Hitting the Books To Hitting AI: Inside High School Classrooms

I remember having a designated spot in the library throughout my university years that I would love to claim. I loved to read and study in the university library. I would scout out old anthologies of Tennyson or Dickens or devour their pages while my school binders lay open on the desk of the library carrel I had laid claim to for the day. I loved the feel of old books—I even loved the smell.

Times have certainly changed. Few academic experiences like that exist today. Sure, readers still read, but there are far fewer in my experience. And I know. I am that matron, otherwise known as an English teacher. In my first years as a teacher, my excitement was often met with student groans after Labour Day: “Who'd You get for English?” 

I vividly recall a scene in You’ve Got Mail that encapsulates my September feelings early in my teaching career. Not uncoincidentally, both main characters in the film sell books, though they do not own bookstores of the same ilk. Joe Fox, played by Tom Hanks, writes in an email: Don't you love New York in the fall? I would send you a bouquet of newly sharpened pencils if I knew your name and address. I love to read and write and was called to teach. I kid you not: Labour Day used to feel like New Year's Eve to me. 

What does any of this have to do with AI? Frankly, everything. This past year, I have had to completely re-engineer how I teach literature; I use the term ‘teach’ loosely here. This reengineering has not been easy: I am a dinosaur who has learned to embrace AI. Chatbots have helped with a few of my menial tasks: of note, AI can offer specific feedback on students’ writing assignments and has certainly helped with my plethora of student letters of reference or recommendation. Unfortunately, AI cannot grade tasks for me, and student use of AI has increased my workload immensely. 

Not only do I and other teachers have to scan tasks for AI use and plagiarism, but in many circumstances, we use draftback to check a student’s cutting and pasting from outside sources and the number of edits along the writing process—I also use the phrase ‘writing process’ loosely. And do not get me started on Quillbot and Grammarly paraphrasing tools that completely reword sentences, paragraphs, and entire essays. Do not get me wrong: many students still enjoy reading and some still do complete their writing tasks authentically, but not the majority. 

This year, I changed my tasks considerably. I once encouraged students in my grade twelve class to use Chat GPT to summarize critical articles and then evaluate the effectiveness of those summaries. In April, my students interviewed seniors at a retirement residence and wrote two-to-three-page memoirs on their lives. In lieu of a literary essay in May, students wrote creative writing tasks whereby they had to write fictitious letters from one character to another. Am I still gauging knowledge and understanding of novels and writing expectations? Absolutely. Simply in different ways. 

The challenge therein remains that these tasks are arguably not preparing them for writing academic essays in university, but again, universities are battling the same challenges of AI and academic authenticity that high school teachers are facing. In North America, 40% of college and university students polled in February of 2024 admitted to regularly using ChatGPT to complete coursework, assignments, and, yes, even exams. This statistic is rendered all-the-more problematic since more than one-fifth of university students now take classes entirely online. The waters of online learning and academic integrity have indeed become murky. 

 My youngest son, for one, has not seen the inside of a lecture hall at Carleton University in three years, and he hopes that the next time he does is when he collects his Journalism Degree.  In Ontario, all high school students must now earn at least two online learning credits as part of the Ontario Secondary School Diploma requirements unless they have opted out or been exempted. This mandatory online learning began with students who entered Grade 9 in the 2020-21 school year. They had just emerged from the COVID pandemic. Had they not stared at screens enough?

Now, let me be clear: Online learning has its place, and many students absolutely love filling their timetables with online courses, and it is not for the reasons you may think. Sport schedules, more sleep, and, yes, the fact that it can be far easier to get away with Chat GPT in an online course top the list of reasons. 

I taught two online high school English courses this past year. These students who registered were from all over the province of Ontario—a big province. I have no academic context for these students, and I rarely, if ever, saw their faces or heard their voices. I had one student who took my course online because he did not speak English, and he admitted he took English online because he used Google Translate to complete every assignment. These were his words, not mine. To clarify, this was a university-English preparatory course. He emailed to ask if he could use ChatGPT and then Google Translate to complete his exam. I answered no, but he did anyway. 

This past year was the first school year in the Ottawa school boards' history, wherein online exams were unproctored. To clarify, in past years, students were supervised in school settings for these online exams. That is impossible now: far too many students are taking online courses, in courses with teachers all over the province. Don’t get me wrong; even in supervised settings, much cheating takes place. I can think of dozens of examples from my own courses. 

My online unproctored exams were a disaster this year. At least one-third of my online eleventh-grade university English course students cheated on their final exam. Many wrote essays—or generated essays—about books they had never read. Chat GPT wrote exam responses for them and, in several instances, wrote entire literary essays for them that included invented novel titles and authors that not only were not course readings but did not exist at all. 

Clearly, there are many problems here. One glaring issue is that many of these students did not see it as cheating. One student cheated her way through the entire course and admitted through email that she had never had to read a book throughout high school and had always maintained A’s in English. This is an email asking for another chance to write an essay ChatGPT wrote for her. She also relayed that throughout high school, she simply looked up book quotations and analyses on the internet when needed. Thus, not only did she not read the texts, but she never had to have a thought about them. Sit with that for a moment. She had an average of eighty-five in high school and rarely had to read or think. All the book summaries and analyses of the texts were splashed all over the internet for her. 

Thus, Google enables students to copy quotations and copy literary analyses. QuillBot.com and Grammarly’s paraphrasing tools rephrase this content. Now, AI can completely generate the content, be it literary essays, paragraph responses, or exam responses. Years ago, some of my students spent more time evading work than they would have actually spent doing it. Now, ChatGPT can perform in ten seconds what had taken me a week to complete thirty years ago in my little library study carrel or what time students have spent doggedly avoiding the task at hand. 

We have come to the end of traditional literary analysis, traditional academia, and, for many, the end of reading and thinking about books. The curriculum will indeed need to be revamped. Again. Teachers cannot teach like they did even two years ago, but they cannot also be expected to spend hours upon hours ad nauseam tracking down the sources of student work. 

Overwhelmed teachers are doing their best to adapt to this new reality. We have sat through workshops on AI and new teaching methods and have been told to embrace chatbots. We are moving back to pen and paper. English classrooms have embraced book club discussion in destreamed grade-nine classrooms in Ontario. (Alas, that is an article for another day.)

Though it has introduced teachers to so much more work, no doubt, ChatGPT and other such tools inevitably have their place in the education system. And, though I often subscribe to Socrates’ paradox that all I know is I know nothing, after thirty years of teaching English, I know a few things. I know that we cannot entirely throw the baby out with the bath water. I know that literature should still be explored. I know that students everywhere must still be encouraged to think and write, but in what ways will and must change.    

I may not be able to instill a love of reading in students the way I imagined after watching Robin Williams in Dead Poets’ Society, but for now, English teachers still have jobs and students must still read and write. Teachers have no choice but to embrace AI and find ways to create new meaningful work inside classrooms everywhere that prepare students for what lies ahead. Just how we do that in this changing landscape when it is hard to predict what lies ahead is the conundrum.