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At the end of a class in mid-September, as everyone was gathering their things, a student named Tyler approached me. “Can we talk sometime about how we can ask the questions on our own?” he said. “We always have you to ask the questions and set up how we’re going to discuss and analyze, but I’d like to know how to do that for myself, for when we don’t have someone else to do it for us.”
Listen to this article, read by Robert Petkoff
I assured Tyler, whose open face under his ball cap bore the look of a guy who hoped he had not somehow offended, that this was a question he absolutely should be asking and that the short answer was yes. I told him to bring it up again at the beginning of our next class, when we could talk about it as a group. This put us a month ahead of schedule in achieving one of my goals in any class I teach: gradually turning over to students the responsibility for defining problems and deciding how to solve them.
I teach English courses at Boston College. I don’t lecture much. Mostly, we engage in conversation, paying attention to one another and to the book we have all read. I don’t teach content so much as a way of coming at things — tools and moves we can use to extract meaning from the world around us and make well-supported arguments about what we find. Class as workshop, not factory. As in a band or team practice, everyone in the room is simultaneously developing their individual chops and participating as a member of a problem-solving community. We practice on novels, poems and other literary artifacts, but the set of skills we’re trying out is basic equipment for living for any citizen or worker, any thinking person. It’s the same tool kit you would use to make sense of a State of the Union address, the state of your neighborhood or the sequence of events that has led you to be sitting in a cubicle or a jail cell.
Tyler and his peers want to be capable humans, independent thinkers. They are not, contrary to widespread belief, universally eager to turn over every last shred of their intellectual and community-building capacity to robot servants/overlords. And as Josie, another student in the class, told me, at least some of them “are not that OK” with peers who rely on A.I. to do their work. This all runs counter to the doomy picture of helplessness painted last spring and summer by well-circulated stories about generative A.I.’s effect on higher education. Everybody’s cheating their way through college. No student is going to read a book or write a paper on their own ever again. It’s the end of the essay, of reading, of thinking.
As professors in the humanities, who were already feeling besieged by a sustained chorus that questions the value of their disciplines, considered these stories and their own encounters with A.I., their unease sharpened into a specific concern about the fall semester. If they kept doing what they normally do, would they be sleepwalking into a minefield? A significant number of them did more thinking about teaching than usual over the summer, when professional scholars typically concentrate on research. As a result, they came into the fall with retooled courses featuring more purposeful approaches to writing and reading, less reliance on technology and a renewed focus on face-to-face community.
