Bill: Welcome to the Hillbrook School Podcast. I'm Bill Selak, I'm director of technology and I'm here with Molly Brown,
Molly: the seventh grade and sixth grade English teacher at Hillbrook.
Bill: So Molly, English teacher ChatGPT Generative AI okay, right. Initially, you're like, it strikes terror into
Molly: the hearts of English teachers. It is, yeah. The creativity aspect, the idea that a machine is going to be reading and writing for us and influencing the work that people do so vibrantly without a soul, basically. So it's really just an algorithm and it's drawing off of things. So it scares me. But I think about when I was a kid, I was not super excited about math and I remember wanting to use a calculator or kind of complaining about doing some of the lower level arithmetic needed to solve higher level problems.
Bill: What did your math teacher say?
Molly: He said, what, are you going to carry a calculator in your calculator in your pocket for the rest of your life? And guess what, Mr. Anderson, that's exactly. Yes, we are exactly what happened.
Bill: So what's your version of that? Are you going to carry an English teacher in your pocket now?
Molly: Well, what if you have to communicate without electricity at some point? Or what if you get a job and you don't really know how to think through problems? Are you going to just take at face value? You still need to differentiate between good ideas, bad ideas. Communication and personality is such a big part of writing.
Bill: Voice.
Molly: Yeah, voice is huge. So if you don't learn to express your voice, I feel like it's going to really water down the future of writing, reading, communication in general.
Bill: Yeah, well, and so much like right before we started recording this, you were talking about like the need for like first of all learning how to write and then also kind of understanding the thing. And it seems like writing's a little bit less about. Let me just put paper to pencil or what's the computer version of that? Fingers to finger to keyboard, whatever. It's less about actually like knocking out words as it is about like wrapping your brain around it. Is that kind of how you think about things?
Molly: Yeah, being able to. I guess the structure part is the part where AI could come into the biggest advantage because that is, it's something, once you learn it, you can put your ideas into the structure. I just worry about like the watering down of ideas after a certain amount, amount of time, or just not learning how to explain your ideas clearly to people because that's going to transfer over into human interaction as well. Instead of just written Wait, so it's
Bill: less about actually writing essays and more about like, cohesive, coherent thoughts with humans?
Molly: Yeah, and just being able to explain something to somebody else without. You know, our minds don't work logically all the time. Like, we think of things. You know, you read stories from little kids and all of a sudden they're like. And yeah, this happened too. So. So if you plan the process of it, that's a really higher level thinking skill that you need to attain to be able to be understood clearly and to express yourself clearly. So that's the part that AI kind of takes out of it. It'll write something and it'll put it into an order that is acceptable and understandable. But that kind of leaves the writer out of the experience of having that struggle of trying to figure out, what do I say first? Is this what I mean? Am I finishing it correctly? Is it following an order that someone else can understand?
Bill: That's amazing. So let's talk about how you're using generative AI right now as an English teacher. The first thing that comes to mind, you have a whole lot of students and a whole lot of grading. Right? So like, walk us through what that looks like now.
Molly: Okay. So I mean, I've still been doing the grading by hand, which is, I think a good way also to get to know your students in this day and age too, is it's really easy to tell if they use AI. I can hear their voices, I can see the types of writers they are because I've read a lot of their work. But spending two weeks, like 40 minutes in essay for 60 essays on a five paragraph essay to give good feedback can feel a little bit daunting. So what I've been trying to do is, while I'm still grading and reading all the essays by hand, is I'm trying to compare the rubric and the AI response to what I would say to the kids and see if their scores match up and what the differential is. And it's been really rewarding because one thing that it helps do is it helps me to be more clear in my instructions. So while I'm instructing AI to edit or to give feedback to the kids, it also helps me understand when I get the response that there's some parts of it that aren't as clear as they could be. So that's also helping the students.
Bill: So, like, what's an example? What does that look like then?
Molly: Well, if you just really breaking down the parts of an essay, so focusing on different things, like for example, we Just did one. Focusing on formatting and so just setting up a paper, having your name in the left hand side of the corner. So me looking at that and grading everybody, that's a pretty simple thing. But it's also only understood after they get it wrong oftentimes.
Bill: Sure, sure.
Molly: So those types of things or a strong hook, but being really spec about what you want in an essay for the students, they can still have the creative freedom within that, but deciding what you're focusing on and making sure they learn those skills on the path to writing.
Bill: And then you said you kind of use generative AI alongside your grading. Is this to like I'm thinking about like when I'm grading, like my grad students, the first couple times, whenever it's like a thing where they have to knock out, you know, like a four page paper, the first couple I feel like is like really good. And then I start to get fatigued. And so it's hard for me to know, like, is this because I've read so many? Am I only comparing it to the one before it? And so I found like pacing in excerpts and then giving it the rubric. I'm getting actually a more objective grade than I otherwise might have done. And so again, I think that doing it alongside is really, really helpful. But for me it helps with that fatigue of knowing like, oh, I'm just really tired, I'm starting to grade really easy, or I'm really tired, I'm starting to get annoyed and like, you know, being more nitpicky than I otherwise might have been, you know, is it kind of that?
Molly: I would say that's a huge part of it because you can't help as a teacher holding. I mean, you're grading each paper as if it's new, but you have students who have written for you for a long time. And so it kind of takes out that ability if there is a bias there. And like you said, you do get exhausted or something happened during the day and that can definitely influence the way that you see things. So this takes out that subjective part of it and makes it, I guess, a more objective way of grading.
Bill: The other thing you just super glossed over I think is actually brilliant. That a lot of people aren't talking about is like, how is an English teacher or really any teacher or almost at this point any human, how it does, how do you know, like when somebody is claiming their work as their own, when it's really AI generated?
Molly: I've got a couple tells. Most kids don't know how to use An EM dash. I don't like to tell them that.
Bill: I love those.
Molly: They're great. I stopped using them mostly seventh grade.
Bill: Yeah, that's not.
Molly: I don't see a lot of adults using that unless it's in the publishing world. And so if I ask them what it is and they're like, have no idea. And I'm like, well, most of the time kids have been really honest and they're given the opportunity to try again or to figure out a different way to use it. I haven't seen a lot of large scale plagiarism, which I think is the fear or, you know, just generating an essay.
Bill: Well, it's for sure the fear. It's also a lot of our conversations go with adults, right?
Molly: Yeah. And so, yeah, just asking them about their work. For example, I don't know how many versions later, but last year with a literature essay, it'll provide a quote, but the page number is completely incorrect. So it'll set it up like it's said by Hemingway. But you look at that page, in an instant you can tell that it has nothing to do with Hemingway or the actual essay. But it looks good.
Bill: Yeah. Well, and then most importantly, what you said earlier is, you know your students, you know their style, and suddenly you're like, this is not you. True, right? Yeah, I think that's the trick.
Molly: Yeah. And one other thing, just like to finish this off, I'm thinking about. I've done this assignment for years about bare paint and advertising and just like the power of the human.
Bill: Bear the company.
Molly: Bear the company. I was thinking like, yeah, we use these paint chips to write poetry.
Bill: Okay.
Molly: But one of the kind of things about it is that those names, like the beautiful names that they come up with, like sunrise cactus and those types of things, those are human generated to this day.
Bill: Okay.
Molly: And so my challenge is for kids to either we learn about that. We learn about kind of the importance of creativity and human touch on things. And their assignment is either to write poetry using the words on the chips, or they can try to figure out a simple algorithm to make something that sounds good or as good as what the humans have generated. And so far, no one's really been able to do it.
Bill: Interesting. Like algorithm, like actually write a computer program.
Molly: Yeah. That just hooks an adjective to a noun or whatever they're thinking for those things. And most of the time it's really clunky and it's not beautiful.
Bill: So.
Molly: So taking out that human element of poetry, which I know AI has written some poetry.
Bill: Yeah.
Molly: We did some interesting projects with it, actually, in eighth grade a couple years ago, where they compared and tried to tell if students could identify the AI written poem or the human written poem.
Bill: That'd be really interesting to do kind of year after year to see how it's progressing with nuance. Yeah. And also, like, what your prompt is ahead of time and how much that affects what it's not gonna have for you.
Molly: Yeah, definitely.
Bill: Yeah. Well, what are you excited about moving forward?
Molly: I'm excited about clearing up more time for conversations about the work and understanding and editing process versus having to wait so long to get your work back, because as one person, it can be hard to get it back. So I'm excited about that part of it and just kind of seeing how we can use it as a tool to help us, because, yeah, it's here to stay. Much like the iPhone and the calculator in the pocket. It's not something you can ignore.
Bill: Take that, Mr. Anderson.
Molly: Yeah, sorry, Mr. Anderson.
Bill: Awesome.
Molly: Sorry. I'm not. Sorry, Mr. Anderson.
Bill: Molly, thank you so much for joining us.
Molly: All right, thanks for having me,
Bill: Sam.