Next Wednesday morning, I’ll be hitting a career milestone: the start of my 35th year of teaching.
Perhaps more amazingly (to me anyway) is that it’s my 53rd consecutive first day of school (you now all know how old I am!). I know liturgical time is more the thing around here, but since I toddled off to preschool in 1972, I’ve never had a year that didn’t run on academic time. At this point, I can hardly imagine any other rhythm. When I hear that someone is going on vacation in October, say, my initial thought is always, “but that’s not possible—it’s during school.”
Seventy semesters on as a professor, it turns out I’ll be starting this year in much the same way as I started my first. In 1990, only months from my own college graduation, BabyGraduateStudentMe(TM) stepped into a first-year composition class, English 131: Introductory Expository Writing. Though we were called “teaching assistants,” in this class and almost every other, I was really no one’s assistant and taught the class completely on my own as the instructor of record. This year, now tied for most senior member of my department (by seniority, not age, mind you), I was already eagerly looking forward to teaching an upper-division Jane Austen course, but this summer when we needed more sections of “freshmen English,” what we call English 101, I took on a new section as an overload to help out.
It’s a remarkable time to be trying to teach writing. When I last taught English 101– not that long ago in fall 2023–I was certainly aware of generative AI. My syllabus even had a policy about it. But the kinds of products that software such as ChatGPT can now produce can boggle the mind. I spend a lot of time constructing my assignments to help students develop their voices, increase intellectual rigor, demonstrate authentic feelings and ideas, and craft strong, rhetorically savvy arguments. I like to believe that the level of personal engagement that each paper requires makes machine-generated text harder, but feeding my essay prompts into the maw of the chatbot produced results that, though vacuous and superficial, were often passable.
And this depressed me.
Of course, I’d already been reading a good deal of the emerging literature on AI, detailing the many downsides to cognition and critical thinking. I have major ethical issues, too, with the fact that so much of AI was stolen from others’ intellectual property, that it requires such large amounts of energy and water, that it is often obsequious in its interactions and hallucinates sources out of nowhere.
Nevertheless, the seeming ubiquity of AI use among students has required me in these last months to consider again my principles and objectives that undergird and guide my teaching. That’s actually a useful exercise for every semester.
To begin: though I can imagine other disciplines where in upper-division courses, for instance, AI might be a good tool or useful preparation for future work, in a first year writing class, it feels only logical to not allow AI. After all, it’d be like taking a PE class, but having a robot do all your weight-lifting. Moreover, any college writing instructor worth their salt will tell you that the point of a writing class is not the product you produce, but the process you learn. Writing is about thinking deeply, evaluating sources for yourself, struggling to come up with the right words for the right audience. It is exceedingly difficult. Indeed, writing is hard because thinking is hard, but both lie at the heart of the academic enterprise. And, as one of my departmental colleagues wisely observed at our fall faculty conference, “sometimes you still have to learn to do the hard thing.”
That needs to be articulated more than ever for my students. I’ve committed, then, to stating very clearly both in class and on each assignment sheet, the skills and ways of thinking I hope my students will practice and cultivate in their essays, so they understand the intellectual “muscles” they are building. As I have for many years, I’m continuing to disincentivize “product” writing and spending time instead coming alongside them, including every other week one-on-one personalized sessions, as they lean into owning their own process.
After all, I’ve always believed that the best teaching is collaborative, that sees students as full agents in their own learning. What initially saddened me, I think, about considering entering a classroom possibly dominated by AI-generated work was the way it shifted the teacherly metaphor of my work from coach to cop. I have never wanted to be in a classroom where my starting point with students was suspicion and distrust or an assumption that they are default cheaters. That feels incredibly disheartening to me.
That’s where the long view helps. As I thought about the many, many sections of first-year writing that I have taught over the years, I remember all the threats to thinking and writing well that have ever been. It’s really nothing new. In fact, students have always been able to have someone else write their paper—whether by hire, out of an ancient file cabinet somewhere or an internet outpost, or in some computer-generated way. Sure, ChatGPT is very accessible and very attractive. But isn’t that true of many temptations. It didn’t take that long to buy a paper off the internet, either.
It means that the solution lies elsewhere. Certainly, shaping a good course and excellent assignments is important. But what we’re really doing is as much virtue work as any acquisition of knowledge. The goal is wisdom.
I often put at the top of my syllabus 1 Peter 1:13, “Prepare your minds for action.” That’s the key for me. We might consider the classroom as the warm-up room for the next part of the journey. Learning is never neutral, and it’s never passive. In every class, I’m asking students to think beyond the abstract and disembodied. To wonder: how is what they are learning—but as importantly, the ways they are learning—training them in the habits of heart and mind that they will need for a lifetime as they become the people they want to be over a lifetime?
I’m grateful that it’s easier to talk about all of this because my students and I share a common language and commitments. Though it doesn’t have the ring to it of a 35th anniversary, it’s also the start of my 28th year at an institution that takes seriously our project of believing that our learning matters to God. And that includes how we learn.
It’s why next week Wednesday, we’ll gather and learn about the semester’s intellectual work, but as vitally, we’ll make commitments together about what will govern the learning in our English 101 class. I’ll give them a document with my signature that outlines all my promises to them about how I will behave as their professor, and I’ll ask them to make some promises back. We’ll covenant together to have the classroom space that I hope will be for their flourishing.
Thirty-five years on, I realize I may be naïve and still breathtakingly idealistic. I imagine it’s too late to change now. And I’m okay with that.
Here’s to another school year: Deo Adjuvante non Timendum.
Photo by Scott Graham on Unsplash
