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I assigned a writing prompt a few weeks ago that asked my students to reflect on a time when someone believed in them or when they believed in someone else. One of my students began to panic.
“I have to ask Google the prompt to get some ideas if I can’t just use AI,” she pleaded and then began typing into the search box on her screen, “A time when someone believed in you.”
“It’s about you,” I told her. “You’ve got your life experiences inside of your own mind.” It hadn’t occurred to her — even with my gentle reminder — to look within her own imagination to generate ideas. One of the reasons why I assigned the prompt is because learning to think for herself now, in high school, will help her build confidence and think through more complicated problems as she gets older — even when she’s no longer in a classroom situation.
She’s only in ninth grade, yet she’s already become accustomed to outsourcing her own mind to digital technologies, and it frightens me.
When I teach students how to write, I’m also teaching them how to think. Through fits and starts (a process that can be both frustrating and rewarding), high school English teachers like me help students get to know themselves better when they use language to figure out what they think and how they feel.
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If you believe, as I do, that writing is thinking — and thinking is everything — things aren’t looking too good for our students or for the educators trying to teach them. In addition to teaching high school, I’m also a college instructor, and I see this behavior in my older students as well.
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This! This is what scares me the most about AI! Physical exertion is difficult if someone isn’t used to it, and it gets easier the more often it’s done. When it’s done often enough, it becomes a habit. Mental exertion is exactly the same. Thinking is a learned skill just like a sport is, and an entire generation is growing up without that most critical skill.
An unthinking populace is a more easily controlled populace.
In the bar scene in CATFA, the song called ‘There is a Tavern in the Town’ starts playing right before Steve finds Bucky and sits down with him. Let’s look at the lyrics for the sake of torturing ourselves, shall we?
“There is a tavern in the town, in the town/ And there my dear love sits him down, sits him down/ And drinks his wine 'mid laughter free/ And never, never thinks of me.”
“He left me for a damsel dark, damsel dark/ Each Friday night they used to spark, used to spark/ And now my love, once true to me/ Takes that dark damsel on his knee.”
“Fare thee well, for I must leave thee/ Do not let the parting grieve thee/ And remember that the best of friends must part”
“Dig my grave both wide and deep, wide and deep/ Put tombstones at my head and feet, head and feet/ And on my breast carve a turtle dove/ To signify I died of love.”
