The Day AI Walked into My School

Issue #10

The Day AI Walked into My School

It started with a sophomore English paper.

One of my best teachers — seventeen years in the classroom, the kind of educator who could tell in two paragraphs whether a piece of writing was authentically a student’s — came to me in October with a printed essay in her hand and a look I hadn’t seen on her face before. Not anger. Not confusion. Something closer to grief.

“I can’t prove it,” she said. “But I know this isn’t his writing. The vocabulary is his vocabulary. The argument structure isn’t. And I don’t know what to do about it because there’s no policy.”

She was right on both counts. It probably wasn’t entirely his writing. And there was no policy.

I sat with that essay for a long time after she left. Because I understood that we weren’t talking about one student and one paper anymore. We were talking about a seismic shift in what learning looks like — and every school in the country was about to be standing exactly where I was standing, holding…