I’m a college English teacher. I rarely ever get papers written by AI. Here’s how I do it.
Every news outlet and tech startup on the planet is trying to convince you that the college essay is dead due to the rise of AI usage. I am here today to debunk that premise as utter horseshit. Students resort to AI use for a variety of very specific reasons, but all of them stem from a lack of caring about the work that they’re doing. It is our job as instructors and mentors to show them why they should care, and also to provide them with work worth caring about. That is labor, but it is the labor we are being paid for, and I would argue it is the most essential part of our task as English teachers. If we don’t do that extremely basic, bare-minimum amount of care, then we don’t deserve papers written by humans.
This is a careful, deliberate process, but it is both actionable and achievable — but only if you’re willing to throw away a lot of what you presently assume about teaching.
The first step toward preparing for this is both the easiest and the hardest: you have to stop being a cop in the classroom. You have to trust your students. Remember when Against Cop Shit was running through pedagogy like wildfire? I recall at least three professors at my institution directly referencing it in various contexts. Then the AI boom occurred and all of a sudden everyone decided that, no, actually we should be cops again.
