Teach Like A Desert Father

The ‘full desert‘

The inspirations for this blog are many. I have not felt the need to write for quite some time. I’ve been happily silent, content that I have little to add to what I’ve already said. Despite mounting evidence of an entirely natural, both personal and universal entropy, I regard myself as one residing in a purple patch of life. I am content and I know that I am content.

But I am heart-broken – there’s that. My arteries are corroded with sorrow since I received a poem sent to me unbidden by one of my students. The poem came via Teams Chat and came from a student I thought not given to writing poetry. As such, I read it with great interest and pleasure. Truth be told, it wasn’t exactly TS Eliot, but there was a philosophical quality to it that I thought the seed of something to come and I told him I thought it was a sincere expression and that I really appreciated it and that I would be interested in reading more of his writing, when it came.

The truth is that my immediate thought is that the poem had been written using Open AI’s ChatGPT. This thought was the first arrow. The pain of self-loathing that arose from the entertaining of this suspicion, this doubt was the second arrow. I had recently attended a poetry competition organised by a group of students and I knew that, from this moment on, I would in all likelihood never be able to freely enjoy listening to my students’ recitals of their original work without, from time to time, wondering whether indeed they had written their own work or whether AI had had a grubby, silicon hand in the poem’s creation.

We live in a world dominated by the tiny, pin-prick focus of the left brain as it ensures bodily survival with a blizzard of continuous calculation, categorisation and abstraction. Our small self is a danger-detector, a problem-solver and a corner-cutter. It is entirely natural that we should regard the saving of our labour as a goal worth pursuing: we pay other people to walk our dogs; we trust nurseries with our young, young children; I myself own and operate a dishwasher. I don’t like manually washing dishes and I love my dishwasher.

In the same way that I don’t like washing dishes, I know that I have students that don’t like writing assignments. Last month, I set an assignment to review an adaptation of a Shakespeare play. One of my students produced an excellent homework assignment that read as a loose paraphrase of a review that I requested several times from ChatGPT so that I could see if any patterns emerged in the AI-assisted writing. Patterns did emerge: the reviews produced by ChatGPT were more journalistic than academic – more focused on loose evaluation than literary analysis. Words like ‘showcase’ and ‘seminal’ and ‘archetypal’ cropped up in each of the versions that I requested. These words also cropped up in my student’s writing. I didn’t challenge the student. I didn’t have the heart to engage in an inquisition.

Now, when I set homework assignments across a variety of age-ranges the words ‘showcase’, ‘seminal’ and ‘archetypal’ pop up with depressing frequency. They have since leaked over into many students in-class, handwritten work.

I console myself that AI has somehow improved my students’ vocabulary, but I know, in the full desert of my heart, that AI has done nothing of the sort. AI has replaced my students’ efforts. It has eviscerated their imaginations. It has replaced their God-given right to access the greater part of their self with nothing more than a cursor dancing across a screen, farting out an approximation of what others wrote in a more naively creative and less brutal early Internet age.

And so I wonder what to do now, as a teacher in this new age of the automation of the imagination. Do I reduce every task to closed-book, in-class, hand-written with me proactively invigilating, ever on the prowl and ready to pounce on the slightest evidence of wearable tech, smartwatches, Google glasses? Or do I let the river of digitally-enhanced ‘content’ wash over me like cyber-sewage excreted by today’s latest Wintermute or Neuromancer?

I want governments to ban AI for one reason only: AI is already destroying trust between teachers and students and it is sucking the creative air out of young lungs. There is no debate to be had here – none of my usual nuanced equivocation. AI is a force for ill in the world. And I don’t see how it can be stopped. So, for the foreseeable future, I will need to accommodate the rising use of a technology that thieves intellectual property, masticates it and sends it paraphrased back into the digital documents ‘produced’ by young, time-pressed students. Every text produced by AI at the behest of a student is a potential synaptical connection lost to the cosmos. We are standing against an avalanche of mindlessness.

My instinct is to escape: to stop teaching, leave it to Khanmigo – students can learn from CD-ROMs, the Information Superhighway; students can revise, soggy in Sugata Mitra’s cloud. I want to go and live in Thoreau’s Walden.

But I know that Walden is bullshit. Thoreau’s form of escapism depended upon the kindness of family in much the same way that Isabel Paige’s off-grid living was actually just her living in the grounds of her parents’ farm waiting for the next box of supplies and popping back to her mum and dad’s HQ to charge her devices with unicorn farts. There’s no true escape and it’s right that there should be no true escape.

Again in truth, I don’t know what I am going to do, but I am going to stay in the classroom. I have chosen to draw inspiration from Moses the Black, Antony the Great and John the Dwarf, amongst many other Desert Fathers. I shall renounce but I shall not reject. I will stay, but I will create a space – a desert – in which something might be protected: creativity, imagination and genuine acquisition of knowledge. I don’t know how I am going to do this, but I am going to try.

The Desert Fathers moved from the Nile Delta in the late 3rd century in order to set up a community based on experiential living rather than rapidly ossifying doctrine. They were ascetics but were surprisingly forgiving and prone to saying wonderfully cynical things like ‘don’t follow your heart’. But, most inspiring for me, they renounced an abstraction and yet stayed in the vicinity of their prior communities (the desert wasn’t so remote from the Nile Delta as you might think – it was more like moving from Hoxton to the Green Belt).

And so I reject AI and I move myself into an inner ‘full desert’. I will continue to engage with the world and continue to transact the best way I have found: as a teacher.

But I now fully know my enemy. The Desert Fathers knew their enemy too. They were most forgiving of all sins, except one: the sin of preventing their neighbour from accessing his/her greater self. Anything that abstracted one from oneself; anything that alienated one from one’s ground of being… well, that was real evil. That was the one thing that angered them.

I know my enemy. My enemy is AI and I will do my utmost to allow my students to meet the world fully before AI packages the world for them in ones and zeroes.

This thesis is by no means settled, but the story begins here and it will be written by a full-blooded human teacher – an angry one at that.

I rise now, a desert rat.

The dishwasher’s done.