BY OLIVIA B. WAXMAN
BACK TO SCHOOL
PETER PACCONE, A SOCIAL-STUDIES TEACHER IN SAN Marino, Calif., has a new teacher’s aid helping him in the classroom this year. He plans to defer to his helper to explain some simpler topics to his class of high schoolers, like the technical aspects of how a cotton gin worked, in order to free up time for him to discuss more analytical concepts, like the effects of the first Industrial Revolution.
His new assistant? ChatGPT.
“What I feel that I don’t have to do any longer is cover all the content,” Paccone told a group of more than 40 educators in a May Zoom workshop, which he organized. If artificial intelligence is on the cusp of reshaping entire aspects of society—from health care to warfare—the realm that leaps first to many minds is education. Asked a question online, ChatGPT will produce an answer that reads like an essay. So students and teachers preparing for a new school year are also grappling with AI’s implications for learning, homework, and integrity. Paccone is among many high school teachers already experimenting with ChatGPT in the classroom. But the tool is inspiring as much trepidation as it is excitement.
Earlier this year, as OpenAI.com, the website of the company that produced ChatGPT, became one of the 50 most visited websites in the world, some of the nation’s largest school districts, from New York City to Los Angeles, banned its usage in the classroom while they worked to formulate policies around it. Meanwhile, teachers desperate to figure out how to harness the tech for good congregated in Facebook groups like ChatGPT for Teachers (about 300,000 members) and The AI Classroom (more than 20,000 members).
“The majority of the teachers are panicked because they see [ChatGPT] as a cheating tool, a tool for kids to plagiarize,” says Rachael Rankin, a high school principal in Newton Falls, outside of Youngstown, Ohio.
But Paccone and a growing group of educators believe it’s too late to keep AI out of their classrooms. Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, a major teachers’ union, believes the panic about AI is not unlike the ones caused by the internet and graphing calculators when they were first introduced, arguing ChatGPT “is to English and to writing like the calculator is to math.” In this view, there are two options facing teachers: show their students how to use ChatGPT in a responsible way, or expect the students to abuse it.
AS TEACHERS WRESTLE with whether to use AI in their classrooms this year, they’re also lea
