Like Love: Navigating the Messiness of AI in the English Classroom
When I agreed to write for Her Voice at the Table on AI in the English classroom, I was in the middle of an experiment with my seniors. I would love to say that since then I have acquired conclusive proof that I am an AI/academic integrity/relationship-building genius and that I have found a satisfying synthesis to the concerns of many anxious teachers, many curious students, and the many zealous tech enthusiasts… but I haven’t.
Rather, what my attempts to navigate AI in my writing classroom have come down to are three words at the heart of W.H. Auden’s “Law Like Love,” from which I will blithely plagiarize words, thoughts, and whole constructions throughout this post because years after first reading and wrestling with his poetry they still sing in my head.
So, dears, I hope you will grant me some patience as I think with (but not, please! for) you.
The Situation
Artificial Intelligence is here.
It is in Microsoft Word suggesting to me that I fix the last sentence of the previous section (and probably this one too), providing me hints to improve accessibility; it is in Google AI overviews that remind me every time I search that I have long since outsourced my random curiosities; it is in Snapchat bots that my students started talking to as a joke and now will quietly admit sometimes show more empathy than their friends; it is in every teaching newsletter and professional development offering I have seen in the past two years; it is in our Honor Council, my junior Citizen Rhetor research project, my AP seniors’ perfectionistic desire to be pre-graded on their assignment, my planning for a bachelorette weekend, my guilt about environmental impact and water usage, and the time-saving recommendations for teachers, ranging from creating lesson plans and rubrics to grading assignments, and on and on. Also, information is now everywhere.
We live in a world with so much more information (and disinformation and hallucinations) available to us than any generation before us, and it is messy and overwhelming and destabilizing. As such, I do actually believe that we need new tools to navigate the staggering volume of voices because I don’t think any part of our civilization or brain was meant to have access to so much at once. I think it can be tempting in the face of this avalanche to just grab for the fastest way to begin sorting the absolute mess we have flung at us night and noon. So, unlike Auden's many men, I cannot say “Don’t use AI” again. Because, it is just so FAST and seems so clean.
However, in 10+ years of teaching I have yet to see anything that shakes my conviction that if we are to have any agency in our thoughts and relationships: the mess has to exist somewhere.
The Mess Has to Exist Somewhere
For a paper to be not just clean but thoughtful when handed to a teacher, somewhere in the writer’s life there is an annotated book, a mind map, a friend who listens to the wandering muddy version, a murder-board of quasi-conspiracies tracing an image, a scribbled work page, a flawed code, a rough draft with all the missing apostrophes circled, a jumbled mind that spirals and chews as you fall asleep or shower or go for a run, a thesis draft that uses every boring verb and prepositional phrase under the sun slouching towards a thought.
For a relationship to be healthy, somewhere there is a conversation about how your criticism of a friend of mine triggered the terror that perhaps you dislike that quality about me, too; a therapy session about how our mothers’ communication style has shaped the tones of voice that we hear; a hashing out of the hundred little ways we have fallen short of who we want to be to each other; an honest admission of the million ways we have fallen short of who we hope to be.
From talking to my friends and family members who have actively worked on AI, I know that this is true of AI: there are people who developed the code and there are people who sort the useful parts of it and there are messy fact checkers. So, I think that expectation of mess also has to be true in how we use AI if we are not to lose the skills that our more obviously messy mental activities teach us.
Which brings me to my experimental question: How can I tie relationships and questions and mess to every step of our class interaction with AI?
Talking, Asking, Goals, and a System?
This is my current scientific process:
1. Talk to people about AI. Let it be messy.
In my class, this process looked like an hour and a half of journaling and talking with each of my AP Lit senior classes as honestly as I could about my messy concerns about AI. ). I shared all the ways that I, as a teacher, have used, been encouraged to use, and thought about using AI. I shared my observations as a teacher for the past ten years and as a person for the past two. And then I asked them to do the same and braced myself.
2. Ask all your questions. Then ask another question.
Then I asked them every question I could think of (many from the list below because I didn’t know what I didn’t know.)
Essentially, after a long conversation about all the ways that AI seemed anywhere from scary to relatively harmless to good, we got to the last three questions in that list.
Every single class reacted viscerally against the idea that I had been encouraged to use AI to write college recommendation letters, because my students were so clear that the purpose of a recommendation is a reflection of a relationship. And in turn that recast the last two questions, because I got to explain that to me learning and literature and grading (and for that matter, rubric writing) are acts of relationship, too.
So, I asked them another question.
3. Ask what learning outcomes and relationship outcomes we are aiming for by using AI.
Actually, we started with just the first part. What are the desired learning outcomes of this class? Perhaps predictably, I had a few answer “polished professional writing” or “getting faster at writing and thinking.” (These are goals. Just not the goals I have in mind for the class). I am grateful to say that I also consistently had someone say what I consider to be the outcomes I actually care the most about: “noticing when something seems unethical” and “taking risks” and “being unafraid of the weird stuff in the world” and “trying to solve problems instead of just complain about them.”
When we started digging through the mess of outcomes for our class, we came to a few that we all agreed seemed true, and then I told them my ranking:
TOP | Ethical Relationships |
Agency & Originality | |
| Risk & Resilience |
Curiosity & Complexity | |
Clarity & Efficiency | |
Polish | |
Speed | |
BOTTOM | Perfection |
Looking back at the uses of AI that flagged as dicey for us, we found they were the ones that prioritized values lower on the list: Polish, Speed, Perfection.
Of course, this process confronted me with how important it is then that I build, protect, and prioritize a relationship in which they can trust that I meant it when I said that I was more interested in their agency than in their perfection. And the fact that if I am more heavily grading based on perfection, speed, and polish, I am not holding dearly enough to the values I claim, which means my students are more likely to be reasonably tempted to mirror those lesser values. (Obviously, I think all the things on that list… except, I suppose “perfection”… are good.)
4. Slow down a little to assess the goals, inspect the mess, and affirm the relationship.
My first attempt to acknowledge AI in our classroom: I made a form for my students to fill out anytime they used AI for my class and swore that, so long as they filled it out a day before the assignment was turned in, even if I ended up thinking the use was dicey, the worst possible consequence would be talking to me about it. The form essentially asked them to pause, face the messiness of AI use, and assess if and how the tool they were using was supporting a higher goal.
Trash or Treasure, you can duplicate my form here.
The bright side from a few uses thus far is that when they feel ok about using the form and are willing to sacrifice the additional time to do so, they are often right: it doesn’t feel like a violation of our course and the use they made to sort information (one sorted it into a crossword) was a better use of their time with no loss of relationship or learning.
Relationships Take Time
Still, I cannot claim comfort yet. I have had only a few students use the form. It is still deeply early-days. But I do feel better. I like assuming the best of them.
Mostly I want to believe that when we reach for tools like AI, it is because we think that they will help with the job we need to do. The job most of us need to do is live in a world with too much information. The toothpaste is out of the tube on that one, and the loud angry crowd of voices is now how we live, and it seems idiotic (in the sense of the Greek noun ἰδιώτης idiōtēs 'a private person, an isolated individual’) to pretend otherwise.
But I also believe that how we navigate information and communication and thinking are relationship issues – ethical issues – and as I contended earlier, the mess needs to exist somewhere, and we need time practicing dealing with the mess and with each other. Hastily formed answers and relationships feel like they are either concealing or delaying mess, and I think that both rob us of practice considering our values (and other possible values), prioritizing our relationships, and being patient with those who are dear to us (including ourselves).
But I also believe that how we navigate information and communication and thinking are relationship issues – ethical issues – and as I contended earlier, the mess needs to exist somewhere, and we need time practicing dealing with the mess and with each other.
“If We, Dear”
All this brings me back to those three words that sing to me from Auden’s “Law Like Love.”
In that poem, after the first half – a litany of initially quite clear and seemingly authoritative definitions of the law, which descend into the cacophony of a loud and angry crowd that reminds me of nothing so much as the internet, and makes me long for nothing so much as solitude – Auden breaks his pattern of starting stanzas with a definition.
And the whole poem slows down. It must slow down. Because after a conditional, a communal pronoun, and an endearment (If we, dear), he launches into a beautifully halting homophonic admission of mess and confusion:
“If we, dear, know we know no more Than they about the Law, If I no more than you Know what we should and should not do Except that all agree Gladly or miserably That the Law is…”
In this maze of “know” and “no,” I find that the only person who could read this is one who holds the speaker dear enough to be patient as he works it out. That patience and relationship and fallibility and determination to try to say something is what I want for my students, my relationships, and myself. It is why I teach literature. It is what I am trying to find the place for in using the tools we have to navigate the world we have to.
That patience and relationship and fallibility and determination to try to say something is what I want for my students, my relationships, and myself. It is why I teach literature. It is what I am trying to find the place for in using the tools we have to navigate the world we have to.
Notable in the poem is that even when the speaker finds a set of couplets to close his theory on Law Like Love, they are coupled with uncertainty and fallibility and continued relationship.
So at least, I think I am in good company.
Law Like Love
Law, say the gardeners, is the sun,
Law is the one
All gardeners obey
Tomorrow, yesterday, today.
Law is the wisdom of the old,
The impotent grandfathers feebly scold;
The grandchildren put out a treble tongue,
Law is the senses of the young.
Law, says the priest with a priestly look,
Expounding to an unpriestly people,
Law is the words in my priestly book
Law is my pulpit and my steeple.
Law, says the judge as he looks down his nose,
Speaking clearly and most severely,
Law is as I've told you before,
Law is but let me explain it once more,
Law is The Law.
Yet law-abiding scholars write:
Law is neither wrong nor right,
Law is only crimes
Punished by places and by times,
Law is the clothes men wear
Anytime, anywhere.
Law is Good-morning and Good-night.
Others say, Law is our Fate;
Others say, Law is our State;
Others say, others say Law is no more.
Law has gone away.
And always the loud angry crowd,
Very angry and very loud,
Law is We,
And always the soft idiot softly Me.
If we, dear, know we know no more
Than they about the Law,
If I no more than you
Know what we should and should not do
Except that all agree
Gladly or miserably
That the Law is
And that all know this,
If therefore thinking it absurd
To identify Law with some other word,
Unlike so many men I cannot saw Law is again
No more than they can we suppress
The universal wish to guess
Or slip out of our own position
Into an unconcerned condition.
Although I can at least confine
Your vanity and mine
To stating timidly
A timid similarity,
We shall boast anyway:
Like Love I say.
Like love we don't know where or why,
Like love we can't compel or fly,
Like love we often weep.
Like love we seldom keep.
-- W. H. Auden
Rachel Davies is currently Music Directing Little Shop of Horrors and prepping a dream role as Donna Elvira (the most Audenic "More Loving One" character of all time) in Don Giovanni.