Travel back in time with me. I’m thirteen years old. It’s the year 2000 and the Internet is a relatively new household phenomenon—at least in rural areas like mine. My friends and I have mostly been using it to make ourselves ridiculous email addresses, like chocolatekisses007 and chatterbox001. Everyone uses Hotmail. Gmail doesn’t exist; neither does Google. I spend countless hours building a MySpace page, customizing the music and background with snippets of HTML code. I stay up late chatting with friends on AOL Instant Messenger—it’s here that I learn to articulate the things I’ve been too afraid to say in person.
Summer rolls around and I sit cross-legged in a faded blue recliner in my parents’ living room. On the table next to me, an ice-cold glass of SunDrop rests on a coaster, beads of water drip down the side. There’s a dog-eared book in my lap, and in the background, the TV airs reruns of Boy Meets World. An advertisement captures my attention—it’s a cheery cartoon butler encouraging me to seek the answer to everyday questions online. I can still remember the thrill of typing in all of my existential questions, full of teenage angst and idealism, and I also remember the disappointment upon receiving my narrow results. The commercial was for the search engine Ask Jeeves, which was later replaced by other big-name search engines: Yahoo and Excite and, finally, Google. It was marketed as something akin to Siri—ask and you will receive. In practice, it was just an early way to pull up a list of semi-helpful articles on a given topic. But I like to think the butler has recently made a comeback. If you haven’t already explored Jeeves’ alter-ego, let me be the first to introduce you to ChatGPT.
Now, if I’m honest, I am usually pretty skeptical of technology, if not downright cynical, and this holds true for the coming wave of artificial intelligence (AI). My initial reaction to its development was one of fear. (Anyone else have nightmares after watching Westworld or Ex Machina?) I’ve read about concerns over plagiarism and artistic integrity, all of which are valid. I’ve also heard concerns of AI ushering in an age of rampant disinformation. This also seems very likely, and I encourage you to read Amy Peterson’s piece on that here. That said, my sister mentioned using ChatGPT to revamp a resume, and my husband brought it up as a potential way for us to create targeted meal plans. While both of these suggestions piqued my interest, I didn’t give ChatGPT much thought until a couple of weeks ago when I happened to see a blurb about how teachers are using the chatbot to plan their lessons. Since I’ve been consumed by all things education lately, this resonated. It can do that? I wondered. What is this thing? So, I had my husband open the app (which was already installed on his phone), and I asked it a question:
Can you create a Charlotte Mason inspired curriculum for a five year old?
“Certainly!” it wrote back. (The bot is very enthusiastic.)
Within seconds, I had a simple outline (albeit nothing I couldn’t have gotten from Google). I continued to play with it, getting more and more specific:
Can you create a Charlotte Mason history lesson for a five-year-old to explore the ancient nomadic peoples of the Fertile Crescent?
Nerdy, I know, but the results blew me away. I kept going:
What are some age appropriate book recommendations for this lesson? What science lesson would pair well with studying this historical time period? What artist and composer study would pair well with these lessons?
I kept asking follow-up questions until I had a completely integrated unit that included history, literature, science, art, music, and even some Spanish vocabulary related to my topic. Last week I wrote a little about how I am considering homeschooling, and I’m embarrassed to admit how many sample curriculum resources I’ve downloaded in order to compare and pilot them. Now, I’m realizing I can use AI to do all this legwork for free! I know I sound a little over zealous. I know it’s not going to teach the kids (or will it one day?), and I know it’s results are not to be used without discernment, but it’s still a pretty remarkable tool.
Travel with me again to 2017. I’m thirty. I’ve recently landed my first teaching job, and my seventh- and eighth-graders are eating me alive. They can smell the fear on the new girl from a mile away. My school dismisses at 2:25 p.m., and because New York has an excellent teaching union, I am free to leave with the students on Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays. However, I do not. I stay in my crowded classroom, with its robin-egg blue walls, and I work on my lesson plans until 4:30 p.m. or 5:00 p.m., when I finally make the mile-long trek to the nearest subway station. It’s a thirty-minute ride from there to my apartment, and I take the time to look out the window or read. Once I’m home, I graciously eat a quick dinner my husband has cooked, and then I continue revising tomorrow’s lessons until I fall asleep. That first year, I worked through my lunch breaks and my preps. Every. Single. Day. I was given a bare-bones curriculum, which I supplemented with ideas I found on Teachers Pay Teachers and Instagram. It was mentally and physically exhausting, and I had very little work-life balance. Even the weekends were spent prepping for the week ahead and catching up on the mountains of assignments and essays I had to grade.
If it’s not clear, I do have the tendency to obsess—as a teacher, I often got stuck in the unending vault of Google search results or in the deep scrolls of Instagram in pursuit of that “perfect” activity to wow my students. I continue to struggle with this—the tendency toward obsession remains, it’s just taken different forms. Today, I’m more likely to be found looking up parenting strategies and kid activities, book recommendations and writing prompts. Part of my interest in ChatGPT is that it eliminates some of the overwhelm. It’s a one-and-done kind of platform. I can keep asking questions if I want to, endlessly I suppose, but there’s no headlines or blurbs or images to tempt me into a doom scroll.
I assume that ChatGPT will follow the same pattern as other technologies that I’ve experienced—from texting and the first smartphone to the progression of social spaces. If it does, then we are currently in its golden phase, where it’s still in early development. (Do you remember when Facebook was only a place that housed photo albums? Where you could tag your friends and leave little comments on their wall? Do you remember when Instagram was only for your friends, without any search features or hashtags or marketing?) It is likely that ChatGPT will soon come with a wide array of features, including some kind of lucrative social algorithm. But for now, it’s pretty basic. It’s user-friendly. And while I’m sure a day will dawn when my opinion of it has changed, today I intend to enjoy using this golden era to create lessons, build meal plans, suggest exercises, and give me useful phrases to help guide me through a preschooler’s meltdown.
If you’ve used ChatGPT, I would love to hear your experience in the comments below. Tell me what’s been beneficial; tell me your concerns. Let’s consider the future together.
With curiosity,
Jenica
Ordinary Joy:
Words of Jubilee:
I loved this observation from Shannon K. Evans.
If I do not intend to stay as I was — or as I am — then I understand this is my path of growth: to turn from the either/or and trust the both/and.
- Shannon K. Evans
You can read the rest of her article “nothing knows more than the woods” here, which seems a somewhat fitting balance for a piece on AI.
A Few Good Things:
Here is a link with some additional ChatGPT uses specific for my teacher friends.
If you’re looking for new podcasts, the kids and I have been enjoying this one: Eat Your Spanish.
Here are links to two poems from Sherman Alexie that I enjoyed reading this week: Highway Lazarus and One Hundred Black Bears.
As always, thank you for reading. If you would like to contribute to the publication of this newsletter, you can use the link above to support my writing fund. Please feel free to share this publication with anyone who might enjoy it.