Schrödinger's Chat

 It took me a while to come up with a name for this blog. 

Schrödinger's Chat(GPT) was the best I could do; pithy and punny, perhaps pretentious. But I do think that there is something to this. 

Schrödinger's Cat is a thought experiment which, for the purposes of this metaphor and this blog, explores the idea that two things can be true at the same time. (That's a bit of a bastardization, I know, but let's just go with it for now.) 

The case has been made to me over and over again that LLMs have a helpful purpose in the classroom (sometimes by people who are in the process of developing their own LLMs, ahem.) To some degree I can see this. LLMs can construct entire lesson and unit plans in a second They can proofread your report card comments. Heck, they can write your repot card comments! 

While this is true, it does give me some pause. I've always struggled to teach from other people's lesson plans. If I don't craft and plan the lesson myself, it feels a bit like I'm wearing someone else's shoes when I'm up in front of the the class trying to teach it. And yes, I can get it to write my report card comments, but... should I? 

As for the students, I can see real benefits for the kids who have gained the required knowledge and understanding but have difficulty expressing their ideas on the page. There are all kinds of learning differences which make constructing cohesive paragraphs a much greater challenge for some students than others, even if their level of understanding is the same. 

But then... how do I distinguish which ideas are actually theirs? How can I tell that the LLM has been used for structural clarity rather than idea generation? And what do I do with the category on the rubric that DEMANDS that I assess structural clarity in students' writing? 

That's what we have in this metaphorical box: an LLM that is simultaneously helpful and a hinderance, a revolution and a devolution, the answer to all of my students' problems and the problem with all of their answers. 

All right: that's enough blathering. School started this week, so it's on to the planning. I'm going to track my real-time progress, struggles, and realities of teaching Language and Literature in a ChatGPT world. Let's go.