AI for Me, but not for Thee #
When it comes to using LLMs, educators need to lead by example.
The temptation to 'just get ChatGPT to do it' is as strong for teachers as it is for students. So should we be surprised when pupils reach for the AI to finish their homework, when we do the same with our paperwork?
The end of term is always a rush, with exams to mark, units to finish, reports to write. That last bulletpoint on the to-do list is often the most arduous: at a modest 100 words per pupil, per subject, subject teachers can soon find themselves churning out close to ten thousand words (double that if you're a sole trader like a drama or music lead).
Faced with a drafting a short novel in the hectic final days of an exhausting year, who can blame someone for looking to speed things up a little? Particularly when reports quickly drift into anodyne vacuity anyway ("has worked well this year... has shown progress... going forward, make more of an effort to complete homework on time..."). What's the harm in letting the artificial brain take the strain?
They can always tell #
Social mores about LLM-generated text are still forming. If it's for personal consumption, no-one can really object. But if a text purports to be from a human, tasting the tang of ChatGPT's artificial verbage can be a bitter surprise. If it has a human's name on it, then it should really be written by that human.
Educators write reports in double-trust: both as custodians and as role models. The obvious purpose of the end-of-term report is to provide a (largely) unvarnished summation of how the child is doing, for the benefit of the parents. In the context of the private sector, this is even more important, perhaps the most crucial piece of client-service communcation the educator produces all year.
But there is the other, implicit value of the report. For the child, this is likely the only adult-coded, personally-targetted writing they will read in a year. It must set the standard for what professional, transactional writing should look like. Even if the comments are banal and inoffensive, they serve the purpose of instructing the child in how grown-ups speak to one another in a professional written context.
To farm that out to a bot is a dereliction of duty, and an implicit signal to child and parent that this writing doesn't matter.
There are plenty of points in the school day that can benefit from the quick-and-dirty disposable drafting of AI, but the end of year report must not be one of them.