Hello, friends!
Another busy week of school with bullshit sprinkled throughout. Now it’s a much-needed three-day weekend and I got my flu shot and new Covid vaccine so I’m good to go.
Welcome to the 91st installment of Gauthic Times, the newsletter about my writing, my life, and more thoughts on AI.
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You can also get my collection Catalysts or my novellas Alice on the Shelf and Shadowed.
Anyway, let’s do this!
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Project: Amusement Park saw me get to page 172 last night. I’m out of 1985 and back into 2024. At the end of the 1985 segment, something happened that I realized I could tie into another character that I hadn’t thought of as I wrote the first draft, so I got excited by that. The work carries on and so do I.
In other writing-related stuff, I just ordered another batch of bookmarks for the next event. Hopefully they’ll be in on time.
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I was at a meeting this week during an in-service with my colleagues in the vocational-technical program I teach in. It’s an arts and communications program and because it is a new program comprised of two older programs, there’s a lot of teachers and personalities. During our meeting, the use of AI to help generate some of the writing needed for some course stuff we were working on was suggested.
And that’s when it started.
Two or three people apologized to me for using ChatGPT or Gemini to write whatever things for lesson plans or whathaveyou.
Apologizing. To me.
I have become the poster boy for the anti-AI movement in my program, I guess. For good reason, I think, considering AI, by its very nature, plagiarizes other people’s works and since we’re supposed to be creative, maybe we should stay away from it. That said, I have copped (right here in these updates) to using AI to help generate rubrics and even portions of lesson plans (more the former than the latter). I didn’t feel like bringing it up because I have before but people remember what they want.
The thing is, there’s no need to apologize to me.
The use of AI to help align things like lesson plans with frameworks certainly helps the process. It can take a lot of time going through frameworks and see what you can pull for your projects. It is much easier to type in a few keywords and then proofread and revise what the computer vomits back up. And if you’re going to revise it and fix it, I guess that’s okay. But…it kind of misses the point. I also have a couple of ethical issues with it. And not the ones you may think.
First, ethically, we want our students to learn. We want our students to do the work. I think every teacher sitting at that table the other day agrees with that. But teachers shouldn’t be willing to put in the same work to create the lesson plans? Teachers borrowing lesson plans and revising them have always been a thing, and that’s cool. But some of the other things I see…I’m not so sure. But, again, it’s an easy tool to use and, in the right hands, is simply that, a tool. This leads to my other dilemma.
Why are various administrations and departments of education pushing AI so much? Well, part of that has, no doubt, to do with money. Companies make a ton from coming up with new initiatives and going to schools to sell them. I feel like there’s something else, though, too. Why would administrations across the United States care so much about teachers having more time on their hands? That’s the biggest argument I see. “Use AI and you’ll have more time.” That begs the question: More time for what? Are you suddenly going to start caring about teachers’ mental health? Giving them more time to relax? Doubtful. More time to cover other classes. More time to do more bullshit paperwork for bullshit initiatives that’ll just change at some point in the future when new buzzwords, acronyms, and initiatives come to pass.
Yeah, I’m not sure. I will probably continue making basic rubrics that I can then go and modify on my own because that’s always been a weakness, but I sense that with each new rubric I have AI make, I’m learning better to make my own. This means that I won’t have to use it to make my rubrics at some point.
By then, though, it won’t matter, because almost everything will be AI generated. So much so that maybe licensed teachers won’t be needed, just people who can deliver content. And when that happens, it’ll be because of all the things we teachers plugged into the AIs to help us have more time.
Yeah, don’t apologize to me. Apologize to yourself. You’re only making the anti-education folks’ jobs easier.
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October 26th is going to ROCK!
I’ll be appearing with Paul Tremblay, Greg F. Gifune, Maureen Boyle, Kathleen Brunelle, Christa Carmen, and Derek Mola at the Barnes & Noble in Wareham, Massachusetts, as part of a Halloween Horror and True Crime event!
Space is limited so make sure to reserve a spot at 774-667-0282.
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Gautham: Bill Gauthier.com 
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