Reading Serious Literature: Do We Teach It by Demanding It and Controlling It?
Dedicated to Janet and Matt
If you’ve ever taught seventh grade English in a diverse middle school serving a low-income zip code, I’d say skip this post. You already suspect how AI is going down in those classrooms. I can’t add much because all I have are suspicions.
How? I suspect: Not well.
My five years teaching in middle school is not chronotopically fresh, but it made an indelible mark in my psyche. Re: AI, I suspect there is a wide chasm between the behavior of adolescents who have managed to keep alive an academic spark and those who would ditch class on a dime.
The kids who show up because they have to—their parents are on top of it, doing what they think is right for reasons of social mobility, though they might say “future gainful employment”—probably get a detention if they’re caught using (AI, not drugs). I knew teachers who wouldn’t let kids enter the classroom if they hadn’t done their homework—it was automatic on-site detention. Detention might deter some of them from intellectual dishonesty as defined by Teacher or drive others into secrecy, alert to ways to hide their AI use.
The kids who show up for the social action, the intrigue, the hormonal thunderstorms probably don’t care about AI. When they are marked present at roll call, it doesn’t mean “present” in any educational sense. At this tender age, many of them haven’t yet done a serious crime warranting sentencing as an adult. I think my students who enjoyed the dark side went there because it made them feel alive and powerful. AI probably isn’t a big draw for them—what’s in it for me? Using AI as a symbolic weapon, they may insult the goody two-shoes with accusations of academic fraud and create drama with Teacher.
My personal experiences at this level were tame compared to what I saw at a middle school in inner city Chicago. In some classrooms the kids had taken over. I’ve written before for ltRRtl about working as a teacher consultant for Douglass Middle School in the 1990s (see the archives). After a year of two-times-a-month whole-day visits to roll up my sleeves and teach with the English department, I learned that middle school in the inner city is a totally different question. It would be a huge victory if these kids actually READ AI.
I cringe when I read opinions about AI that make this machine the cause of the death of literature and writing. In addition to what I see as an elitist attitude, in my opinion, the Common Core with its mandate of non-stop close reading on an odyssey in search of textual evidence to support an argument has beaten AI to the punch. If anything can destroy literature and writing, it is micromanaging. Is anyone in education anywhere any longer concerned with reading literature as an aesthetic experience—or are these experiences distractions on the path to readiness for work or college? Is literature a textbook?
Here’s where the Core got it wrong: In the real world we do close reading because we are motivated, we want to—I’ll go so far as to say we must, for intrinsic satisfaction. Don’t get me wrong. I was an English major, and I read for intrinsic satisfaction even when I was working for a grade—two goals can co-exist—but we don’t do close reading just because we are mandated. I chose my major. Every tiny nuance took on heightened significance, and I experienced the ecstasy of perseverance under conditions of challenge. It is literally wonderful, addictive. Who would believe that English majors developed a love of literature through being forced to read everything under imminent threat of failure?
In a curriculum that jams their noses into mandated pages and demands “read closely,” kids who care about their grade may well turn to AI and skip the text. Is this the fault of AI?
For the past two years I’ve used AI as a tool to enhance reading for intrinsic reasons. I am grateful that I lived long enough to experience it. In the years I have remaining this tool will increase my access to literature. For example, most of my adult life I’ve felt somehow incomplete because I had never read the Iliad or the Odyssey except in bits and pieces read instrumentally and then forgotten. I’ve taught with people for whom Homer has taken up residence in their minds, and they have constructed huge schemas with his poetry at the hub. I knew all along I needed Homer, but in a system that demands full time commitment to whatever assignments are given, I could not spare the time. When I tried—which I did several times over the years—I stopped because life got in the way.
Last year I read both of Homer’s epics. AI helped me grasp enough of the context in which Homer wrote to get me started. Aware as I am that AI output (notice: I don’t say “text” because AI produces computer output, not texts as humans use the term) must be verified, I used information from the bot to set up online searches for background texts, and I spent several hours building an understanding as a layperson before I stepped into the challenge.
The first pages of the Iliad were insane. I could barely make heads or tails of it. I commanded the bot to explain to me what this or that god or goddess had to do with anything or why a particular warrior was mentioned several times and was dropped. As I moved through the text, I monitored myself as more and more of these details stuck in memory with fewer and fewer chats needed. I noticed my motivation to read strengthen as the textworld unfolded; bot chats were an unwanted interruption. I came to distinguish moments where I simply needed information from moments where the challenge was interpretation. The bot isn’t helpful when the job of interpreting is both the reason for the work and out of reach of the bot. I didn’t care what others thought, and that’s all the bot can output. I cared about what I thought.
In the era of Common Core which has had an impact in the higher grades similar to NCLB in the elementary grades, schools have tightened the screws on grades and scores as the primary motivation to exert effort and to persist in the face of struggle. There can be no intrinsic pleasure in difficulty because the stakes of failure are too high and time to really do the work too short. There is never enough time to learn in classrooms on the administration’s Core treadmill—and if it isn’t the Core, in our factory model it’s some other totalizing scheme. Getting the right answer isn’t the right answer to the riddle of AI in middle school or high school English where supporting young people in developing the motivation to work hard for pleasure is the ball game. Once they are motivated, we can teach them. They want to learn and will see the bot for what it is—neither a reader nor a writer but a tool.
Thanks Terry for your thoughtful post. When you shared, "If anything can destroy literature and writing, it is micromanaging," I thought about my own experience as an administrator. When I got into micromanage mode, I imagine I came close to creating a similar experience with teachers.
Your use of AI as a literature companion is novel. It's also creative because you are leveraging the technology to meet you where you are, plus guide you to where you want to be. I don't love the term "assessment-capable", a la Fisher and Frey, but you exemplify that in recognizing what you don't know and how you can know it.