AI Discussions and the Secondary English Classroom

This week China announced its release of DeepSeek, a cheaper, faster, OpenAI alternative that has taken the world by surprise.  Educators are excited but nervous.  What does DeepSeek mean for the future of Artificial Intelligence (AI), and more importantly, what does this mean for education? 

As a high school English teacher, I think about AI often as our district has a “No AI Policy.” For me, this means I have to determine whether a student’s paper was written by AI. Usually when I ask, the answer is a yes. In the past I have held discussions with students like, “I’m sorry, the 9th grade on-level class never discussed Atticus Finch from To Kill a Mockingbird and toxic masculinity,” or “I’m sorry the 11th grade on-level class did not compare John Proctor from The Crucible to Huck Finn because we did not read Huckleberry Finn.” While some papers come in with obvious answers as to whether AI was used, others are not so clear.  

What is an English teacher to do? How does an educator determine whether AI was used especially as these programs evolve? After living through a couple of years of the AI policy, our department has come up with a few best practices that are worth considering.

First of all, look for the mistakes.  Mistakes in punctuation, word choice, mistakes that high school students make and generative AI does not. High school freshmen are newbies at cheating.  They haven’t learned how to write effective prompts that will tailor for writing style and voice.  They just cut and paste the writing prompt into ChatGPT.  They often don’t even read the response it gives.  Instead, they just copy and paste whatever the program spits out. 

Secondly, analyze voice. I prefer the voice of a slightly awkward high school student fumbling with word choice to the elegant sophistication of AI. Much of the writing I have seen from AI sounds the same: elevated, educated, and boring.  I like the little jokes that kids plant into their essays and their quirky anecdotes. That is what makes writing original, creative, and special.  Who wants to read the same essay 120 times?  

Create assignments that will not allow them to use ChatGPT. Make the prompt so unique that the program can not effectively respond to it. Give them unique quotes to use, or ask the student to incorporate stories from their own lives. There are little tricks we can do to make their writing original. 

Write on Google docs. This allows the teacher to download a chrome extension called Draftback that will replay the actions the student took when typing the essay.  The teacher can watch the students type and delete.  It shows how many edits they made. Or, it shows them copying and pasting entire essays.  One student was even caught deleting the verbiage, “This was created by generative AI.”  

Some more experienced teachers believe in going back to basics;  the students should write everything by hand. Have you read a student’s handwriting lately?  Not only is it incredibly difficult to read, but also many student accommodations require that the student use a word processing program. All of these suggestions are useful, but add to the teacher workload. 

But, maybe the best of all of these recommendations is to embrace AI; AI is here to stay. Educators need to learn to use it as a tool like spell check.  In fact, my district has just given the teachers access to  Magic School ai. This educational AI is pretty impressive from the outset: the lesson-planning tools, the quiz generator, and essay grader just to name a few. Some of the tasks that teachers regularly do are now available at the touch of a button. In order to test the program efficiency, this week I will upload my writing prompt and rubric in the MagicSchool classroom for the generative AI to grade my students' essays. It certainly will make my life easier if AI can grade papers well. I find it ironic that some students will have AI write their papers, and I will have AI grade them.  

No one knows what DeepSeek means for the field of education. Instead of speculating, let's dive in and start using this technology in our classrooms to find the cure for cancer, diagnose diseases, and elevate our children's intellectual curiosity by taking the mundane tasks off their plates.  So, DeepSeek, show us what you have.