Hello, friends! Is it possible to clench your jaw so hard that it snaps off, flying across the room and hitting someone in the forehead? I’m asking, as the kids say, for a friend.

The sun is shining on this mid-March Saturday, the sound (noise) of children playing outside is coming through the sliding glass door, and I’m here to say “hey” to you, my faithful readers.

Hey.

Welcome to the 62nd installment of Gauthic Times, the newsletter about my writing, my life, and my feelings on AI in education.

You’re probably sitting there wondering how you can get me to write more. It’s a question that keeps you up at night. I get it.

Well, becoming a Patron on my Patreon, where I write about things in more detail than I do in the newsletter or on my website, including the actual names of my works-in-progress and not just codenames, would certainly help. The lowest tier for Patreon is $1. Check it out: if every social media follower I had did the $1 tier, I could write more and pay my bills better. The same would happen if they bought copies of my books.

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Echoes on the Pond is out now! Grab a copy, if you haven’t already. If you have bought it already, books make great gifts! And if you’ve read Echoes on the Pond, I’d also really love (and appreciate) it if you’d leave a nice review on Amazon or Goodreads.

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: MG Space Adventure I has been my main focus for this week. Beginning last Sunday, I’ve gone through half the book. There’s twenty less words than when I started with the tightening up, polishing, and minor revising.

I call the book a middle grade space adventure because it’s a kids’ book, aimed at the 8-12 age group though I am told adults can enjoy it, too. At about 131 pages, or around 30,200 words, the book is very slim compared to the adult horror novels I write. That said, it still hits me emotionally at times.

I refer to it as a “space adventure” instead of a “science fiction” novel because there’s not tons of science in this fiction. It’s really an adventure on another planet with science fiction motifs, like a crashed spaceship, an alien race, and a robot friend. It’s friggin’ fun.

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“Hey! Have youse guys tried out the new AI stuff?”

The teacher from another vocational program came into my classroom not because of me but because one of my colleagues had been standing near my desk, chatting with me. She looked at me with that look on her face I know so well, just this side of an eye-roll.

“Not really,” she said.

“I’ve–” I started.

“Oh, man! It’s great!” he said. “I’m not so great at writing lesson plans and I can just plug in a few ideas and it does it for me! Youse guys gotta try it!”

Now I know for a fact that this first-year teacher, who’d been a teaching assistant in his program longer than I’ve been teaching there (that’s since 2007) needed to be told that Google Classroom doesn’t correct tests and give grades for you unless you put the answers in. He was under the impression that Google just knew, I guess.

And this is one of many reasons that I worry about AI in education. Before he’d cut me off and ignored me (as he put his satchel on my desk, moving some stuff with his bag and nearly forcing me to stab him in the eye with a pencil–I hate my desk(s) being touched), I was about to tell him that I’d used AI to help create rubrics. We all have our weaknesses and rubrics are mine. But using AI to help craft a rubric is actually very similar to what I’ve been doing for years, and in some cases, better.

Knowing that I’m not good with rubrics, I’ve often looked up rubrics for topics that I’m teaching and then taken them, revising them for my needs. AI does the same thing. It’s taking the criteria that I put in it, the objectives and frameworks/competencies that I’m looking for and churning out a rubric.

From there, I go through and revise it, tweaking and fixing things and putting my stamp on it. Just like I did when I was taking the rubrics from Google Images, etc.

I guess if I used AI to write a lesson plan, I would do the same thing. I’d use it as a guide for myself.

That is not what this guy is doing. This guy is putting whatever word salad he can manage into the machine and using what it puts out, right or wrong. When he said, “It writes the whole thing for you,” it said everything.

This is what I find disturbing about AI in education. It easily does what AI in every other artform does: it takes the humanity out of the work. Only the teacher can know what will work and what might not. Only the teacher can revise the lesson plan based on past problems that arose when teaching it. Or based on the students they currently have in front of them.

I’ve been thinking about AI in education a lot since a PD day back in November but it wasn’t until this moment when the other teacher came into my classroom to talk to my colleague (which is the only time he comes into my room: to talk to other adults in my room or if he needs something) that it solidified for me what troubled me most about AI in the classroom. It doesn’t know our students, any more than many administrators who never come into the classroom.

And that is wrong.

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Okay, that’s this week’s newsletter. Thank you for reading!

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