Why I Don't Use AI To Respond To Student Writing

Teacher / Poet #46

Why I Don’t Use AI to Respond to Student Writing

“[AI] just helps create less burnout for teachers and makes your job feel more manageable…I was definitely one of those teachers who would grade on the weekend and after school for hours and I have realized that’s no longer tenable as life goes on and I have other priorities outside of work.”

-from Education Week, February 14, 2025, “A high school English teacher uses AI to provide students with personalized feedback”

---

I’m not currently using AI to respond to student writing that I assign. I also make no judgments about teachers like the one I quoted above, who do use that technology. Most of these folks have far heavier student workloads than I do. In public schools in this country, English teachers often serve between 150 and 180 students per year, five or six sections of students, with multiple courses to prepare.

That workload is neither sane, healthy, nor “tenable” to quote the teacher above. It is no wonder teachers have turned to machines to respond to their students.

But I must also insist: responding to student writing is an essential part of teaching. (In my view, it is at the heart of being a reading and writing teacher.) When we accept the lie that a machine can respond as well as a human teacher, we reduce the unique and distinctive value of what that human teacher does. I don’t accept that reduction. I would prefer to ask myself another question, and would suggest that others with power in the schools and districts of this country ask it of themselves as well.

Namely, if a piece of writing that we assign as teachers can be responded to by a machine wouldn’t that suggest that there is something about the writing task itself that needs to be re-examined?

For instance, in AP English courses which I teach, students taking the high-stakes end-of-course exam are required to respond to excerpts from novels and short stories and poems by writers they have often never heard of. They get 40 minutes to read these pieces totally out of context and then write essays on the sparse prompts provided them by the College Board. The essays–though I hesitate to call them that, true essays are explorations, experiments, but how much experimenting and exploring can you do in that severe a constraint?--are then “scored” on discrete categories: “Thesis,” “evidence and commentary,” and “sophistication.” The rubric, like the prompt, which is used in multiple humanities exams, has been created and branded by the College Board.

These are students at the end of their high school journey–usually 12th graders–and often they are taking the most “advanced” literature class on offer. And the writing task we assign them at the end of the course is so artificial and regimented a machine could certainly respond to and ‘score’ it. (And has. I’ve plugged in a number of AP English prompts into ChatGPT and seen it churn out fluent and ‘high scoring’ essays. And other teachers have plugged in the rubrics and seen the machine score student essays as well.)

Because I teach AP English classes, I do spend class time giving students practice “timed writes” (of 40 minutes) because I want them to be prepared for the exam that they too will take at the end of the year. And I do read and respond to the essays, scoring them as well with my own fallible human brain. And I do find myself repeating some of the same comments as I score them on the pre-fabricated rubric I’ve been given by the College Board.

I feel more than a little hypocritical as a teacher doing this.

For a large part of the year, the majority of writing tasks the students do in my class are creative in nature: they write flash fiction, tons of poems, produce a script and film it, act in a scene. And in each of these assignments, they reflect on the process of their creation. They read and interpret a ton of writing in those genres as well, and write letters to each other, to other students, and to living artists as well. Analysis and student-led discussion is always an essential part of the mix.

Can you imagine plugging creative assignments like these into a machine to give students feedback?

But as we get closer to the AP test date, and students express anxiety about preparedness, and I consider my own professional responsibilities, the class invariably tends to have whole parts of the course that are essentially ‘test prep.’ This aspect, more than bringing piles of papers home to grade (which I gave up long ago), is the most ‘untenable’ part of contemporary English teaching: to do the job that I’m paid to do, to meet my own professional responsibilities, I feel I must spend time on things that I don’t think really serve students.

A fellow English teacher I admire, Marcus Luther, who co-hosts a podcast

The Broken Copier

, likes to say that “teachers can walk and chew gum at the same time.” With that apt and homely image, I understand Luther to mean that we can simultaneously work within a very poorly designed system and at the same time propose meaningful changes of that system. Because without systemic change, the meaningful individual choices teachers make in the classroom–especially those related to AI–will have very limited impact.

Speaking of meaningful changes proposed by English teachers, did you know that in 1990, the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) did extensive research on class size and workload for English language arts teachers, and recommended that “schools, districts and states adopt plans and implement activities resulting in class sizes of not more than 20 and a workload of not more than 80 for English language arts teachers by the year 2000”?

In that position paper, the NCTE authors cite Theodore Sizer, founder of the Essential Schools movement, who wrote, “High schools exist to develop students’ powers of thought, taste, and judgment…to help them with these uses of their minds. Such undertakings cannot be factory-wrought, for young people grow in idiosyncratic, variable ways, often unpredictably.”

Of course, most people know that the recommendations of the NCTE and Sizer’s wisdom were largely ignored by schools and school administrators across the United States. And so teachers, and specifically English language arts teachers, burdened with untenable workloads, are now uniquely vulnerable to offerings by for profit companies like ChatGPT, Gemini, Brisk, MagicSchool, etc.

Please, let’s not pretend this is a benefit to teachers, or to students.

Districts and schools will doubtless be pouring money into “integrating” AI into classrooms, and soon encouraging teachers to use the technology to ‘save time’ for the things that they “really care about” when it comes to teaching. Meanwhile, the actual material conditions of the individual teacher’s situation–which is nowhere near what NCTE recommended 35 years ago–remain the same. Too much work to do; not enough time to do it.

Rather than simply lament and critique a bad status quo, Theodore Sizer, who I quoted above, started the Coalition of Essential Schools, a network of at its height more than 600 schools. These Coalition schools embodied fostering the “unique, idiosyncratic, and unpredictable” gifts of young people by giving more power to students and teachers. I know, I know, it’s a pretty revolutionary idea: but what if teachers and students themselves were involved in making key decisions which they were intimately affected by?

The Coalition’s closing in 2017, paired with the top-down management of so many schools in the wake of national initiatives like No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, and the Common Core, left a gap for students and educators hungering for communities of learning where power and agency are genuinely shared. Or, to use the language of another education activist Alfie Kohn, where “progressive education” values are actually put into practice, not just lines of copy on a school or district’s website.

Others have taken up Sizer’s mantle. Teacher-Powered Schools, a network of “equitable, student-centered schools that share power among students, families, and the full educator team” launched in 2014, and now has 250 schools in its network. I have no idea if the network has an “official policy” on AI. I looked for one briefly and couldn’t find one. I doubt it exists. In fact, I would expect that many educators, parents, and students within schools in that network would argue with points big and small in this essay I’ve written.

And that is a good thing. And the model of this particular kind of school is such that these human beings–the teachers, the students, the parents–come to the table together and talk through a plan for the school community together. But, by and large in this country, that is not how school and schooling works.

Another English teacher I admire, Annie Abrams, who also doesn’t seem to have a problem “walking and chewing gum at the same time,” in her brilliant book Shortchanged: How Advanced Placement Cheats Students, points out that when the original founders of the College Board’s Advanced Placement program met to to hash out the formation of those offerings, one of their primary concerns about the courses was that they not be overly prescribed or standardized. That the courses be authentic experiences of a truly liberal education, in the best sense of that term. But, of course as the years have progressed, AP as a brand (and an experience for teachers) has become progressively more and more prescribed and standardized. And I would argue (as Abrams does extensively) that the positive and beneficial experiences that happen in your average “AP classroom” throughout the United States happen in spite of the College Board, not because of it.

In other words: when thoughtful and motivated young people work with a thoughtful and motivated teacher, and then read and study good books, and discuss them, and write about them, learning happens. You don’t need a multi-billion dollar “non-profit” like the College Board to ensure that learning, nor a suite of standardized tests to measure it.

I have unapologetically cited the work of “unschooling” writers like

Peter Gray

, Susan Debra Blum, and Akilah S. Richards on this platform. I do so because their scholarship underlines and illustrates a fact that so many of us educators forget: schooling is not the same thing as learning. Some of us, having learned this truth in our bones, may choose to do the countercultural and subversive work that Gray and Richards do–creating and supporting alternative spaces that run radically against the grain of contemporary education. Others of us, like Blum, and Coalition of Essential Schools in the past, and Teacher-Powered Schools, try to make a dehumanizing system a little more human.

A little more human. That phrase calls to mind another life-giving organization in this landscape–the Human Restoration Project, a non-profit started by two public school teachers Nick Covington and Chris McNutt in 2020 with the aim of “informing, guiding, and growing a movement toward a progressive, human-centered education system.” Human Restoration Project works with educators, administrators and schools across the country to implement systems-based changes in schools. Among the 20 systems identified by HRP include: creating cross-disciplinary multi-age classrooms, utilizing restorative justice, supporting and elevating teachers, encouraging the self-directing of learning, redefining assessment and testing, and radically reducing homework.

HRP states that, “In a systems-based approach to change within educational settings, the focus shifts from blaming individuals—like educators, administrators, and students—for problems, to identifying and addressing the underlying systemic issues. This perspective advocates for reimagining schools by modifying root causes and structures that contribute to challenges, thereby fostering an environment where all members can thrive without being singled out as the problem.”

I recently listened to one of these co-founders of HRP, Nick Covington, speak of his own tumultuous final years in the classroom on a podcast interview with Marcus Luther’s The Broken Copier. Covington left teaching in 2022 after 10 years as a high school social studies teacher. In his final year in the classroom, his home state, Iowa passed a “divisive concepts” law that was aimed to curb teaching on topics like race and gender. For Covington, this meant, in practice, administrative censorship of his social studies courses, which considered current events like the “Unite the Right” march in Charlottesville, among other things. (At one point an administrator told Covington, “Current events don’t belong in the social studies classroom.)

Listening to Covington tell this story–and you can hear the emotion in his voice now, even three years later after he has left–it makes me angry that a teacher as good as Nick was pushed out of the classroom by a dehumanizing system.

But “pushed out” is not quite right, either, though. As Covington notes, he and McNutt had started Human Restoration Project while they were both still in the classroom, and as Covington was going through his final year, and being surveilled by administrators, HRP was given a grant that would allow him to make the leap to do the work he continues to do to this day. His witness in the classroom and now out of it gives me hope for the future, uncertain as it is.

You may remember that I started this essay with a very simple statement: I’m not currently using AI to respond to student writing. It’s my view that this technology is ripe for mis-use, and without schools considering the other many dehumanizing systems at play within their communities, will only exacerbate a transactional view of learning. We don’t need that right now.

So that’s my one small contribution today towards greater humanity in the educational system. What’s yours, dear reader?

---

Notes:

-Thank you,

John Warner

for pointing me to the 1990 NCTE position paper on class size and teacher workload. Reader, if you have not checked out Warner’s brilliant book on AI, More Than Words, please do so.

-For those interested in non-standardized ways to get students to creatively engage with literary analysis, you might be interested in the essay I wrote a few months back, “A Modest Proposal,” on the benefits of letter-writing in the classroom. And on a practical note, a good letter assignment for students you actually know has the benefit of being almost AI-proof.

-As I was finishing edits and final revisions to this piece, I came upon Cassandra Nelson’s brilliant and wise essay, “Who’s Afraid of the Still, Small Voice” at Common Good Magazine: “An attempt, necessarily partial and incomplete, to understand how most of the fun and many of the people have been squeezed out of education, and whether these might in fact amount to the same thing.” She emphasizes the importance of relationships and humanity as vital to any school community flourishing. Her work and voice matter, and I highly recommend this piece and all of her writing.

-Especially for the teachers, administrators, and (college) students who are reading this Substack: what are your thoughts on the issues surrounding AI and schools?