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.
College writing instructor. Most of my time is spent trying to get students to un-learn bad habits from high school.
I try to prevent those habits from starting but the standardized bullshit I am forced to teach sort of requires it to graduate. :doomer:
Oh I don't blame high school teachers for their situation. Even if we didn't have the testing regime they're required to teach towards, good writing inherently requires students to interrogate authority (even the authority of the instructor), which isn't something that most parents want their kids doing in a real way. After all, a good writer recognizes both why rules exist and under what conditions they should be broken. That kind of contingency is generally skeptical of authority, etc.
Of course the academy, with the hollowing of tenure, is doing its best to remove the possibility to do that even in college, so things will probably become pretty fuckt in the next few decades...
I remember my freshman university writing class and getting totally OWNED by the first assignment, I was so mad bc I had always gotten top scores in writing in high school, I was actually offended
Luckily I was able to pull my head out of my ass and learn to write from my instructor but not out of some desire to improve but bc I was a nerd that wanted A’s
I am lucky I went to a school that had uni writing as a requirement bc if I had gone somewhere else I probably would have never learned to write properly