AI has grown to become a popular tool since 2022, marking a significant shift in the way people approach education. Lexington High School too, has been affected by AI, not just on the students’ end, but the teachers’ as well.
Many teachers at LHS have their own reasons for selecting their subject and position, but all share the concern of AI’s effect regarding the development of young minds in the next generation.
“You have the space in high school English, particularly, to push students to explore what they actually think and how their opinions match with different kinds of scholarship or content. And so I see myself as a facilitator of building a student’s brain up and strengthening what students are able to do,” Abigail Chaffer Coyne, an English teacher at LHS, said.
Coyne recalls instances in which students employed AI not only to complete assignments but to estimate the grade they’d receive for it as well. As a result, she said, the quality of work dropped. Meanwhile, indignation and arguments for a higher grade, citing AI predictions, increased.
“There’s just so many kids using it for even the smallest of assignments that you always have to be skeptical,” Coyne said. “It’s not just breaking my heart, but also breaking my spirit, because what I’m in this for is to work with kids, to mold your brain, to do hard things, and to attack problems in a thoughtful way. People are just so resistant to doing that on their own.”
This shift is not just about the numbers in Aspen or the red pen on packets; the dynamic between students and teachers has been affected. There is often a heightened sense of suspicion and miscommunication in student teacher-relationships. Teachers in particular face challenges as they approach this new development.
“You can’t treat every lesson as a matter of life and death or a matter of, ‘Have I reached the students, or have I lost them forever?’ But it only takes so many to add up to where they don’t really understand, ‘Why is it important to be able to think about these things for ourselves?’” said Ian McWilliams, an English teacher at LHS.
Both Coyne and McWilliams’ views of education aren’t limited to academia alone.
“When you resort to a robot to tell you the answer to a question, it’s turning off all of the lights in your brain. You don’t have to do any of the work, to summarize, to analyze, to generate, to think about anything. It is actually making you so much weaker for the next decades to come. It’s not just about this one assignment or this one class. It’s about how your brain responds to challenges and stimuli forever,” said Coyne.
However, AI usage in the short term does make students’ lives easier in a hectic school such as LHS. Therefore, while teachers are approaching AI usage in the classroom with caution, they also express compassion.
“AI just doesn’t make art, it doesn’t make literature. It makes a slop. So I’d love to think that it will be gone in 10-15 years, but I hope in 10-15 years, if it’s not, that I’m still fighting the good fight. And I’m just taking them one lesson at a time, and just treating each student like a human being. That’s enough for me to forget about all the other machines out there for the time being,” said McWilliams.
