Among all the regular challenges that teachers face, the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in recent years has had a huge impact on how they approach the classroom. It has also affected how some students engage with their schooling.
A recent NPR article explores a report from Brookings Institution’s Center for Universal Education and says, “The report describes a kind of ‘doom loop’ of AI dependence, where students increasingly offload their own thinking onto the technology, leading to the kind of cognitive decline or atrophy more commonly associated with aging brains.”
Pam Bussey is an English teacher at Chateauguay Valley Regional High School (CVR) and has been a teacher for ten years. She feels that the rise of AI has completely changed her job. “There’s a lack of trust between teachers and students often now when there’s a computer involved. And so, within my classroom and some of my colleagues’ classrooms, we’re going back to pen and paper,” she says.
A Psychology Today article explains that most of K-12 students’ vocabulary comes from reading, not from direct instruction. Plus, students who read more for pleasure score higher on subject-specific testing. In her 10 years of teaching, Bussey has seen a decrease in students’ interest in reading books, but more than that, she has noticed a decrease in the ability to consume long-form media.
A consequence of this decrease in literacy is the inability to take in longer content. “Their attention span for long texts is diminishing, and we kind of understand that with TikTok. Everything’s super fast-paced. And so, to be literate, like a good reader, you need to be able to stick with a text, whether it’s a movie or a short story or a book or even a video game that’s gonna take you many hours.” Bussey adds that, “They don’t really need to remember anything anymore because everything is remembered for them, right? Their passwords, their phone numbers, their email addresses, their home addresses.”
Though she isn’t against AI entirely, Bussey emphasizes that it is important to develop the necessary skills and knowledge before relying on it. “I think for a 14-year-old who feels overwhelmed, who may not know what they’re doing, who knows that there’s this cheat code – it’s very tempting,” she says.
There has been some pushback, with people claiming that with so much reliance on AI, students should be taught how to use it. To that, Bussey uses the metaphor of a chainsaw. “A chainsaw is a wonderful tool, but I would never hand a chainsaw to my four-year-old. So, I’m not gonna hand AI to a 14-year-old,” she says.
Bussey’s motto, which she has printed and put up in her classroom, says that students should give themselves the gift of trying. She finds that students’ writing, particularly creative writing, is often stronger when they write by hand without the entire world at their fingertips. “Sitting in front of a laptop, choice is endless, and in a way, it’s inhibiting to a writer. But if you’re literally like, ‘me and my paper and my pen,’ choice is not limitless. You only have you to work from.”
AI should be a last-resort tool, or a supplement to the work that is directly coming from students.
Bussey says it seems as though dealing with AI is going to revolutionize the way teaching works, especially in subjects like English. Already there has been a shift to more hands-on activities to help students develop their skills and literacy before jumping into the world of AI. And though it might be useful in some ways, she urges the importance of developing basic skills before relying on the robots.