Ridiculous Opinions #291
The Death of the Student Essay
I was reading through the article linked above this morning and thinking about artificial intelligence. I find myself conflicted about an essay like this, because at the very heart of this writing, the core ideas are sound: Because students are using artificial intelligence to do their writing for them, they are losing their critical thinking skills and thus becoming, for lack of a better term, “dumber”.
But at the heart of an essay like this (oh, the irony) lies something that has bothered me about educators since the day that I became one: THEY DON’T CHANGE.
They are stuck. They are still using techniques that educators were using over a hundred years ago. As Klass writes in his elegant newsletter about artificial intelligence, “…one of its most consequential murders—so far—is the demise of a longstanding rite of passage for students worldwide: an attempt to synthesize complex information and condense it into compelling analytical prose.”
Essays.
What is wrong with educators today? I see this often, educators clinging to the rotting corpse of the essay, long since dead, no longer useful, propped up as a kind of guardian against the future, its lifeless limbs flopping and flailing on a stick as a whole generation of educators, all of them stuck in the past with the desperate hope that somehow everything will go back to the way it was.
Spoiler alert: It won’t.
The essay was an artificial construct, a waste of time that was never about independent thought, but more about the notion of how well a student could cater to the preconceived notions of the people who are grading them. I’m not sure that even once in my life I have been rewarded for “independent thought” in an essay. My first year of university as an eighteen-year old in my freshman composition class, I wrote a heartfelt treatise on Hamlet, where I vomited up words on the page that were meaningful and new and from my heart. I wrote an essay that I was so incredibly proud of that I couldn’t wait to turn it in to show that I was a force to be reckoned with. I was an independent thinker and I was ready for the world to acknowledge my genius.
I received a C+.
It was at that point that I realized that my professor did not care about my thoughtful essay. He cared about structure. There was nothing in that essay that resembled the structure that he wanted, and thus the essay was worthless to him. It was a lesson that I learned quickly and I honestly doubt that I receive anything lower than an A- on any essay that I wrote after that. It was not about independent thought. It was about performative writing. It was about falling into line and doing things the way they have always been done.
As an English teacher for many years, I have always told my students, you are always correct if you can justify your opinion. This was an anathema to my fellow English teachers. The Great Gatsby is about Gatsby’s love for Daisy, and NOT Nick’s love for Gatsby (and vice versa). A Streetcar Named Desire is about power dynamics in relationships and NOT about a person dealing with being transgender. No English teacher wants to hear about those things! They just want you to justify the same old ideas about the same old things that they were taught. They are not interested in the new. They are only interested in students reinforcing the opinions that they have been taught over the years.
So, when it comes to artificial intelligence doing the work for students, teachers flip out because artificial intelligence just reinforces their old and withered ideas.
An essay is basically bullshit.
There are many other ways to make our students critical thinkers and most of them do not involve computers. Just write by hand, people. And I’m not talking about hand-writing an essay. We have already established that the essay is dead.
Have students keep a journal. Have students draw a picture. Have students make a video. Have students create a project. Have students design a mural. Have students put on a play.
Do you see the most important thread in all of those things? It involves being creative.
The future of education is not core classes (and by core classes, I mean English, History, Science, Math, etc). The future of education is the Arts. It is the last refuge of education, but the most important element of our continued humanity.
You can’t cheat at art.
(And look, jerks, if you start coming at me with art made by artificial intelligence, like videos or the slop that perpetuates facebook and instagram and such, then you are simply an example of the illiterate society that artificial intelligence has produced).
Drawing a picture that represents your feelings regarding the deeper meaning behind a novel is a more powerful way of expressing yourself than an essay, and it involves a hell of a lot more critical thinking skills. Composing a soundtrack to a critical moment from history and then explaining in front of everyone why you created that soundtrack is a better way to show understanding than an essay. Making a documentary about your understanding of cell division is better than writing a paper about cell division.
There are a million ways to check for understanding that are different than the essay.
And before my fellow teachers start shaking their fists in my direction and say, “but this is the way that students are tested!” or point with both hands towards the IB or AP exams, I say to you, “So what?”
Is this about test scores? Is this about going to the best university? Is this about status or education? If the IB or the AP are the only things you care about, then you are part of the problem.
Our job as educators is to get our students to think. Our job is to get our students to engage with the material that is on hand. This does not happen with an essay. Our job is not to get them to have the best test scores or get them into the best universities. That does happen with an essay. And if that’s what you want to do, then I don’t want to work with you and I would certainly not want to be in your class as a student.
I began my career in Scottsdale, Arizona in a school that made it a rule that we would have no textbooks, no tests, and nothing traditional about what we did in the classroom. We made things up. We experimented. We tried to offer something to students that regular schools were not doing for them. My time at that school has dictated the whole of my teaching career. I experiment. I make things up. I try to take a non-traditional route to getting kids engaged. Sometimes, I am successful. Sometimes, I am not.
But after 29 years as a teacher, at least I am trying. Most teachers are not.
So, educators…stop writing essays about how sad you are about the demise of the essay. No one cares. We’ve moved on. Your methods of teaching and assessing are just stupid in modern society. Find other ways to assess learning. Find new methods to engage students. Stop clinging to a past that was not, by any means, all that great in the first place.
And, if you are a teacher that actually reads this essay on how stupid essays are, I DO hope that I have made MANY of you angry with my little rant about how stupid your love for essays is. I DON’T CARE!
All this education. All of these traditions. All of this critical thinking…
…and Donald Trump is still the president of the United States.
A lot of good it’s done us, right?
Wow love the passion (anger) in your writing.
I'm SUPER angry! (But that's just my general state of being).