It’s kind of a funny story

Commenting on student work, 2024 edition
Me, to a student who obviously used AI: please use your own words.
Student: what says this isn’t in my own words??
Me: I expect students to write in the doc I provide. I am automatically worried when I see a large chunk of work pasted in.
Student: I wrote it on paper before I pasted it onto the computer. If I find the paper will that help??

Um… that’s not how paper works.

That’s how I shared the story with friends. It’s all true, and dear Heaven, but this generation of kids…

But it’s also not the end.

Today, the last day of school, the student came to class. They finished up some work and, at the end of class, hung back at my request. We both wanted to see if all their missing work had been submitted, and I wanted to talk about that pasted-from-paper document. The student had resubmitted it, this time with a photograph of a handwritten document – the paper they supposedly wrote before they (magically) pasted it into the doc.

It was already hot – today’s high was 32C/ 90F and felt like 43C/ 109F – and the end of school was on everyone’s mind. I know I had to muster up all the calm I could find; I assume the student had to do the same. I opened the assignment. I showed the student how I could see the copy/ paste. I showed them the AI detector and the 100% AI result. I acknowledged that I could see the handwritten document, but shared my concern that the assignment didn’t fit the instructions. Then, as patiently as I could, I said, “I can see that you’re upset. Tell me what happened. I’m listening.”

Then I listened.

And it turned out that I was wrong. They walked me through their work and showed me their thinking. They hadn’t used AI to generate the text, but they had typed it up in Grammarly (because when you’re learning English a good grammar program goes a long way) so some of the words were not quite theirs. And they had followed the instructions, sort of, they just hadn’t organized properly to separate parts. And they were shocked that I could see the copy/ paste and a little hurt that I thought they might have “cheated.”

So we talked about cheating and about getting behind in our work and the shortcuts we sometimes take. We talked about the pressure of finishing all that late work and about talking to teachers rather than hiding. Then I thanked him for talking to me and shooed him off to catch up with his friends. The whole thing probably took three minutes, maybe two.

It’s not as good a story as the one where a student says “I wrote it on paper before I pasted it onto the computer” and the teacher thinks, “Um… that’s not how paper works”  but the real part of teaching, I think, is the part after the funny part – the part where we listen – and I wanted to write that, too.