Tuesday, January 17, 2023

Having Taught English Composition For 20 Years…

...it’s not the AI that concerns me.

First, this speaks to the usual quality of composition among college students, or at least the expectations of that quality (lowered considerably in my lifetime. The work I did in high school English was set at a higher standard than I could ever have asked of my students even 5 years later when I was a TA in graduate school. And that was a common public school, not a private school or a “charter school.” 25 years later, when I started teaching again, the expectations were even lower. And got lower and lower as I went on. I assigned a 5 page research paper to make my students write a “long” paper. In my junior year in high school I wrote a 20 page heavily researched paper. Not only could my students barely do any research, they could barely write 5 pages. They came to me woefully undereducated, and I couldn’t fix all their deficiencies in one college semester, or even two.)

Which takes us to the second. I had a student, when I was a TA, who had a vocabulary of more than a few hundred words. This made her seem to write better than my other students, a privilege she proudly carried into Freshman English from her high school. But what she wrote was empty gibberish; lots of words, but no content. I tried to get her to add content to form, but she couldn’t understand what she was doing wrong, and the next semester found a teacher more sympathetic to her “style.” Was I right, and everyone else wrong? No; but standards are a matter of judgment. They are also a matter of expectation. I learned what to expect after 20 years of trying to improve my students’ accomplishments.

So the AI doesn’t worry me. It’s all relative to expectations.

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