Red Ink

A Work of Fiction

Jane Reed walked into the teacher’s lounge like she entered every room—full speed, curly grey hair bouncing. Twenty-five years in the classroom hadn't slowed her down. She loved teaching with all her heart.

“These 8th grade essays," she said, dumping an armload of papers onto a table. "Half AI, half human. I'm starting to think the AI ones show more personality."

Elena Garcia didn't look up from the worn couch where she sat cross-legged, annotating essays with purple ink—never red, not since her master’s thesis on feedback. The color of the ink matters.

"At least you can tell the difference," she said. "My seventh graders are adding deliberate mistakes to camouflage the AI. False mistakes. They're crafting artificial authenticity."

"Ha! Artificial authenticity," repeated Sarah Johnson with a bitter laugh. The youngest teacher on staff, still paying off student loans, she looked almost as young as her students.

She tapped her phone screen. "Listen to this email I just got from a parent: 'In the real world, professionals use AI tools. Shouldn't we prepare our children for reality?'"

She looked up, her Gen-Z cynicism showing. "Reality. As if that word means anything anymore."

***

Marcus Chen entered almost unnoticed. The department's only male teacher was passionate about literature, a careful reader whose bow tie was as precise as his syntax, his lesson plans written in iambic pentameter.

“The AI debate is a distraction," he said, sliding into his usual chair, the one he'd occupied for eighteen years. "We're not losing them to machines. We're losing them to fear."

"Fear?" Elena looked up.

"Mmmm."

Marcus pulled out a crumpled essay from his breast pocket and smoothed it with hands.

"Maria's latest work. Probably the most insightful analysis of 'Beloved' I've read in a decade. Full of grammatical errors, unconventional structure, and genuine brilliance. She begged me not to share it with the class. She said it sounded too ‘basic.’”

He adjusted his bow tie.

"Basic!" Jane exploded, pacing now. "God forbid they sound like themselves! Yesterday my best writer, unusually creative and strange, asked me if his writing is 'too weird.' He's started running his work through AI to make it 'more normal.'" She slammed a hand on the table. "He's thirteen! 'Weird' should be his whole personality right now!"

Sarah slid down in her chair. "You want to know what's really messed up? I just ran the district's new standardized writing rubric through an AI analyzer. Guess what? It's mathematically optimized for machine-generated responses. We're literally grading them on how well they can imitate algorithms."

***

Elena's purple pen made a soft click as she set it down. "Last week my Carmen told me she feels most herself when chatting with AI. 'It never judges me,' she said. 'Never tells me to try harder or do better.'"

She touched the small gold cross at her neck, a habit from her Catholic school days. "I've spent twenty years teaching children to find their voice, only to watch them trade it for a parrot."

Marcus leaned forward, bow tie catching the fluorescent light. "Yes. The AI essays all sound the same, regardless of who prompts them. We lose the human touch that makes each performance unique."

***

"Speaking of performances," Sarah said, waving her phone, "new directive from admin. We're supposed to use AI to help grade. To ensure 'consistency across sections.'" Her air quotes dripped sarcasm. "Because apparently our human judgment is too... human."

"Too human," Jane repeated, sadly. "Like Tommy's essay about his grandfather's dementia. AI would flag it as 'off-topic, poor structure, excessive emotional content.'" She ran a hand through her curly hair. "It was the most beautiful thing I've read all year."

***

Elena uncrossed her legs, reached for her ever-present thermos of liquid health. "My grandfather was a storyteller. He always said perfect stories are dead stories. Life happens in the mistakes, the tangents, the unexpected turns."

She took a sip, smiled sadly. "What stories will these children tell their grandchildren? 'Once upon a time, an algorithm optimized my self-expression'?"

"You know what scares me?" Marcus said quietly, smoothing an invisible wrinkle from his slacks. "Not that they'll all start using AI. But that they'll internalize its values. That they'll learn to think in algorithms before they ever learn to think in metaphors."

***

Sarah sat up suddenly. "Oh God. Listen to what just came across our department email. 'New AI-enhanced writing curriculum promises to eliminate individual teacher bias and ensure standardized learning outcomes across all demographics.'" She looked up, face pale beneath her practiced Gen-Z cool. "They're not even pretending anymore."

"Coffee shop?" Jane asked, already gathering her chaos of papers and technology. "I think we need to talk about rebellion."

Elena recapped her purple pen deliberately. "Resistance," she corrected, years of ESL teaching making her precise with words.

"Rebellion is loud. Resistance can be quiet. Like teaching them to whisper their true voices beneath the algorithmic noise."

"I know a place," Sarah offered, sliding her phone into her back pocket. "They don't have WiFi. The coffee's terrible. It's perfect."