A Personal Letter: Teacher to Teacher

Dearest Teachers in the Trenches:

Large Language Machines (LLMs) have found a place in my daily life similar to my recording equipment. Most days I spend over an hour (at least) creating, recording, revising, or remixing classic rock’n’roll songs. Sequestration during COVID began with a search for tools to extend my musical reach through recording my voice and instruments as homemade backing tracks. I am my own choir, something I never imagined I could do (cf: A Musical Respite). I now am aware of the AI in GarageBand and understand its significance for my instrumental tracks (MIDI instruments, samplers, etc.). I hoped to perform live once the pandemic relaxed its grip.

I find language bots incredibly helpful in much the same way, i.e., bots are tools to bring a distant personal goal and intention closer to reality. I don’t look for ideas to steal but for ideas to lift me up toward a better grasp. I track down provenance in order to know the sentient source and explore the vein for more gold flakes. I would like to see discussions like the kinds I have everyday in classrooms. I’ve come to view the bot as a search engine on steroids and understand generally what it does and doesn’t do. Mainly, I find that it reduces intrinsic cognitive load during readings of theory, experiments, ethnographies, philosophy, history, sociology, linguistics, etc. while helping me focus on the work of germane cognitive activity, the bot primarily an efferent tool in Rosenblatt’s terms.

It is important to understand the role of agency in intrinsic cognition during efferent reading (reading to learn). If I am both accountable and responsible to myself for the meaning I make, I am aware that in the end this is the meaning I hope to situate in a network of schemas to serve me in future learning. I want and need it to be right, or at least to index it as tentative. However, if I fully understand that I am responsible and accountable for accomplishing my teacher’s goal, prodding me to pass a test, I am relieved of the obligation to make peace with meaning I want and need during germane thinking.

Having a discussion with a bot is essentially a reading event, and like all meaningful reading events, do not end at the last word. As the human I’m always aware of germane cognition and the weak link fallacy in epistemic work. Schema maintenance of structures with weak or faulty links can come crashing down when one most needs them. Remember, I am responsible. If you think for a minute I take the bot at face value, you’ve got another think coming. Just as I read any text with the intention of making new knowledge closely and critically, I read bot output with a higher alert level.

The excitement and expansion begins once I leave the bot (sometimes a bit stale) and go outside to see what I can see of the real world in which human discourse is as real as subatomic particles. I find the experience of shuttling between the bot’s output and human output in the real world fascinating. Trust me: Human intelligence is of a different order of activity, far more compelling and meaningful than anything a bot might synthesize like cotton candy.

The interplay between artificial discourse and real world human text is enlightening like nothing I’ve experienced in my lifetime. If I had had access to a bot in high school I would be lightyears ahead of where I am in terms of a knowledge base. Counterfactuals, as you likely agree, are artificial whether mathematically derived through AI or speculatively imagined in a human brain. Remarkably, AI could assist me in exploring an alternate existence which would never show up in a Google search.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Artificial-Real World interplay can naturalize the tool for use in a community of learners as it has become for me. Teachers skilled in delivering high-quality task frames inside instructional designs linked to local curriculum and practice can design learner opportunities for shuttling between AI and Real Life, essentially shifting from intrinsic cognitive work to collaborative germane cognitive work. These opportunities should be carefully studied in vitro for teacher expertise to build and assist in resolving the many paradoxes no one is even thinking about right now. This interaction creates a unique learning environment mixing the common sense, plain vanilla consistency and the vast knowledge base of AI with nuanced, local, situated CRITICAL understanding that comes from human experience.

Learners face challenges trying to manage intrinsic cognitive load, exciting when in the flow, devastation in waves of confusion, the sense of being lost, which can easily overwhelm them if complexity is beyond their grasp and they have no tools. Cruelly, the nature of human learning means that we all must endure these feelings and channel them. Welcoming confusion as the harbinger of a more expert future can be almost impossible in a setting where extraneous cognitive load is high, thinking about what the teacher wants you to do, what could happen if you don’t do what the teacher expects, what college you will not get in if your GPA drops, when the teacher is going to push you to finish, why you have to do this busy work, yada yada yada…

Do your own work (and do it my way) is unlikely to blossom into authentic self-interested community-centered germane cognition. Asking students to pair up and explore this prompt with a bot and then have a class discussion about learning might be a cool icebreaker. “We’ve all heard a teacher say ‘Do your own work (and do it my way).’ Why do teachers always seem to expect this?”

Yours,