Sometimes I wonder if I am ever making a difference in the world. Am I just eating ceviche in Lima, or am I making a difference? Well, this week, I felt as if I was more than a consumer of fish and corrector of grammar errors (By the way, this ceviche below costs less than a specialty Starbucks drink).
Well anyway, one of my students used AI (Chatpt) on a project. It was a day when I woke up on the wrong side of the Equator. To make it worse, the first graders cheated on Pin the Tail on the Donkey. Then, this kid–a whiz kid from Korea–didn’t make a wise choice.
That’s because I don’t allow AI in my classroom.
I’d rather eat glass than allow AI in my classroom.
And I don’t like eating glass.
As a blogger and award-winning writer of cereal box backs, I take pride in words. I think words change minds. Dr. Suess only used a palate of two hundred words to create Green Eggs and Ham, something he did to win a fifty-dollar bet. The end product is a story loved by millions, a story too nonsensical to have been created by Amazon Alexa’s cousin. That being said, my philosophy about AI is the same that I have about birth control. Even though students may want to use it, I’m not going to teach them how.
Anyway, this student was Korean, but under the influence of Americans. His vocabulary regenerated into shoulders shrugs, his sentences beginning with the word like and ending with yeah instead of a period.
So when he submitted a paper dripping with heart-tugging vocabulary? I knew something was wrong. Parts of it felt robotic like a telemarketer script while other parts silenced the room. But overall, it just didn’t connect, just like a phone charger in foreign countries.
Sure enough, the student’s paper was 66% AI created, something I verified at an AI-detector website.
I took a screenshot of the AI report, then drafted an email for the student, copying the school director, and the Korean student’s mother.
Need I say more.
I dialogued with a colleague before doing this. He agreed. Even though the punishment would be severe with the student’s parents, it was the right thing to do.
Now on that very same day in that very same class, I shared a story entitled WhizKid with my students. The whiz kid in this story made a bad decision in high school and ended up in jail. Behind bars, he got in grip with his faith and owned up to his mistake. He told the judge he was guilty (unlike students who never swear in the hallway), a decision that changed the trajectory of his life.
Now, I don’t get religious a lot–it’s not my deal to peddle beliefs–but I don’t think that it was a coincidence that this AI incident happened on the same day. When I met with the teary-eyed student? I encouraged him to write a letter to the original Whiz Kid (whom I am in contact with now).
The letter was zero percent generated by AI and was one hundred percent sincere.
You can read the original WhizKid story below.
I guess I do more than check grammar.
Good lesson Ginger