I care deeply about my students’ learning, but with all the new technologies available to help them cut corners, I worry that they’re not doing the deep thinking necessary to learn. That’s why I’ve been prompting AI to create lesson plans and assignments for me that will engage my students.
Students are using AI because they want their papers to be perfect. But I don’t care about their final product; I just want them to engage in an intellectually stimulating process. So I’m using AI to ensure I create the perfect lesson plans and assignments.
Because I want students to value the writing process, I had AI generate a series of lesson plans walking them through brainstorming and reflection exercises to demystify writing and make each step manageable. But then my students utilized generative AI to complete all the preliminary exercises and write the final paper.
I guess I just didn’t prompt the AI well enough.
That’s why I’ve concluded that instead of teaching students to read and write, I should be teaching them how to prompt AI better. If only I’d had a better education in AI prompt writing, I’d be able to get AI to create more AI-proof teaching materials for me.
Plus, AI promises to be the great equalizer. Right now, some students read and write well, some not as much. We should throw out our former curriculum, which emphasized developing students’ reading and writing skills, and instead invest all our time and resources in AI-prompting education. As technology changes the world, we can’t leave our struggling students behind.
With AI, all students, not just high-achieving ones, will be able to produce equally good results. However, one problem I’ve encountered so far is that some students understand how to prompt AI effectively and can discern whether the text generated by AI is of high or low quality, while others struggle to prompt AI well or understand its output.
Because I’m not a good enough AI prompter, I can’t figure out how to prompt AI to tell me how to help all students become better AI prompters.
The other issue I’m having is that my stronger students are very, very bored. I asked AI how to further engage them with AI prompting. Now, those advanced students are working on prompting AI to come up with ways to refreeze the glaciers their AI prompting has melted.
Other students have objected to being forced to use generative AI. They claim AI is immoral because it uses human writing in its training, without paying the human writers and for the express purpose of replacing human writers. So, I prompted the AI to devise a lesson plan that explains why students need to become proficient in prompting AI—so they can land writing jobs in the future, where they will spend their days prompting AI.
This technology that is ruining education has incredible potential to save education, if only I could figure out how to use it better to improve my students’ education. Once I get better at prompting AI to write my lesson plans and assignments, students who currently have trouble reading and writing will be able to prompt AI to create writing indistinguishable from what the stronger students can prompt AI to produce.
And once all students have fully adopted the voice of AI, we’ll know we’ve finally experienced educational equality.
