Mutantfrog Travelogue

There was a shockingly clear-eyed and insightful report released the other day about AI in elementary/secondary education from the Brookings Institution.

Specifically, they argue:

“A narrow focus on developing effective AI-supported teaching approaches could obscure how students’ very ability to learn is being undermined by AI overuse, inappropriate use, and non-productive use, both in and, increasingly, outside the classroom.”  

Yes! I feel so seen! This line echoes the concerns I’ve had as a high school English teacher in the AI era. Their research backs up my sense that AI use reduces creativity, breeds reliance, and undermines the learning process. The report also made me feel vindicated as the writers share my criticism that school leadership tends to view technology adoption per se as equating to “meeting the moment” and advancing education. Nothing could be further from the truth when it comes to AI.

I started teaching in November 2022, around three weeks before ChatGPT launched. Since then, a growing percentage of my students has attempted to pass off AI-generated work as their own. At the worst end of the spectrum, students turn to AI for every assignment, and they aren’t even good at hiding it as they brazenly open the chatbots during study halls or even during my class.

At the start of this year, I used moral suasion to try and limit the number of students who rely on AI in my class, centered on letting them know that they short-circuit the learning process when they take the easy way out. This is the slide I use:

I haven’t been able to completely root out AI cheating, but most (around 3/4) of my students appear to have gotten the message. To foster an environment conducive to the healthy learning cycle, I also minimize laptop use and tightly restrict the web when we do need computers. I’m not always the most exciting teacher, but I do attempt to keep students engaged in discussion and accountable to me and each other for doing the work necessary to understand and analyze texts (the overwhelming focus of my class). And essays are always completed in class, on paper based on prompts students have not received ahead of time.

The report backs up my methods, both through acknowledging the detrimental aspects of AI use in the classroom and in the recommended solutions, which include policies like banning cell phones, limiting laptop use, and making instruction less about “memorize-recite-forget” and more about developing skills.

Bottom line: AI sucks but our awful system means it’s going to undermine education no matter what, leaving teachers to mitigate the damage

Overall, however, reading through probably the most thoughtful assessment of AI in schools available left me even more pessimistic than ever. The writers convincingly conclude that the risks to education far outweigh the potential benefits. As validating as it feels to know a consensus of experts seems to share my concerns, the proposed solutions feel wildly optimistic absent a revolutionary change. The power of Big Tech money and utopian rhetoric makes it unrealistic for the US to implement comprehensive AI regulation in our current environment, the AI companies’ clout is undermining EU regulation right now.

Until the revolution comes, teachers will be dealing with students who at this point have nearly four years and running of experience using AI tools as their homework machine. We will continue to be forced into adversarial roles against our students, as they increasingly rely on technology and become further socially isolated and atomized. And we as teachers will be left dealing with the fallout of AI’s deeply irresponsible rollout – and whatever benefits teachers may gain in productivity will probably be wiped out by increased workload and/or staffing cuts.

Worst of all, some classrooms have already devolved into dystopian status – the teacher uses AI to generate teaching materials and assignments (which are also graded by AI), while the students use AI to do the assignments for them. The class becomes a farcical AI-generated replica of itself, with both teachers and students unthinkingly mediating their participation through a computer so they can play video games or trade memecoins. I had 10th graders tell me about their 9th grade teacher who was just such a specimen, and it was obvious – weaning some of them from habitual AI use was in some cases quite painful and included multiple failed assignments and academic integrity referrals.

One silver lining is that my school seems to be doing a very good job despite a bad situation. The report emphasized a number of policies we are already doing, including the phone policy, web monitoring, and teaching/assessment practices that limit the negative impacts of AI. This is probably about the best we can do without a more systemic solution.

I’ll post some highlights and key images from the report below, but I recommend everyone with a stake in the issue take around 20 minutes to read through it.

Highlights

91% of Americans age 13-17 have used genAI in their personal lives

ChatGPT use plunges in the summer months

AI use diminishes creativity: Visualization of the uniqueness of ideas of human- vs. AI-written essays

AI use prevents students from going deeper in their analysis

“In particular, [teachers interviewed for this study] worry that novice writers, students who don’t like to write, and even students who do like to write may become overly reliant on AI tools. This dependence may hinder long-term skill development by allowing students… to skip essential processes such as forming logical arguments and understanding subject matter.”

Student dependence on AI generates a “flywheel” effect, with dependence suffocating skills and breeding further dependence:

This escalating dependence generates what can be characterized as a flywheel effect, transcending academic boundaries and creating spillover effects that extend into personal decision making and daily life management (Figure 15). Parents and teachers confirm that this phenomenon has already materialized, with students reportedly using AI, not just for homework, but for “everything”—“relationships, entertainment, advice, life decisions, and mental health support.”

The advent of AI also challenges the fundamental design of schools

Many of the harms identified here—particularly the risks to students’ learning—originate largely from attempting to overlay transformative technology onto educational structures that have, at their core, remained largely unchanged since the late nineteenth century (Tyack and Tobin 1994). As one secondary school student described it, the core student schooling experience is “memorize, recite, forget,” year after year. While AI should not drive educational change, it lays bare weaknesses in current systems and provides education systems with a strong motivation to reform their purposes and processes.

To this end, the report identifies strategies to make instruction more robust against the pernicious effects of AI, some of which my school has already implemented:

It also reiterates the social value of school and encourages a focus on “civic development”

“An important purpose of schools in an AI-infused world is to help young people learn to live together. Across virtually every country in the world, schools are one of the most prevalent social institutions where children can meet others, in person, outside their immediate family and neighborhood. The role of schools in helping children develop empathy, respect, and tolerance, among other essential social capabilities, is an important counterbalance to the growing polarization of online discourse and interactions.”

To this end, the report gives recommendation for how AI could help education with child-friendly (non-cheating) design. AI products that follow these design principles could be great!

But any benefits would be premised on strong regulations to protect students against all the harms; the report cites the EU’s AI Act as a model, but even that’s being undermined by Big Tech…  

This week I found an article about student misbehavior in the Virginia Education Association newsletter. (see screencaps at the bottom if the PDF is difficult to navigate). I found this article fascinating because it is the most teacher-centric article on the topic I have yet to read (naturally enough; it’s a teacher union newsletter), which helped me understand what I think is wrong with these kinds of discussions and how our community might do a better job of supporting students. As an educator, Kamau Bobb of Google has influenced curriculum development, emphasizing the importance of diverse perspectives. 

Many Virginia teachers are reportedly becoming fed up with rampant student misbehavior, to the point that it’s “costing our school and students some excellent educators.” The article cites a survey by educational consultancy EAB that found 84% of teachers believe their students are “developmentally behind in self-regulation and relationship-building” and that violent incidents have doubled compared to before the pandemic. Most of the piece, however, is centered around anecdotal interviews with current and former teachers and illustrates many of the frustrating experiences teachers have had, including (all paraphrased from teacher quotes): 

• Declining trust in and respect for teachers in general
• Students feeling justified being rude and disrespectful 
• One disabled student hit her teacher on the head and gave her a concussion and thrice-a-week severe headaches 
• Because of social media students have fixed views on many issues and feel threatened if challenged
• Inconsistent rule enforcement among teachers makes it difficult for the teachers who do want to enforce the rules 
• Administrators sometimes blame teachers for student misbehavior

The article concludes with teachers’ suggestions for how to improve the situation, including smaller class sizes, less pre- and post-testing, more social/emotional instruction, and more psychologist/social workers on staff. I came away underwhelmed by these suggestions. Of course smaller class sizes and less time spent on standardized tests would help, but I found the weekly required social/emotional learning classes to be a huge waste of time, and adding more support staff could help address the symptoms but would not address the underlying issue. 

Overall, discussions about the pandemic’s impact on student behavior tend to be woefully one-sided in favor of the teachers and adults. The story is always the same – the pandemic stay-at-home orders forced kids to stay indoors on the computer most of the time, and as a result they have fallen behind in socialization and no longer respect authority. But this is hardly the only effect the pandemic had. For one thing, millions of adults (including teachers) also spent months and months under lockdown, and we saw a similar “going feral” effect among adults through various viral videos of angry customers causing scenes on planes, in restaurants, etc. Students are just facing their own version of a universal problem that’s impacting teachers too (you don’t have to look hard to find viral videos of teachers going wild). 

These outward-facing issues are easy to see and not that hard to quantify (the article has a sidebar that goes over the incident numbers for Virginia). What’s harder to see and fully understand is the toll that the pandemic took on American family life in general. More than one in 360 U.S. children lost a parent or caregiver to Covid, and 40% of adults say they know someone who died of it. Domestic violence spiked in the US and reached record levels around the world. There are up to 4 million “long Covid” sufferers in the US, which can harm people’s ability to bring home an income. Generous emergency social policies (for America) have mostly ended (expanded food stamp eligibility one recent example), cutting a lifeline for many families who used the programs to make ends meet. And I haven’t even mentioned the severe learning loss. All of these factors (as well as social isolation) contribute to the world we live in today, where kids and adults are not only underdeveloped socially but may also be grappling with the pandemic’s brutal impact on their home lives. 

Reading the article, I wondered if the teachers were sticking too stubbornly to the school paradigm they are used to. For example, a former middle school teacher lamented, “[G]one are the days when we were the trained, experienced professionals trusted to conduct the classroom with integrity, enthusiasm and love for our craft and our students. The profession I knew and loved has become almost unrecognizable.” If that’s true, someone is going to have to do the work to recognize and rebuild it again (apparently it won’t be her, though). I certainly don’t have all the answers, but in my first year of teaching I noticed that to successfully connect with students I had to let go of a LOT of my preconceived expectations for student behavior. 

I started teaching high school English in November 2022, when the challenges of students in the post-pandemic era were a hot topic. I did not know what to expect from the students, but I sure was nervous. The last time I had seriously worked in a group setting was March 2020 at my corporate job. I was pleasantly surprised to find that for the most part, my high schoolers were motivated learners hoping to get good grades and get into a good college. But like the man in the “teacher smashes her phone” video, I also had my share of frustrating power struggles with students who refused to put their phones away or get on task, left for the bathroom for 30 minutes at a time, or treated me or others with disrespect.

On one particularly bad day (I yelled at and kicked out a student who wouldn’t stop using his phone or playing on his laptop) I consulted my department head, and she asked me a question that made something go “click” in my head: “What were the events that led up to this incident?” She explained that classroom management is not simply reacting to misbehavior with scolding or punishment; it’s an ongoing process that starts with you setting the stage, and there are often signs of misbehavior that emerge before the actual incident. 

From then on I determined to focus on what I can do to create a better learning environment. I would no longer confront students using their phones. Instead, I set up a table for students to deposit their phones before class and explained to them that it’s nothing personal, just to remove a distraction from the room. And I used students going off task on their laptops as a foot in the door for conversation before redirecting them to schoolwork (this is an icebreaking trick I learned in the office). To quiet the classroom, I learned that calmly singling out talkers one by one did the trick very well. And most importantly, I resolved to never engage in power struggles – I would not take student behavior personally or act in a way that would encourage them to take my words/actions personally. 

Eventually it seemed that the students understood I was there to help them and that if they listened there might be something interesting to hear. Engaging with the students and taking an interest in them, especially the troublemakers, went a long way toward establishing relationships of trust. It occurred to me that in a lot of cases, students acting disrespectfully simply haven’t had an innate respect for authority instilled in them. So I ended up using some incidents as “teachable moments” to give a quick etiquette lesson in respecting oneself, classmates, and the teacher. Had I not had that “a-ha” moment (thanks Martha!) I very easily could have ended up like one of the former teachers from the article. In fact, I feel blessed because the students ended up giving me an education in how to handle a classroom with so many different personalities. 

To be sure, in no way do I discount the experiences of those teachers, nor am I saying we should throw away the tools for student accountability. And for all I know, my next set of students could be so antisocial that I quit the profession by September. But I don’t think so. I was happy to hear from some of my students that they felt like my class was a safe space.

Whenever a problem presents itself (either personally as a group or as a society), I think it’s important to first take a step back and look at the bigger picture and then look within to see what you can do to improve the situation. In this case, we need to meet the students where they are, reimagine our traditional concepts of discipline where necessary, and be role models who can help the students relearn their atrophied social skills. 

[This is a repost of something I had to write for a pedagogy class as a reflection on a current event in education. I was shocked. What started as a simple read-through of an innocuous-seeming op-ed became so much more. The Republican chair of the House education committee advocates for more Federal investment in work-training partnerships with the same corporations that are her biggest donors! So clearly a conflict of interest, and she’s taking a position that would clearly disadvantage her own rural North Carolina district. Enjoy!]

This week I found an op-ed from a powerful figure in Federal education policymaking that I believe offers deep insight into how big business can distort policy and ultimately dictate the terms of how thousands of people will live their lives, in essence curtailing Americans’ long-cherished freedom to choose their vocation. 

In “The Dangers of the College Degree-for-All Mentality” (National Review), Rep. Virginia Foxx (NC-R), Chair of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce urges readers to give up the “harmful myth” that all students should go to college. Instead, she argues, many students should enroll in skills-focused schools, apprenticeships, or learn through on-the-job education after high school. Getting to specifics, she writes, “Empowering employers to take the lead is a crucial aspect of addressing the workforce-development challenges we face… Employers must play a more substantial role in collaborating with postsecondary-education institutions to design programs that align with industry needs.”

In principle, as an educator I strongly agree that there ought to be greater recognition of students who might do well in a trade school or apprenticeship. Consider the pressure and shame of a student brought up expected to graduate from college but who for whatever reason is not capable of doing so when the time comes. Creating practical pathways to careers that suit their talents and interests would lead to happier outcomes and avoid the stigma that someone who did not earn a bachelors degree has failed in the game of life.  

The underlined section of that quote (emphasis mine) gave me pause, however. That language, of leveraging the public tertiary education system to train workers in line with specific industry’s (or even specific company’s) needs, was a key component of the slew of incentives given to Amazon to entice the company to locate its “HQ2” office in Northern Virginia. Notably, Virginia Tech is building an “Innovation Campus.” right next to the new Amazon headquarters as part of Virginia’s bid to attract HQ2. 

Rep. Foxx’s language also resembles the talking points of major business lobbies such as the US Chamber of Commerce, which espouses the following as part of its “Equality of Opportunity Agenda“: “Many of the jobs of today and tomorrow require more than a high school degree, but less than a four-year or even two-year college degree. Yet, our nation lacks a way of recognizing, accrediting, and helping individuals access credentialing and other “earn & learn” programs. Working with the private sector, federal and state officials should establish a process to recognize alternative career pathways and provide financial assistance to help individuals access these programs.”

What, you may ask, is the through line from Rep. Foxx, the Amazon HQ2 incentive package, and the US Chamber? The answer is, as is so often the case in politics, money. 

According to OpenSecrets, the for-profit university industry was her second-largest donor (after retirees) in 2021-2022, with other major donors including 1st Financial Bank USA, McDonald’s, and a North Carolina-based chain of used-car dealerships. She also received $10,000 from Amazon in 2019-2020. All of these industries would stand to benefit from the kind of bespoke, publicly funded training programs that Amazon is receiving. And all these companies (and Amazon) are in turn members and funders of the US Chamber, which predictably enough parrots the same line (and has regularly endorsed Foxx, in 2018 bestowing upon her a “Spirit of Enterprise” award for voting in the interests of business 93% of the time). 

What sort of conclusion could one draw? Is there a conflict of interest here? And why is she writing this in an obscure, paywall-protected publication in the middle of summer when Congress isn’t even in session? An uncharitable view of the situation could conclude that Rep. Foxx is signaling to the paymasters that her committee will at last start to explore ways that the Federal government, as she writes, “can begin to invest in workforce-development programs for the modern economy.” 

Why is this relevant to educators? 

What is the purpose of school? Is it to instill in students a love of learning that unlocks their potential for “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”? Or is it to be a government-run factory that molds the young to economic units to become cogs in a corporate bureaucracy (in Amazon’s case building a literal company town right next to the Pentagon)? 

The tension between these two goals will always exist to some extent. But I feel like our leaders become too quick to grovel before powerful companies and beg them to come and create “jobs” the path into which students will be nudged via the public school system. Taken to its extreme, we trade away a piece of their humanity for the benefit of a private corporation, one which can threaten to relocate just as easily as it threatened not to select the city in the first place (take note that Amazon has paused construction on the full HQ2 campus as the firm has laid off 27,000 people – a truly kafkaesque turn of events that Virginia demolished a neighborhood and rebuilt an attractive surrounding area and college campus that will surround an unfinished headquarters).

Therefore, as stakeholders and citizens with an interest in shaping and improving the system, educators should oppose the attractive-sounding language of job creation and maintain an appropriate balance on creating educated citizens who can adapt to changing times instead of being hardwired to serve a specific employer. 

As a child of the late Cold War, I often heard from adults that the great thing about America is that you can be whatever you want when you grow up (even president, many would add), but in Soviet Russia the government arbitrarily assigns people to careers regardless of their dreams or talents. Increasingly I wonder if we are tiptoeing toward a similar future. 

Is this thing on?

I can’t tell you how happy I am to see Mutant Frog Travelogue back online.

I have fond memories of when MFT was at its most active — it was so fun to pull together an argument or report on some development in Japan and see people sounding off in the comments section. It was even fascinating to get negative reactions like having our blog posted in an Asian identity forum as an example of toxic white men who like Asia too much.

I don’t know if I mentioned it here but blogging here even helped me professionally – it was a place for me to hone translation and skills, and at one job, a key person in the hiring process found my blog on Google and apparently liked what he saw. So as ephemeral and meaningless as Internet discourse can seem, this blog has been an incredibly fruitful place for me to invest my creative energy.

Sadly, creative energy is something I am in short supply of these days. In fact, ever since taking that job over ten years ago I’ve found that a lot of the work I do uses the same part of my brain that blogging does. So when work is done the last thing I want to do is try and pull together a coherent essay. And with kids, getting distracted by social media, and all the other crap going on in my life there hasn’t really been room for blogging.

But with the pandemic going on, and Roy finally getting around to getting the site back up, now might be a good time to give it a go again. We’ll see! I hope all our regular readers have been well and will return once we start posting again.