The five-paragraph essay is the most common and obvious example of an intervention that actually discourages thinking, but there's many others, many of which I once employed because I thought I was helping students get better grades. bookshop.org/a/1793/97814...

I will add the following: our students lack the research skills required to audit an LLM essay for errors. They don’t arrive on campus with these skills; we teach it to them over four long years. So throwing freshmen in the deep end and saying “swim your way to a shore of rectitude” is folly.

For the 9s, I've seen lots of success with: Eleanor & Park; every day; All American Boys; The Kite Runner; The Boy in the Black Suit; and Walking in Two Worlds.

Haven't read but have heard good things about: Darius the Great Is Not OK; The Sun is Also A Star; and American Born Chinese.

We were inspired by the work of @amnesty.org in defending Indigenous rights, specifically with the Sami people of Norway. Fantastic mentor text!

www.amnesty.ie/fighting-to-...

Absolutely - analysis for the sake of analysis is stifling. I've been trying to incorporate reflection, multimodalities, and trying to emphasise that (IMHO) we should be teaching communication more than "English".

Voice in writing is hard to develop, and harder to justify as a fungible skill in our STEM-crazed society. I've always thought our voice as a writer is our inner voice to ourselves. I hate that we are subcontracting the challenge, and joy, of navigating our human experience to inhuman tech.

🧵/end

Anecdotally, I've noticed the following consistancies in the samples I've worked with over 3+ years of reading this slop:

- Always lists qualities in groups of 3
- Forces connections w/out evidence
- Qualifies with "may", "might", "could" (coward)
- Overuse of complex-compound sentences

🧵/6

"ChatGPT is informationally dense and uses content words more often."

It is a torrent of content over contexts or connections. It values technocratic lists data points over an actual iterative thinking process - because it doesn't think or feel! Only we can do that! Remember?

🧵/5

"ChatGPT texts are characterized by a maximization of nouns and adjectives over all other word classes [...] ChatGPT also avoids the use of adverbs and passives."

Not only is its syntax more limited, but it opts for blunt "formal English" even in contexts where that tone is inappropriate.

🧵/4

"We clearly see that all AI-written texts are much more similar to each other [...] than they are to human texts, which show far more pronounced patterns of register variation."

Human (aka real!) language embraces variation; AI embraces standaridzation and sterilization of content and form.

🧵/3

First - the assertion that language is what defines humanity, for, as Bertrand Russell quipped, "no matter how eloquently a dog may bark, he cannot tell you that his parents were poor but honest".

AI is not human and does not have language; only simulacra of the two.

🧵/2

Thank you @pattolivieri.bsky.social , as always, for your thoughtful leadership and support!