Katherine Parrish

When I returned to teaching in the high school English classroom this year, I had expected, “how do we deal with ChatGPT” to be part of a department, if not school, missive. But at my school, it hasn’t been mentioned at all.

I’ll do some recon a bit later this month.

I introduced the option of using ChatGPT, or other models like it, for my perennial first “get to know you” assignment.

I ask my students to write an introductory e-mail to me, the body of which should be 200-250 words long. Previously, while introducing the assignment, I have made a big show of the fact that they needn’t be entirely truthful in their assignment. While this assignment is invaluable to me, because I get to know so much about every student, I’ve often felt it a bit impertinent for me to ask a group of students to tell me all about themselves, when they don’t know me at all, and don’t know whether I’m trustworthy. So, I give them explicit permission to invent or re-invent themselves.

This time, I added, and if you want, you could use ChatGPT to assist you, or even write the whole thing for you! I think I tried to encourage them to do weird and wonderful things with their prompts, but I don’t think they knew what I was talking about.

After reading the submissions, I think that one of them *might* have used ChatGPT or another assist, cause her writing was a lot more polished and punctuated than what I’ve seen from her so far. And she went well over the word count, which, again, is different from what I’ve seen. There could be a lot of reasons for this. She’s very social, and might have enjoyed the task and did better on it for that reason. No matter. Her detailed sharing gave me a lot of bonding material, and we had a very energetic chat about our mutual love of Amy Winehouse at the end of the class.

In the past, I’ve suspected the assist of a parent or older sibling in this first assignment, especially from my students for whom English is not their first language. And I have wondered, to what degree is their content constrained because of this? Could ChatGPT provide more private assistance? Does ChatGPT tattle?