Tag Archives: creative writing

teacher vs. chatbot?

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This article is about an English teacher trying to figure out how to cope with AI in and out of the classroom. The main ideas seem to be just in-class writing assignments and discussions. This is high school (I think), and one thing that might surprise an older reader is the idea that the teacher spends a significant amount of time reading out loud to students, and also giving them time to read themselves in class. I am not surprised because I see the teachers of my own children in middle school doing this.

I’ve thought about trying my hand at teaching, at some point. I may or may not ever do that, but if so I will have to think about how to use AI in an engineering classroom. I don’t have all the answers of course, but this is a bold new frontier so neither does anyone else. Here is my first attempt at a brainstorming list:

  • In-class writing assignments,
  • Paper and pencil tests (or portions of a test – maybe if there is a 2-3 hour chunk of time to take a test, you have the first hour to do the paper and pencil part, hand that in, and get the second part where you are allowed to at least use a spreadsheet program. Or if the class period is only an hour, you could give a test over two days)
  • Journaling – I’ve always thought that reading and writing needs to be a part of what students do, even in STEM fields. In my own classes, teachers have tended to spend almost all the time focused on doing math problems. The problems are critical and I plan to come back to them. But I learn by reading and writing first and foremost, and there are others like me. So my idea is to have short reading assignments and ask students to summarize key points in a few bullets or sentences to show that they did the reading. Then, crucially, I would ask them to relate the reading to a relevant outside reference – kudos for a peer reviewed article, but could also be a relevant news or magazine article, or even a Wikipedia page. Now, obviously students are going to use AI for this, and that is okay. There would have to be classroom discussion related to it, and points given for being able to discuss what they wrote intelligently.
  • Okay, now to those problems, homework assignments, and/or take-home exams. These have always been the beating heart of engineering education. This is the struggle and the hard work of relating theory to problem solving, resulting in deep understanding. This is also where students benefit from individualized feedback from teachers and collaboration with peers. They are going to interact with AI here, and I see no real alternative other than classifying AI as not cheating. In fact, this is where you may want to actually encourage them to experiment and openly share what effective techniques they found that they think enhanced their learning. You have to give some points for the homework, otherwise all but the most-disciplined students will not make the significant effort needed for learning. But most of the points should probably be given for doing supervised in-class assignments that are similar to the homework.
  • There’s another problem here though – distance learning has become pretty common, particularly in graduate school. And that throws a monkey wrench into the whole in-person thing. It is potentially unfair if some students are in-person and some are virtual – are you going to surveil students on-camera the whole time and try to ascertain if they are cheating? This is a tough one and I don’t have all the answers.
  • Then there is the traditional “term paper” or “research paper”. This is a traditional cornerstone, but students are just going to use AI for it. Asking them to present their results and asking them personalized questions is part of the answer here, but that doesn’t really help them with feedback on their writing. The in-class writing assignments have to be part of the answer here. But again, in terms of out-of-class-writing, I think you have to classify the use of AI as not cheating and actually encourage them to experiment and share what they thought was effective.

Well, that was just some stream-of-consciousness drivel, wasn’t it? For me, writing and thinking are inseparable. I had some thoughts on this topic in the back of my mind, but now that I have tried to articulate them (without the use of AI), they are more fully formed than they were before I did that. If I were going to think about this more right now, I might ask AI to help me find some more articles and blogs on the subject.

novel writing software, Scrivener, and R Bookdown

This is a pretty niche post, but a couple years ago I briefly entertained a fantasy of becoming a novelist. After I tried to write a novel, my the wisdom of not quitting my day job was affirmed. But in the course of that, I briefly investigated software that novelists are using to organize their books and research. The most popular is called Scrivener. I was thinking though that it would be neat if someone would customize the R packages Markdown or Bookdown for writing, because then especially if you are writing non-fiction you could have all your data, analysis code, tables, figures, references etc. in one place along with your prose. This post describes a system that allows the author to actually combine the use of Scrivener and R Bookdown.

writing and thinking

This 2012 article in The Atlantic talks about the connection between writing and thinking. I think it’s spot on – the exact reason I write this blog is because that is how I think things through (well, this hasn’t been the greatest sentence structure ever, now has it?)

Fifty years ago, elementary-school teachers taught the general rules of spelling and the structure of sentences. Later instruction focused on building solid paragraphs into full-blown essays. Some kids mastered it, but many did not. About 25 years ago, in an effort to enliven instruction and get more kids writing, schools of education began promoting a different approach. The popular thinking was that writing should be “caught, not taught,” explains Steven Graham, a professor of education instruction at Arizona State University. Roughly, it was supposed to work like this: Give students interesting creative-writing assignments; put that writing in a fun, social context in which kids share their work. Kids, the theory goes, will “catch” what they need in order to be successful writers. Formal lessons in grammar, sentence structure, and essay-writing took a back seat to creative expression.

The catch method works for some kids, to a point. “Research tells us some students catch quite a bit, but not everything,” Graham says. And some kids don’t catch much at all. Kids who come from poverty, who had weak early instruction, or who have learning difficulties, he explains, “can’t catch anywhere near what they need” to write an essay. For most of the 1990s, elementary- and middle-­school children kept journals in which they wrote personal narratives, poetry, and memoirs and engaged in “peer editing,” without much attention to formal composition. Middle- and high-school teachers were supposed to provide the expository- and persuasive-writing instruction…

Some writing experts caution that championing expository and analytic writing at the expense of creative expression is shortsighted. “The secret weapon of our economy is that we foster creativity,” says Kelly Gallagher, a high-school writing teacher who has written several books on adolescent literacy. And formulaic instruction will cause some students to tune out, cautions Lucy Calkins, a professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College. While she welcomes a bigger dose of expository writing in schools, she says lockstep instruction won’t accelerate learning. “Kids need to see their work reach other readers … They need to have choices in the questions they write about, and a way to find their voice.”

I had a lot of formal instruction in how to diagram a sentence in both English and Latin, and how to arrange an argument in a very structured way. I don’t always write that way now, but I am glad I had that because it was essentially instruction in thinking and communicating in a logical way. I had essentially no instruction in creative writing, and that is actually something I regret and would like to try in the future.