My Current Thinking on Artificial Intelligence

There are no reliable figures for how many students use A.I., just stories about how everyone is doing it.Illustration by Tameem Sankari -(courtesy of the New Yorker)

I find myself using Artificial Intelligence more and more. I am using it as a thought partner, fact checker, editor, researcher (no more Google Searches), idea and question generator, etc. It is amazing how fast I and millions of others have gone from no AI use to having it become a constant companion. I read in the article, “Everyone Is Using AI for Everything. Is That Bad?” New York Times Special – June 16, 2025, that Chat GPT is the sixth largest website on Earth and 43% of Americans in the workforce use generative AI.

I am also seeing an increase in students using AI in their learning, and more concerning, in completing class assignments. K-12 international schools and universities are trying to figure out what this means for teaching and learning. We can’t ban it and so we need to figure out how teachers and students can use it effectively. I use Anthropic’s Claude and I see they, like Chat GPT and others are marketing to universities (Claude for Education). Our school, the Tashkent International School limits the students to use Magic School who has partnered with Anthropic in protecting academic integrity, privacy, and most importantly, was designed by educators for educators. Faculty can also use Google’s Gemini and Notebook LM because it is integrated into our Google Suite for Education and protects privacy.

I recently read “The End of the Essay: What comes after AI destroys college writing?” by Hua Hsu, a New Yorker Staff Writer and English Professor at Bard College (New York). He reports on AI use at the university level and features findings from interviews with current students and professors. Professors are taking measures to limit students using AI to complete academic tasks.

  • Share time-stamped version histories of their Google Docs.
  • Design written assignments that had to be completed in-person over multiple sessions.
  • Reintroduce the good old “blue books” that I remember from my university days in the late 1980s. Students wrote essays or answered questions in testing booklets handed to them from the teacher at the start of the exam session.
  • Some professors are considering going back to oral exams (“Maybe go all the way back to 450 BC”)
  • Use software like GPTZero, Copyleaks, and Originality.ai like we used Turnitin. I Turnitin is adding AI detection services as well.

One professor uses an in-class writing assignment on the first day to use as a basis to measure future assignments to check for AI use. The example cited was write a 200-word analysis of the opening paragraph of Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man”. Hsu believes in “passage-identification” blue book exams, in which students name and contextualize excerpts of what they’ve read in class. He says, “Know the text and write about it intelligently, that was a way of honoring their autonomy without being a cop.”

It is a great article and has so many points that I want to keep for future reference. Below are my takeaways from the Hsu’s article:

  1. We use Google and Grammarly to improve our writing, one could consider AI is just another productivity tool.
  2. A Harvard undergraduate conducted an approved experiment that used Chat GPT to write papers in seven courses. AI scored a 3.57 GPA, a little below the school’s average.
  3. Deborah Brandt professor emerita at UW Madison, uses the term “mass writing” to describe our era. She is referring to emails, texts, Instagram posts, blog posts, chats, etc. We write a lot all day long.
  4. College students now spend an estimated 15 hours per week on academic students as compared to 24 hours a week back in the early 1960s.
  5. A Harvard dean said students feel compelled to find distinction outside of the classroom (internships) because they are largely indistinguishable within it (grade inflation).
  6. Hsu refers to Anthropic’s “Education Report: How University Students Use Claude“. It shows about half of the usage is “collaborative” while the other half is “direct” output creation and problem solving.
  7. A few years ago, educational experts were telling all students to learn coding, now everyone is encouraged to develop “soft skills” since AI can do all computational work for us.

“The ability to write original and interesting sentences will become only more important in a future where everyone has access to the same AI assistants.” – Hua Hsu – New Yorker – July 7/14, 2025 issue

I am excited about AI and think it will raise the level of teaching and learning! It will force teachers to not assign generic essay assignments or busy work, because students should rightly, use AI because it could be considered a wast of time. Teachers will have to figure out engaging activities that bring insights students can use in their lives. It also makes all of us more efficient in analyzing data and research and hopefully, raises what is possible “to make a positive difference”.

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Latest Reading: The Smartest Kids in the World and How They Got That Way

During the February Break I read the book, “The Smartest Kids in the World and How They Got That Way” by Amanda Ripley. Ripley is an investigative journalist who has written for The Atlantic and Time, among other magazines. The book follows three American high school students on foreign exchange programs in South Korea, Finland, and Poland. The author chose to compare the educational systems of the USA with those three countries because they scored better than the USA on the 2012 PISA. She was looking for why those three countries’ students, do better on the PISA than US teenagers.

I would like to learn more about the PISA tests, but at this point, I feel they must be a pretty good indicator to what ninth grade students know, and to predict their future academic and perhaps career success. She writes, “PISA demanded fluency in problem solving and the ability to communicate; in other words, the basic skills I needed to do my job and take care of my family in a world choked with information and subject to sudden economic change.”

I didn’t agree with all of Ripley’s views, but the book was an interesting and valuable read and I recommend it to all parents, teachers, and administrators. She concludes that it is not one thing or one way that educational systems produce students that show improvement or score high on the PISA exam. Each country featured, did it slightly differently. I thought the best system was Finland. Their key is to only select the best students to go into teaching. It is difficult and prestigious to get into a College of Education in Finland. In comparison, there are too many teachers produced by universities in the US and most have very low admission standards. Many schools of education in the US accept students with below average SAT scores. She refers to leadership guru Jim Collins’s view in Good to Great, that having a great vision without great employees, makes the vision irrelevant. Finland has the smartest students going into teaching and hence, they have good schools. They also have a comprehensive exit exam for students, another characteristic Ripley shows improves PISA scores. The tests takes three weeks and students analyze difficult texts and produce long essays.

South Korea has the “Iron Child” mentality to get their students to score high on the PISA. Korean parents are like Educational Coaches and drill their children at home in mathematics. They also send their children to “hagwon” schools, which are private tutoring companies that operate in the evenings, sometimes until the late evenings. Korean students go to school all day and night. The society also places a big deal on the comprehensive exam, with flights shutting down and traffic stopping on the morning of the test to ensure a quiet testing environment.

Finally with Poland, recent educational reforms put rigor front and central in schools and more was demanded of the students. They also extended mandatory schooling for all students, mandating school for all 15 year olds before many of them go to vocational training. Ripley also described the freedom both Polish and Finnish teenagers have during the school day and in the evenings. They are expected to develop learning habits and autonomy at an earlier age than American teenagers.

All three systems spend much less per student than the US schools. US schools Ripley believes spend money on technology, facilities, and sports (and other extra curricular classes) and teachers and parents do not insist on academic rigor and value the child’s self esteem over having them learn from failure and work harder. She also discusses the disparities in education in all three systems between the rich and poor. Ripley does not believe sports and the arts should be eliminated in US schools, but less emphasis should be placed on them.

The book got me thinking about my current school, the International School of Belgrade. Our rigor is put in the curriculum through the International Baccalaurate, which Ripley mentions favorably in the book. The IB features exit exams with high standards and students are compared against other students from around the world as they complete high school. The IB is also adding eAssessments after grade 10, as a further check on the progress of our students.

Her thoughts on mathematics and the critical role it plays in the lives of people also slightly changed my views. Research shows a direct correlation to math proficiency and future academic success and career earnings. Mathematics forces one to think logically and because so much of today’s jobs require data management, math is absolutely necessary for all students. Perhaps not at the highest levels, but all students should take the highest math classes they possibly can. She mentions that students work up to expectation and a school’s culture, should insist on academic rigor.

There is also chapters on how parents can help their children. She says that it is less important to help out the PTA or attend soccer games, but to demand rigor from their children. She specifically advises the following:

  • For younger children, read to your children six nights per week. For older students, talk with them about their day and about the news of the world.
  • Let their children make mistakes and then get right back to work.
  • Teach them good habits and autonomy. Hold them to a high standard, supporting rigor in schools. Teach them the lessons of hard work, persistence, integrity, and consequences and those lessons will serve them well in the decades to come.
  • One family took their children to a book store on a regular Friday night ritual. Get them in the habit of reading deeply every day, and parents should read books to serve as a model for them.

Finally she mentions the role of the principal and/or director of the school. He/she is the key person in the school, and the act of selecting, training, and retaining the best teachers for a particular school is the most important function of the leader. It got me thinking of revising my methods of looking for teachers and I will look deeper into their university programs. She also suggested to watch them teach a lesson before hiring to get a better sense if they can do the job.

Although she is critical of US schools in general, she does cite many instances where US schools are doing well. The book is not 100% US-bashing. I highly recommend this thought provoking book for anyone interested in education. Here is a link to a book reading by Amanda Ripley at the Politics and Prose Bookstore in Washington DC in August of 2013.

 

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“Sabermetrics Comes to the Classroom”

Standford University Professor, Daphne Koller in this video introduces her startup, Coursera.  Coursera is an innovative approach to on line learning. On the site are on line courses from top universities, but with quizzes and assignments added to each lesson. They are all free and anyone can go through the course, submit the work, and earn a certificate at the end. There are no credits, but everything is graded and you can interact with others taking the course. There are courses starting throughout the year.

The most exciting part for me, not only do I get to go back to university, but also, they Dr. Koller and her colleagues are collecting data on how people process knowledge. Every correct or incorrect answer given on a quiz is analyzed and millions of data point help them understand how students perceive lectures, examples, etc.

In a traditional classroom, a teacher grades a set of exams of say, at ISB, a maximum of 30 papers. Often, trends appear that makes a teacher think about how they presented information. For example, when I was teaching science, a student once misinterpreted percentage error as percentage of air. 

Now with Coursera, instead of a class of 30, there are thousands of sample answers. Also, with on line learning, every question and answer can be entered into a database. What an amazing opportunity for educators to learn more about how students think and interpret or misinterpret lectures, presentations, and examples.

Technology is changing how we can do things. In one of my favorite sports, baseball, the video analysis of every single pitch and swing of the bat, has changed how much evidence coaches and managers can collect on player performance. These new statistics derived from the new technology are called “sabermetrics.” With Coursera, sabermetrics are now coming to education.

The list of courses  is long and I hope I can find the time to take a course or two.

 

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