classroom into something I no longer recognize,” he told me. In this view, AI isn’t a harbinger of the future but the last straw in a profession that was almost lost already, to funding collapse, gun violence, state overreach, economic decay, credentialism, and all the rest. New technology arrives on that grim shore, making schoolwork feel worthless, carried out to turn the crank of a machine rather than for teaching or learning.

  • RION [she/her]
    ·
    1 year ago

    Matthew Boedy, an English professor at the University of North Georgia, told me about one student so disengaged, he sometimes attended class in his pajamas.

    THE INDIGNITY

    I think the idea of AI as the last straw in education from your excerpt is very accurate. If a student is going to have ChatGPT write their essays outright you lost them ages ago, you just didn't know it.

    I also think this might not be nearly as much of an issue if the consequences for failing a course were not to the tune of thousands of dollars to retake it, as well as a setback to the piece of paper 80% of careers are locked behind

    • UlyssesT [he/him]
      ·
      1 year ago

      he sometimes attended class in his pajamas.

      Of all the things that are hellish in hellworld, that's so incredibly unimportant that its inclusion tells me that that professor has an awfully comfortable seat in hellworld at the moment.

      • Southloop [he/him]
        ·
        1 year ago

        UNG is one of the non-federal military colleges like VA Tech, Texas A&M and the Citadel. Notoriously uptight, even after they swallowed up several community colleges a few years back.