Last December, Moby-Dick made one of my students gasp. It wasn’t the first time this had happened (weird book), but nothing about the text itself produced the response. For the final project in my English class for high-school seniors, where we spend a semester reading Moby-Dick, I assigned a pretty standard eight-to-10-page research paper. One student, interested in finance, saw a connection between the plot and the 2008 financial crisis. He spent weeks thinking about the parallels, trying to find a way to make all of the pieces fit together into a cohesive argument about whaling and the exploitations of global capitalism. On the day before the paper was due, I happened to walk past his computer as he watched ChatGPT perform in 10 seconds what had taken him many hours and many cups of coffee.
Maybe you have also experienced the distinctive blend of emotions elicited by first using ChatGPT—a deflating sense of wonder, a discomfiting awe. I certainly have. Since the emergence of generative AI last year, trying to envision the world we’re rapidly heading toward has been a vertiginous exercise. Coders may be replaced by algorithmically perfected, non-salary-receiving robots. In 2027, your favorite thing to listen to while walking the dog may be AI Taylor Swift giving you personalized affirmations about getting over your ex and moving on with your life.
At the moment, much of that remains in the distance. Meanwhile, teachers like myself are standing at the leading edge of comprehending what our jobs mean now. We have spent the past year feeling stressed, scared, and more than a little bit helpless, commiserating with colleagues over where this is all headed. So much of teaching English has oriented around helping students learn how to write formal, “polished” prose. Now, suddenly, a machine can accomplish that task in seconds. From December onward, I’ve had no way of knowing who (or what) has written what I am grading: 20 percent chatbot? Fifty percent? Not only that, but by the time these young people start careers of their own, they’ll almost certainly have easy access to AI personal assistants that can do their written work for them and predict their needs and desires, all in the name of “efficiency.” What’s the point anymore?
And yet, heading into the first full school year under our new robot overlords, I find myself feeling surprisingly buoyant. Much of what English teachers have been expected to do for decades—make students write essays—is no longer useful. Goodbye and good riddance. But AI cannot tear apart what makes teaching meaningful and potentially life-changing to students: the communal experience of being in a classroom. Starting this year, the center of gravity in my classroom is not teaching writing as an “essential skill” that all students need to master; it’s teaching reading. Last year, I predicted that ChatGPT would mark the end of high-school English. Instead, we might already be witnessing its rebirth.
My profession was already on pretty shaky foundations before the arrival of chatbots. The English major has been declining practically since Robin Williams got down from the desk in Dead Poets Society. Let’s face it: Books just can’t compete with the pinging of your phone. All love to the Brontë sisters, but our dopamine receptors are powerless against the digital deluge that surrounds us. If this is true for those of us who can remember a world before smartphones, imagine what it’s like for today’s American teenager, who must look at a book the way a grizzly looks at a bear box: Something amazing may be in there, but God knows how they’re supposed to get it out.
Still, I’ve had plenty of opportunities to watch students as a book they assumed was impenetrable suddenly opens to them. Grizzly bear, meet peanut-butter cups. Even with SparkNotes and now chatbots, so many high schoolers in my classes have shown the ability to become engaged, incisive readers. If I’m being honest with myself, I’ve had less success with getting them to fall in love with writing. My students are brilliant in all kinds of different ways: They’re dancers and gamers, cooks and climbers, climate activists and fashion designers. There’s no reason to expect them all to be capable of exceptional fiction or poetry or essays. It’s disheartening to find a student so focused on the paper they will have to write when we finish a text, so consumed by anxiety at the prospect of how this essay will affect their chances of getting into college, that they miss out on the experience of reading some great work of art.
When we come to the end of a book in class, the usual high-school thing for me to do is have my students write an essay that will show that they Understand the Material, and that the Learning Objectives Have Been Achieved. For years, I’ve burdened them with a 223-slide presentation outlining the process of writing an academic essay: First you make a claim, then you provide evidence for that claim, then you explain how that evidence does indeed support your claim, then you transition, then you do it again. “This is what you will be expected to do in college,” I’ve told them ominously. I’m no computer scientist, but this process—showing them how to perform a sequence of steps in order to accomplish a specific task—doesn’t seem so different from how large language models have been trained.
By this point, in my 13 years as a teacher, I have graded thousands of essays. This type of writing, I’ve noticed, has a stultifying effect on students: They stop writing the way they would talk and instead try to write the way they think writing is supposed to sound. They repeat the same idea over and over, padding the pages with fluff that sounds fancy but doesn’t actually say anything. This is why most writing is so bad—because so-called polished writing is exceptionally difficult to produce. Many professional writers aren’t even good writers.
Consider this progression: Middle-school students are taught to write the five-paragraph essay so they can write research papers in high school and college; then, as graduate students, publish scholarly articles in academic journals; and finally, doctorate in hand, write a monograph on their way to a tenured position at a prestigious university. I’m sure it goes entirely without saying that this is an antiquated notion of education, and an antiquated notion of writing. Nevertheless, English teachers have sat with untold students dutifully training them in the strictures and forms we’ve received as our intellectual inheritance, with little justification aside from This is what we’ve always done.
So this year, my English class will look something like a book club. We’ll read texts and then discuss them, with all the inevitable consonance and contradictions that come from different viewpoints. I’ll focus on extemporaneous writing in the classroom, not the polished essays that students have long been expected to know how to execute. Instead of an eight-to-10-page paper on Moby-Dick, my students will respond to prompts in a spiral notebook; after a couple of weeks, they’ll take that writing and turn it into something to submit. They will be graded, of course, but not on whether the end product conforms to any standardized ideas about academic writing. If the conclusion doesn’t reiterate what was expressed in the introduction, that’s okay.
This is the sort of writing that helps students discover their own mind rather than a clever insight into a Miltonic simile. The beauty of reading James Baldwin is not being able to neatly pin his arguments to the wall like perfectly preserved butterflies; it’s about accessing how his writing remains fiercely alive in 2023. Whatever ChatGPT can say or do about a text, it cannot tell us what it’s like to be a person experiencing that text, how it connects to their specific ideas, background, and beliefs. And here’s the thing: Every student is good at this sort of writing. Well, they’re not all great at actually doing it; some of them prefer to write the bare minimum (a sentence or two) and call it done. But when they do do it, they express themselves clearly and effectively, just like they would if you asked them something via text message. After all, it’s possible that the average American teenager in 2023 does more writing, and is more defined by that writing (text messages, Instagram posts), than any generation before them.
None of these things is rocket science; teachers have been doing this sort of imaginative work for decades but have always been crowded for space because of the imperatives of the academic essay. I’m in a privileged position, at an independent school shielded from the burdens and predations teachers are experiencing around the country, but there’s no doubt that the paradigm shift is coming for all of us. Reckoning with the existence of generative AI may require an absolute transformation in education policy at all levels, and that’s unlikely to happen quickly. The unsettling truth about AI is that it’s virtually impossible to know how fast things are going to move, and I can’t guarantee that down the line students won’t run into college professors still assigning the academic essay as if nothing has changed.
Overwhelmed teachers will do their best to adapt to this new reality despite scarce resources or guidance; others will be prevented from doing so by sclerotic standards and mandates. Students, as ever, will question the efficacy of what they’re being asked to do, and find both wonderfully sophisticated and hilariously boneheaded ways to cheat. Still, the uncertainty that ChatGPT has introduced to all work outside the classroom gives teachers chances for meaningful work inside the classroom. Even in our chatbot world, my students can’t escape Moby-Dick. We will discuss the chapter in which a sailor cuts off a whale’s foreskin and wears it as a cloak, and the part where Herman Melville says that human beings are unable to encounter ultimate reality, but giant salamanders have no trouble at all. There are, after all, still lots of opportunities for Moby-Dick to make a student gasp.
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