After I posted about a computer program that can apparently write student essays better than most students, teacher Mamie Krupczak Allegretti posted the following response:
Writing is more than just setting words down on paper in a “good” essay. If we just want a well worded essay from a student by any means possible, then, sure, let the students use a computer to do it for them. But writing teaches one to sort out thoughts, expand ideas, analyze facts and ideas. Isn’t this what we want students to learn? Writing is also a vehicle for the spirit to come through a human being. It is an art. Many of the great writers have said they they do not consciously write, but their spirit or psyche uses them and writing as a vehicle to make itself known. So. If we want to lose a part of our humanity, we will allow computers to take over every function of a human being. And then where will we find our meaning as human beings?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Beautifully said, Mamie!
Agree.
Writing is also more than essays. The best education programs have writing throughout the curriculum, just as their is reading throughout.
I’ve come to believe that writing is an area of math education that has been neglected.
A sentence can equal a math equation can equal a graph. We generally teach that in one direction when it comes to the writing part. That is, students learn to decode the sentence to form an equation, but do not learn to translate the equation into a sentence.
Agree, Steve!
there is —
please correct
Writing also aides in reading comprehension. This is where students learn about text cohesiveness. They practice using pronouns, ellipses, phrases and various conjunctions. They learn about sentence order and thought progression. They learn about and use text forms, argumentative, narrative and expository. Writing is the key to to learning critical thinking skills. The computer can help students with spelling but cannot judge student or text cohesiveness. This needs a human reader.
In order to write well, one must read. In order to read very well, one must write. MOST of the learning–of structures and techniques–takes place below the level of conscious awareness. However, a good teacher, in a tutorial setting, can greatly accelerate the process by making parts of it explicit.
If you wonder why an afterbirth of the beast of the apocalypse like Donald Trump can be elected president, look at people’s writing. People’s writing is a reflection of the character of their thinking. Large numbers of people are unable to write or think at all coherently. Most people’s writing demonstrates that their heads are full of chaos, confusion, misinformation. Learning to write teaches people to think.
Why do so many never learn to write? Part of it is probably lack of general intelligence, but most of the reason is that English teachers have FAR TOO MANY STUDENTS. To learn to write well, one must write A LOT, and one must get A LOT of specific feedback and practice revising A LOT–a lot more than one teacher can do if he or she has 180 or more students, as is typical of middle-school or high-school teachers.
A more reasonable ratio, for the teaching of writing and reading, is about 1:6.
Not just English teachers. By design, the English classes at my school are far smaller than my social studies classes, but I probably have the kids do more writing. And I have over 200 students
I had at my last school 7 classes, each with at least 30 kids.
Yep. 35 or so per class in Utah.
I know our English teachers see 150 kids a day, as did I as a history teacher.
Good morning Diane and everyone,
Thank you for posting this Diane. A short while ago, I actually heard Margaret Atwood discussing the very idea that is contained in my post. Of course, we use writing for many reasons. I often think about the uses of technology and how it is changing our idea of what it means to be human. It’s so insidious that we hardly ever take the time to question what impact technology is having on our lives, our consciousness, and our energy systems as human beings. For example, you may have noticed that I always begin a post here with, “Good morning Diane and everyone.” I do that to remind myself that even though I don’t know everyone here personally, what I say has an impact on actual human beings. I often ask myself WHY I am posting what I post. The power and awesomeness of technology often fools us into believing that it is the epitome of human progress. But do we ever stop and question and ask ourselves what we are living for? If we can make trips to the Louvre or other countries simply by putting on virtual goggles, does that take the place of the actual experience? Why? If getting thousands of “likes” on social media is what I’m aiming for, WHY is that? Do I want to spend hours of my life (the ONLY life I get, by the way) inputting data into a computer, scrolling through senseless websites, or playing addictive games? It goes on and on. So, when we take pride in saying that computers can now do writing, artwork, and a multitude of other things FOR us, especially in the creative realm, we have to ask WHY we want that. But, you caught me on an especially reflective day. 🙂 In terms of teaching writing, I’ve often thought that a great high school class would be to write a research paper all year long – to revise one piece of writing all year. That would really teach kids what writing is about! Thinking, researching, writing, revising, revising and more revising….
Dear Mamie,
Thank you as ever for a thoughtful comment. What an idea: to write one research paper all year long. That would surely foil the AI writing programs.
You made me stop and wonder why I blog, why I exchange comments with people I’ve never met. I don’t really know why. Partly, it’s because I have always loved to communicate. When I was a child, I thought I might grow up to be a reporter. That was my dream. Life intervened. So what about computers and their capacity to do whatever we do. A computer can report the news faster and possibly better than I can. What it can’t do is decide which News is most important to which readers and it can’t bring perspective to the news of the day.
That’s probably not a good reason to spend so much time writing to strangers who feel like friends.
I could be reading instead.
I am so, so grateful for your curation, Diane! Thank you!!!!!
Thank you Diane. So, you have found a way to live your unlived life. And that’s a wonderful thing. For all of us.
Another brilliant and compassionate post, Mamie. Thank you.
My fellow English teachers did this at the small rural high school where I taught. It was an incremental process that lasted parts of two years. It included guided trips to a local community college library and guidance through the process of research and writing. Then top down reform came, and all that went away
A tragedy, and one example of the nationwide debasement of curricula and pedagogy that happened as a result of the Common [sic] Core [sic]
Mamie,
Our children attended public high schools that had National History Day as an extracurricular. Students who participate in that work on one project all year. Their project can be a paper, a website, a display, a video, or a performance. Other than the paper, it can be a group project.
All submissions follow the annual theme — this year’s is Frontiers in History: People, Places, Ideas — which is broad enough to encompass topics in a variety of areas. States often have special awards for “best on a women’s topic,” “best on a military topic,” “best on a topic pertaining to this state.”
The program stresses the importance of research. I have seen papers with an annotated bibliography with more than a hundred sources. The program also stresses primary sources, so not everything from the web.
Our district in Iowa made this mandatory for seventh graders for a number of years. They weren’t required to enter the competition, but were required to complete a project.
Mamie is 100% correct! I’ve always considered teaching writing as a form of empowerment. That’s why it has been integral in my art education curriculum. Just like the arts, writing gives students a unique chance to express themselves and develop critical thinking and communication skills in tangible ways that will foster lifelong learning.
No more sentences that mean things!
Thirty Days in the Hole????
Learning to write critically and logically also increases reading skills. Reading isn’t the only way we become better readers.
Back in the 1980s, I read books and took workshops that focused on how we learn and heard/read that writing and reading are both powerful tools to increase reading skills. Along the way, I also leaned that we do not all learn the same way.
After that I planned all of the lessons I taught to my students to have elements covering all the different learning modalities. The students heard the stories we read in class orally (from tapes I recorded or bought), while they read silently. Then they wrote essays about the plots and/or characters using the conflicts the characters faced to determine what kind of person the character was based on how they handled the conflicts in the stories.
I taught my students that they had to support their opinions with facts. I’m leaving a lot of details out (the lessons I developed were complicated) but I think you get the idea.
According to the results of annual standardized tests, the district told the English department staff at a department meeting some time in the late 1990s, that my students improved their reading and writing skills more than any other students at the same grade level in the school district where I taught, year-after-year as far back as the district kept test data tracking student progress in each teacher’s classes.
If we keep turning every mundane and routine task over to smart devices to do our thinking for us, we are going to start losing the use of our brains and evolve backwards. Studies already show this is happening because of smart phones and other smart devices that have replaced so many mundane tasks we once did ourselves.
Brain scans have already revealed that the more people watch screens and rely on these so-called smart devices, that some areas of their brains are shrinking and not as active, to put it simply.
Computers don’t understand any of the stuff they produce.
Because of this, there is no real meaning behind any of it.
It’s all skin deep. There is absolutely nothing below the surface.
It looks great, but that’s about it.
While some artists might be into simply looking great, I seriously doubt that is what motivates most of them.
And the truly great works of art (literature, painting, sculpture, poetry, etc) are not simply skin deep. They make connections on a much deeper level, something computers can’t do now and may never be able to do (because they simply do not share the human experience , with all that that entails : emotions, physical interactions with the world around them, etc)
It’s a cliche, but beauty really is more than skin deep.
And so is reality.
amen
The internet and other media are already filled with meaningless crap.
And the meaningless stuff produced by AI (chatbots, painting bots, etc) is just going to compound the problem exponentially.
And since a lot of this AI produced stuff is so good/convincing, one won’t be able to tell what is meaningful and genuine and what is not.
Perhaps the most hilarious thing of all is that ChatGPT(which writes the essays some computer “scientists” are gushing over) is actually trained on the very large amount of text found on the internet, and since it is virtually certain that a large fraction of that is meaningless crap, even if one did not know how it worked, one would have to be a complete fool to believe that ChatGPT is producing something particularly meaningful.
It’s hard to say who is dumber. ChatGPT or the people at OpenAI who coughed it up. These folks plug and chug, just like the bots they are producing.
AI (artificial idiocy) produced by RI (real idiocy)
Not incidentally, the flood of cheap imitation crap produced by AI is going to cheapen all the genuine stuff produced by human artists because many people won’t know the difference and will figure “why should I pay hundreds of even thousands of dollars for a painting or other art work if I can buy a high quality print on canvas for $20?
This has already been true for some time since computers have been generating fake paintings from photographs , but with the recently released neural net based painting generators , this is going to get a lot worse.
Most human artists will find it virtually impossible to “compete” and to make a living.
People are concerned about robots taking over the world and exterminating the human race, but long before that happens, they are going to cheapen the lives of most humans and put them in the poor house.
And the most unfortunate part is we are all letting this happen and doing virtually nothing about it. We are giving the techies a free hand to loose all their toys on the public with virtually no control over any of them.
And very few of the techies even give a damn — or even realize there is a problem –, so it’s foolish to expect that they will police themselves.
Not jncidentally, most computer scientists have pretty much given up on trying to figure out what human intelligence actually is and trying to implement that on a computer.
Now, they almost exclusively just train neural networks on huge quantities of data in the hope that the outcome will “appear” intelligent, which it often does.
But it is only appearance and the “intelligence” is highly restricted by the data that were used to train it, which means the “intelligent system” might react completely randomly when it encounters data outside the original training set. That makes self driving cars that are based purely on neural networks particularly worrisome. Tesla FSD is one such system and it has already shown itself to do wildly unpredictable things which , were it operating without a driver , would certainly kill the passengers and others.
It’s actually kind of funny.
The AI “researchers” have become almost as automatic/robotic as the neural nets they produce.
!!!!!
https://dawnproject.com/dawn-project-safety-test-tesla-full-self-driving-runs-down-child-mannequin-in-school-crosswalk/
Here’s another example of the extreme danger posed by Tesla FSD, which obviously dies not “understand” the meaning of “one way” and “road closed” — because it can’t understand, because it doesn’t understand anything.
https://dawnproject.com/new-dawn-project-safety-tests-reveal-that-tesla-full-self-driving-fails-to-obey-road-closed-and-do-not-enter-signs/
A couple months ago, I read a news story about a man who had drowned in a river because he was directed over a bridge that was “out” by his GPS. The concrete barriers had been removed for some reason and it was at night so he probably couldn’t see the bridge was missing.
But imagine how frequently this will occur with Teslas once they go “full self driving”. Or imagine how frequently they will drive the wrong way on the freeway because they didn’t understand the sign that said WRONG WAY on the entrance ramp
Tesla FSD is absolute junk.
https://dawnproject.com/new-dawn-project-safety-tests-show-tesla-fsd-still-runs-down-children/
The so called “software engineers” who produced it are a disgrace.
Here’s another problem that all electric cars are susceptible to, but that can be particularly deadly for full self driving ones: computer malfunction.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/javier-rodriguez-says-his-tesla-car-computer-froze-at-83-mph-on-freeway-in-southern-california
What happens to a self driving car going 80 on the freeway when the computer malfunction r even dies?
What happens when the operating system freezes? (As operating systems do from time to time on all computers)
When the main computer (the BCM) failed on my 2003 Saturn, everything still worked except the gauges and indicators on the dashboard, which are unnecessary for bringing the car to a safe stop.
The same cannot be said for a Tesla, especially not one operating in full self driving mode.
Here is yet another example of a supposedly “intelligent system” that makes errors on a regular basis that have a high cost (jailing of innocent people): Facial recognition
https://www.commondreams.org/news/facial-recognition-technology
As with self driving cars and many other AI systems, there are almost no laws or regulations/controls over this. And it is actually highly UNreliable for African American faces in particular.
But of course, the computer “scientists” (only in name) who develop this stuff never have to deal with any of the ” issues” after it is deployed on a massive scale. They have long since moved on to the next cool thing.
Incidentally, when the main computer failed on my car, i was able to drive it around for some time until I was able to make an appointment to get it replaced.
The car ran fine and all of the stuff worked — except the stuff like gas gauge, RPMs and speedometer (but who needs that, anyway?)
There is actually an advantage.
If you are stopped for speeding and are asked “Do you know how fast you were going?” You can honestly say “No because my speedometer does not work but I have an appointment to get the computer fixed be t week”
Writing is a deeply personal experience. We write to express thoughts, opinions, explanations and, of course, feelings. A computer responds to programming, but does not think or feel anything. A machine can imitate or attempt to duplicate linguistic pattens, but it is incapable of producing human thought or feeling. We should not be fooled by simulations of the human experience. Writing is directly connected to thinking, and thinking is an integral part of learning. I can honestly say that most of what I remember from university is the result of having written a paper or a response to something I read and thought about.
All I can say is–Bless all English teachers, who have to deal with more essay writing than other teachers. I’m so glad I’m retired & don’t have to deal with the technological craziness out there today! Back in the 60’s & 70’s, you could just go to college taking Liberal Arts courses–Philosophy, Art History, Creative Writing, World History, Political Science, Debate & Speech. You graduated with some useless major, but you had the critical thinking skills, reading & writing abilities, along with a well rounded historical knowledge, that companies would still hire you because they knew that you could easily be trained & adapt to whatever job skills you would need to learn.
All the so-called “useless” courses (art, philosophy, literature, foreign languages, psychology, history) helped me to find out who I am as a human being and how to find my own way in life without being constrained by dogmas and “shoulds” imposed by others. If you don’t know who you are, the world will surely tell you. To me, the real value of an education is to be found there – in how it supports, encourages and beckons you to become who you are in your deepest self and in your relationship to the world and others. You may not find it in our institutional education but that’s the real meaning of an education to me. When your job no longer excites, when the vicissitudes of fate have their way, when the money no longer satisfies, where will you turn? For me, a broad liberal arts education gave me the foundation to begin to answer that question through literature, poetry, reading, art, study, and the sheer joy of ideas. Money is for survival but what do I survive for? That’s a question everyone has to answer for himself.
How very much I appreciate your wisdom!
All the meaningless AI generated crap is going to make it even harder for humans to find meaning because the truly meaningful books, paintings, and other products of the human imagination will get completely lost in a sea of meaningless trash generated by AI bots.
This is already happening on social media , but, unless something is done very quickly , AIC (AI crap) is going to flood — and cheapen — virtually every human artistic realm in the very near future.
It will make the fake news postings on Facebook in the lead up to the 2016 election look like a child’s game in comparison.
Companies today do not want invest in workers today. That’s one reason for the push for “career ready” workers. They want to push skills training into the high schools and colleges.
A Men!
Writing is just one media. What “English” teachers do is help students develop critical thinking and communication skills – rhetoric. Writing may be obsolete anyway. Presentations of many kinds involving various forms of communication and persuasion are the future.
The same skills apply to the PP deck as to an essay. Training in one is training in the other. It must tell a story. It must have an overall, discernable shape. It must support a thesis. It must capture and build attention. It must have valuable takeaways.
It’s actually a travesty that teachers and others already feel obligated to “justify” the teaching of writing to folks who claim that automated writing generators will effectively obviate the need for humans to learn to write.
The people who claim the latter don’t understand the value of learning to write and don’t understand how the AI (neural-net based) essay generators work (hint: it has nothing to do with actual intelligence)
So justifying writing to the latter crowd is just a complete waste of time.
What people should really be focussed on is how all this AI generated garbage is going to impact human communications on a grand scale. To say that it is not going to be positive overall is an extreme understatement.
I can see the new, reduced ed-deformer curriculum now. They’ve already de-emphasized non-math/ELA subjects — I’m guessing cuz that’s what NAEP & PISA focus on, and deformers are all about competition between schools [“accountability” ( = privatization)]. They’ve de-emphasized cursive [cuz you don’t need it to take computerized tests?] Oops: now we don’t need writing— even for being “career-ready!”– there goes half of ELA (& a third of the 3 R’s!). They can call it “Math and ELAEW [English Language Arts – Except Writing”].
It’s similar to writing music. You can set up a well thought out computer program that will write in specific genres or even cross genres. And that’s impressive. But that’s like writing a piece for a Music Composition assignment. It’s different when you’re alone and writing about one you’ve loved who’s now passed. Or with your band mates, bouncing ideas off of each other when someone brings in the beginnings of a song. From whence creativity springs: opening the door to the muse.
Even if nothing ground breaking comes from the chosen creative form; it’s good for the soul and mind. Ms Allegretti nailed it. Nice post. 🙂
All wonderful comments to a wonderful post. One more thing writing needs: time. Time to think, time to get things wrong and work them out.
Those who have read my posts in the past, will have already heard this, but it bears repeating for those who have not:
As the tech guy for our six sites, I ushered in the era of technology; applying for, receiving, and implementing large scale financial technology grants. We had everything the industry had to offer in our schools.
What started out as a fantastic tool for the teachers has gradually flipped to the opposite. The industry now wants the teacher to serve more as a facilitator or monitor…subservient to the supplied subscription based software programs.
I don’t say this lightly and it’s not conjecture. I’ve watched this develop from the beginning. I and others have and continue to fight it.
Similar to the Industrial Revolution, the Tech Revolution is a major source of revenue. Those who have and are continuing the creative process are brilliant. The developers and marketers know how to effectively target their audiences. And the companies and investors want to see continued profits through growth.
There’s big money pushing it…and the loss of what might be termed “creativity” or “humanity” is either a topic of debate in that community or not on the radar at all.
Writing engages the whole brain, planning, sequencing, the physical action of writing (cursive is better than a computer). It allows the brain to explore, to investigate, to compare, to imagine, to evaluate. Einstien said “Imagination is more important than knowledge.
My students were very upset when we stopped teaching cursive (and handwriting in general). I spoke to the word processing workshop facilitators about this and they said that positioning the mouse arrow would give them the fine motor skills that they needed.
🤜😟🤛
Gitapik, that’s sad.
Yes it is.
I volunteered to be in charge of the book room. Ordering, organizing, distributing, and discarding of books and curriculum. The admins (under Bloomberg) told me to stop ordering and to throw all the handwriting books out, along with an excellent remedial reading program we’d been using for years.
I kept originals of all and would make copies. We’d do lessons on the sly. But admin got wind of it. Told me they’d burn the books if I didn’t stop. That was that.
Honestly: you can’t MAKE this stuff up.
Learning cursive is valuable for reasons that have nothing to do with writing.
It really is an art form in itself.
I absolutely loved writing in cursive when I was a kid and spent hours sculpting perfect letters.
I am pretty sure that this later turned into a love for drawing which much later turned into a love for painting.
Unfortunately, I eventually turned to printing since my cursive became progressively worse.
But I believe what I learned is still in every drawing and painting I do as an adult.
It’s a real shame that kids don’t learn cursive any more.
And I can still picture the cursive letters in the lesson book after all these decades.
I bet if I really tried, I could still produce nearly perfect letters without even looking at a book.
It’s like riding a bike and a lot of other stuff you learned in school that you never really forget even though you think you did
It comes quickly back, especially when you are again exposed to it.
It’s definitely an art form.
And more:
In the world of special education; working with kids who had severe emotional problems and ADHD, it was an island of peace and security. The kids really loved that time of focusing on a physical task that produced concrete results which could be measured, over time, by just looking back in the workbook.
Bloomberg, Gates, and the like have no business in education. It’s too diverse. They’re like computers. Everything sorted out neatly in uniform rows that can be easily quantified and qualified.
Hello Joseph,
If you listen to many creative people (and scientists), they will tell you that it’s often NOT rational thinking at all that is the genesis of their inventions, etc. It is during the times when they are relaxed state or even in dreams that their most creative and innovative ideas come. We have this idea that what we call the “rational,” thinking mind is in control of everything innovative that we do. But it’s not that way at all. I suggest reading Iain McGilchrist’s The Matter With Things or The Master and His Emissary. 🙂
Physicist Roger Penrose believes that some thoughts are actually not computational which literally means they can’t be produced by a computer running an algorithm.
Penrose’s idea is certainly an outlier , particularly within the computer “science” community,shere the standard stance is that the human brain is just a complex computer doing calculations, but Penrose has had other “wild” ideas that turned out to be correct (the one about black holes for which he got the Nobel Prize in physics), so who knows?
Interestingly, Penrose has actually described how he had the idea about black hole singularities for which he got the Nobel
Prize.
He was crossing a street with a colleague who was talking about something completely unrelated when Penrose has a sudden feelng of elation, whose source he could not even put his finger on at the time.
It was only later after he had gone over many thoughts in his head that he realized that he had completely solved the mathematical problem he had been working on.
This is a fairly common story told by scientists and inventors and I have had similar shape moments (although certainly not on the level of Penrose’s ideas) when ideas came go me all at once.
Einstein also described a similar experience he had which turned out to be the basis for his theory of gravity.
He had the thought of freely falling and realized that he would feel no gravity at all.
From this one idea came his entire theory of general relativity, which so far has passed every experiment .
The brain is NOT a computer, was not created like a computer and does not function like a computer. This is one of the most erroneous, reductive, insidious and harmful ideas that permeates our society today.
I personally don’t know enough about the brain to have an opinion either way..
Even neuroscientists still know almost nothing about the details of how the brain works.
Hi Poet,
Putting aside everything you know and don’t know intellectually about the brain and its function (and leaving scientism aside for a moment), does it resonate with you that the brain which is organic would have the same functioning as human-made computer? Does it feel right to you that the human body is only a machine like a man-made machine as we are so often used to hearing? As much as this view is foisted upon us, I think we know intuitively that we don’t have computers in our heads and that our bodies aren’t machines. And we can see this in our own experience as well. If I put a laptop in the middle of the woods, it doesn’t smell the scent of the trees or hear the birds singing or delight in the colors of the leaves. In our collective worship of science and technology, we forget that as living beings we cannot be reduced to such a restrictive and mechanical essence. I think this mechanistic world view is something we have to question and will question more as the so-called progress of technology continues to split us off from our interior life. You don’t have to answer….just think about it. 🙂
A computer can be successfully programmed to calculate the concept that all things in life are one. That, at the very least, our molecules are constantly interacting with all the physical beings, shapes, and forms surrounding us.
But a computer will never be able to experience that reality. The beauty, simplicity, and fullness of it. Nor will it ever be able to manifest the inspiration and genius that those moments of clarity may engender.
The revolution in technology is similar to the Industrial Revolution. Some very brilliant and creative people came up with ideas that were extremely useful and marketable. Thar’s gold in them thar hills!…and the developers, marketers, corporations, and investors are mining them to the fullest.
Part of that marketing campaign is to convince the public that the product is essential and actually superior to life before its existence. Big money pushing its weight around.
Ugh. That and Trump Grump on a Tuesday morning. Time to take a walk…