A bit over a week ago a colleague sent me an essay from The Atlantic that claimed we had reached the end of teaching high school English with the availability of ChatGPT. Coincidentally, I was teaching Ted Chiang’s brilliant story, “Truth of Fact, Truth of Feeling” which is about the adoption of technologies (one imaginary and one real) and what they do to us. I had queued up his story “Understand” (about hyper intelligence) to do next. So, on Thursday, December 15, my class and I opened ChatGPT and watched in real-time as it: retold Goodnight Mood in the style of Stephen King; retold the story of Arachne and Minerva as a country and western song; and as it wrote a brief essay comparing Malcolm X to world mythology.
Several of my colleagues were distraught over the article and a couple were aghast that I would show my class this since it certainly could address most of (if not all of) the writing prompts I have given for years. But, all apologies to the writer from The Atlantic, I don’t think we have reached the end of high school English. Ron Charles of The Washington Post also wrote about ChatGPT in his Book Club notes and lots of people are apocalyptically declaiming the end of op-eds and all sorts of things.
This past summer I read C. Thi Nguyen’s astonishing article “How Twitter Gamifies Communication” (and I am now about half-way through his book, Games: Agency as Art). I have long been interested in “gamifying” education for two reasons: 1) education and games share the idea of mastery through scaffolding; and 2) games are fun and education should be, at its best, about PLAY. Not “play” as frivolity–I am talking about the total absorption, loss of time, intensity of experience kind of play. But I am now thinking that I need to adjust my love of gamification–while retaining the best parts.
I say this because Ngyuen’s argument, which I am simplifying here, is that Twitter, with its “rankings” or “grading” through “likes” and “retweets;” through its “scoring” system changes the fundamental goals of communication into something different. Nguyen argues that the genius of games is to have us accept the rules of the game and that we adopt the values that the designer creates and then play within the game. By making communication a game, Twitter changes what we value.
But education has LONG been gamified. Schools, school systems, and too many teachers, impart the value proposition that you should chase the points or you should chase the grade. In fact, education is elaborately designed as a game but it is NOT necessarily knowledge or understanding or wisdom that is valued–it is the accumulation of points. (Now, most teachers will claim that is NOT what they are doing but then a look at a syllabus or course policy sheet or at their assessments will reveal that the points are the value. And parents and kids and administrators are all happy to agree.)
What if we adopted in our classes much more of an “apprenticeship model” and convinced people to chase knowledge or understanding–not the grade–to chase mastery and not points? We would be adopting what I have elsewhere called the Sherpa model ( the other two great roles for teachers being the Magician and the Stripper).
I am going to spend some time trying to work out how this looks in my classroom–and I am fortunate in that I have been doing so for the past few years anyway so I have something to start with. I don’t think we have reached the end of High School English; but maybe we have reached the end of teaching it in the way that, frankly, needed to end. I am optimistic–but I am also much closer to the end of my career than the beginning and so I could clearly be wrong about ChatGPT and whatever comes next.
pulpteacher 