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The culprit? ChatGPT. Both students had typed the professor’s prompt into the AI language processing app, which spit out the essays that they then submitted for class. This powerful new AI app can whip out essays, prompts, recipes, and more and is already used by more than 100 million people.

Some teachers are leveraging the tool to their advantage, using it to create passages for students to analyze in their lessons. While there may be appropriate uses for AI writing, especially in marketing and technical careers, the greatest danger it presents to teachers now is that it allows students to rely on a machine to complete their assignments, circumventing the need for them to share their thoughts and produce original work.

Humans have always been good at finding ways to avoid work. Why would a student spend weeks reading, analyzing, and writing about the themes in Romeo in Juliet when a bot can do it for them in minutes? Think of all the time they could spend scrolling Instagram instead.

As we try to cultivate the capacities of a literate individual (pg 7) in our students we have to give them lots of opportunities for meaningful writing. According to our standards, we have to teach five types of writing that could be on the state test, as shown in the table below.

Note: This chart applies to expectations on the Mississippi state test.

That’s all well and good, and we could spend all year hammering in the moves authors make when writing these genres. But what about the opposite side of the coin, journaling and free writing and writing for real-world purposes? It’s a balance between preparing for college and career (remember, this is the goal, the state test is just the measuring stick to see if we are on track to reach our goal) and helping our students learn to express themselves meaningfully and effectively.  

A few years ago I delivered some professional development to a fabulous group of elementary teachers on creating standards-based writing prompts. Armed with new knowledge and enthusiasm, they wrote up some prompts based on upcoming passages from their textbooks and assigned them to the students. The next time I visited they reported that it had gone horribly. The informative  writings they got back were awful. Most kids only managed to write a few sentences, and those sentences were stilted, boring, and lacked any real depth.

Curious, I inquired about the topic and the prompt. It used the language of the standards all right. But what had these teachers asked their kids to write about? The Canadian boreal forest. Only after one week, reading two short informational articles from their curriculum, they asked the students to write an informative piece about the Canadian boreal forest. I don’t even know much about the Canadian boreal forest. Other than the fact our American toilet paper habit is ruining it, I have nothing to say about the Canadian boreal forest myself. The students’ papers were poorly written because there wasn’t enough information in their linguistic data pool. They’ve never been there, hadn’t seen pictures or watched a clip, hadn’t read enough about it. Maybe after a six-week unit where they had studied multiple texts on the topic could they then write something meaningful. Turn it into an opinion piece about toilet paper and you might get somewhere. But too often we think kids can’t write just because we are asking them to write about topics that are so irrelevant to their lives that they just don’t have anything to say.

We solve this problem in one of two ways. We either take time to be intentional about pouring into their linguistic data pool or we allow them to write about things that already matter to them. Either fill it or use what’s already in there. Both ways are appropriate and should be used multiple times throughout the year.

Instead of worrying over whether or not students turn to ChatGPT, we should spend our efforts on ensuring that the tasks, topics, purposes, and audiences we provide for our students are relevant and worth the effort of reading, writing, speaking, and listening.

Why did humans invent writing to begin with? To share ideas that matter. If teachers keep asking students to write about irrelevant topics, they will keep reaching for tools to save them time.

And they might as well.

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See the entire series on writing:

These resources are for opinion/argument and informative/explanatory writing, geared towards grades 3-8.

• The Writing Process Explained in Memes
• 5 Types of Writing on the Mississippi State Test
• 18 Hook Ideas with Mentor Text
• Writing Introductory Paragraphs
• Writing Body Paragraphs
• Choosing the Best Evidence
• Revising

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Check out the Services page or contact me to find out how Ignite Literacy Services can reinvigorate your writing curriculum.

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