What Happened When I Tried to Replace Myself with ChatGPT in My English Class

Different tools in different years as expectations have changed. The TI-89 is incredibly powerful, but has to give way to MATLAB and Wolfram Alpha. It used to be productive to “google” your problems. Going further, there’s now LLMs writing python code to do calculations. Hard to say what’s next, but I’m sure what is considered ethically questionable today will be acceptable and the new thing will be the new questionable tool.

Being one of those students and with a career under my belt of process analysis and coaching, I have an interesting observation: I harness free time as an explicit part of my writing process, rather than something that interferes with it.

I write at about 1200 words per day and I considered each fo the major multi-week assignments in my entry-level English courses to be worth no more than one day of my time apiece. For the finals, I gave them two days apiece, because I wanted an extra day to define the scaffolding for my argument.

My mother indicates that this is how she went through college too; very occasionally, a serious paper would require more effort than this, but for the most part it was “load assignment into brain, study assignment mentally until T-2d, write assignment, submit”. If several essays are due, then they have to be staged at various days numbered T-2d through T-5d for example — and it’s really important to not depend on T-1d existing at all due to courseware/internet/power outages.

I could technically write a worse essay the day it was assigned, but ultimately, I’m turning in A-tier work by this method. The hardest lesson was that I have to try not to wait until T-1d, because there’s a lot of risk encoded in that and it outweighs the value derived from having an extra day to think about it while I do other things.

But it wasn’t about “free time slipping away” — it’s just that I’m writing crap throwaway work that doesn’t matter after it’s done, and so I can barely motivate to care relative to literally anything else in my life that matters. Thus the T-2d compromise: I’m not about to give them precedence over literally anything, but I will concede that I do need to do so one day early, however boring it feels, because I’d rather have a crap day at T-2d than the same crap day at T-1d with the unproductive anxiety of risking a class-retake if my internet drops out.

Notably, when I actually genuinely care about what I’m writing, I’ll spend weeks researching sources and studying arguments and selecting quotes and then assembling it all over a couple days into a work of art — but assembly day is still always as late as possible in the time window assigned, because by then I’m most able to think and write about it efficiently and with a minimum of frustration. Not a zero of frustration, that is — I am a grouchy writer — but I’m healthy-grouchy on T-2d and bitter-grouchy on T-1d, so I do make the effort to put in my writing that day early now.

So: for your coaching efforts, try working with students to construct a working calendar that has non-writing activities in the leadup and then writing activities at the end. ie assuming a 7-day window,

T-7d: Assignment given: Read the assignment. (Seems obvious; is not obvious!)

T-6d: Think about your argument during your free time, while playing games or out at coffee or whatever.

T-5d: Try to construct a very halfass outline on a piece of paper. One sentence per argument you’d like to make, draw arrows to rearrange them. Not complete sentences, not punctuated, doesn’t have any structure at all. Point is that trying will help brain coalesce.

T-4d: Research references for fun. End up with far too many. Start highlighting quotes to yourself using highlighter or digital tools. If you’re going to experiment with a new tool, get it working and productive in 2 hours or discard it and do something shittier.

T-3d: Bind quotes to your argument phrases from that halfass outline. This may force reorg of outline; cool. Compile Works Cited from whatever you end up using so that you don’t have to fuck around with it tomorrow.

T-2d: Write paper, referring to outline / phrases handwritten note. Do one paragraph at a time. Plan to spend your entire day on this with 1 hour away from desk handling bio/sanity needs for every 2 hours at desk. Enforce that upon yourself.

T-1d: Finish whatever writing you didn’t feel like you were prepared to write on T-2d. Ideally try to do this earlier in the day than later, since that every hour you let this slip towards midnight l measurably increases your chances of a life outage causing you to fail the class.

The point of this schedule is to bake in the daydreaming / slow cooker aspect of the creative process but to keep it on the rails. I play video games extensively when I’m thinking about a paper because I can feed my literary brain the assignment to simmer and then go occupy my reflex brain with the game. I usually end up having to use some T-1d time but I’m getting better at managing my life’s dependencies ie. Food and Water and Sleep so that I’m more reliably at T-2d completion :)

The point that you're (and everyone is) glossing over here is relative positions on the skill gradient.

A first grader probably would be prohibited from using any kind of calculator on arithmetic tests, 4-fn or not. But 8th graders are usually permitted scientific (non-programmable) calculators.

As you go up in grade level, you "get access to" calculators capable of functionality at the level below you. Because the point is that when we're educating students we want them to actually learn the subject matter, but once we've deemed them to have understood it and we have them move onto the next goal, we give them the tools to make that prior goal easier. We lessen the burden of the little mechanical concepts they already know so that they have an easier time becoming familiar with the next more advanced concepts.

AI systems are so much more advanced than what's capable on a TI programmable calculator. It's hard to draw clean boundaries around the tiers and enforce them by telling the model "help the user with tasks of tier 1-4 but not 5+". That's the issue, that it's really infeasible to strictly use them strictly as learning tools. You can almost do it with a lot of self-discipline and self-reflection to analyze your own workflow, but it's not generalizable across domains.

>>> imagine how radically math class must have changed when calculators became widely affordable

It didn't.

I was in math class when calculators were introduced. At least for high school level and beyond, the curricula were designed to make problems solvable without calculators, and they weren't of much use. This was still the case when I taught an undergrad college math class in 1997. Graphing calculators were allowed, and the kids who tried to use them just screwed themselves up.

I would have gladly changed the curriculum to use calculators and computers from the very beginning. As tools, and not just to administer the same old exercises and quizzes. Give them Jupyter Notebook. Math education has never been a success story.

Education faces a dilemma, which is that it has always used heuristics to guide study and assess performance. Exercises such as the "three paragraph essay" had no use in the real world, even long before AI could generate them on demand. When one of those heuristics is broken, another one has to be found. Even word processing forced teachers to grade papers on content, rather than mechanics.

As a teen in the late 80's I had an HP calculator that I programmed to compute molecular weights given an input string like "H2SO4". It felt like having a secret superpower, especially when I participated in competitive exams. I was a very straightlaced kid and would not have used the program if it such things were explicitly forbidden, but as far as I could tell, they never were.

The concepts of adding machines and calculators were also slowly phased in over the span of a century. The first commercially successfully adding machines hit the market in the 1890's, and pocket calculators took off in the 1980's. AI went from theory to answering hand written math homework questions from a photograph in a few years.

Totally correct. In the 90's as a kid in school using a calculator was highly debated amongst teachers and the ability to bring one out on your desk depended on the teacher.

In grade 2 i had a teacher who would say "I don't believe in erasers", you know, the things that "undo" pencil. As a ~6 yr old i actually didn't understand this phrase: "Well I have one, they're real!"

No middle schooler is using a graphing calculator on their algebra exam

It's also an extremely misleading comparison. Basic calculator functions do not in the slightest replace anything taught in a maths class. Using ChatGPT not just to write entire paragraphs (replacing composition), or even providing the writer with ideas (replacing the creative aspects of writing) isn't comparable to adding two large numbers together.

The equivalent in maths would be if you handed students a theorem prover or have Wolfram Alpha give you step-by-step solutions and obviously nobody to this day allows this, because like ChatGPT for writing it'd defeat the point, that students think.

When I was in uni we were allowed basic but not programmable calculators during exams and a lot of CS classes even were pen&paper, if the prof was a bit hardcore

>> Altman’s analogy didn’t hold up. Calculators were uncontroversial

> Calculators are uncontroversial now. But when they first became cheap and widely available, they were not allowed in math classes.

The author of TFA means specifically for his cohort of students, not in general. He polled his students, and the result was that they thought calculators weren't seen as unethical but they were more skeptical/uncertain about AI. By his current students, now, not in general.

Or by market consolidation, as we're experiencing now.

Overcommitted in this context probably means "has a schedule that is packed too full"

Between work and school and other responsibilities they have no time to decompress so they burn out

Let's rephrase it to "most of even the best students" then.

I went to about the cheapest US school that had a decent math program. It costs $17,500/yr between tuition, rent, books, and rice and beans.

That's a lot of money. It's over $10/hr in pre-tax income, even if you work full-time all year, which isn't an easy bar to clear in the sort of towns with cheaper universities. Wages don't scale well enough with more expensive tuition for there to be substantially better options.

Classes are another 22+ hours each week (you could complete school in 3-4 yrs instead, but that makes it even harder to afford and doesn't really reduce the workload enough to make a difference, however I'll also factor in a 15-hour workload later).

The rule of thumb is that you should study 3 hours for every hour of class. I found that approximately correct. Some classes took a lot less. Some took a little more. Combined with the self study you need in adjacent topics, 3hrs is a fair bit low.

During the school year then, you have something that looks like a 128hr/week schedule, or 100hr if you're finishing in 4yrs, and still 60hr/week even if you're finishing in 4yrs and racking up $70k in debt.

Don't get me wrong; I had free time (I worked more during the summer, less during the school year, allowing loans to cover the slack, which bought extra time here and there), but it wasn't exactly a party either. When I skipped class it was because I had to work, had to study for some other more pressing class, or found it more efficient to study the book than to try to understand that particular lecturer.

What people are telling you in the comments is that your perspective is not universal. I've personally only ever skipped one class in my time in undergrad (as an American at an American university), and not for a party. I'm not a special case or anything, those classes are very expensive!

Speak for yourself maybe

It me.

But I read an article recently about the death of partying in the USA: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44514550

>English teachers

Since discovering Analytical Philosophy, I think it is irresponsible to combine Nonfiction and fiction under the term 'English'.

As an engineer, I write emails, they need to be clear, factual, etc... This is in huge contrast with fiction, where writers get merit for being intentionally ambiguous with things like metaphors and symbolism.

What an incredible disservice to students and society to consider English(nonfiction) an 'art'. It should be treated like math and science.

I had to become a middle aged adult and learn this for myself.