With artificial intelligence (AI) growing increasingly relevant in our everyday lives, New Trier High School is reevaluating if and when AI can be used ethically in school. In the English department, that debate remains especially contentious.
During the early 2020s, when AI was largely unheard of, English teacher Brett Rubin admitted he had doubts.
“It was actually three years ago in my AP Lit class where a student mentioned ChatGPT, and I originally thought, ‘is that the name of a band?’” Rubin said. “Initially, I was like, ‘no, never. I don’t even want to look at it.’”
I can’t possibly discourage students from fully using [AI] because this is now going to be the bread and butter of your everyday lives.
— Brett Rubin
At the time, that skepticism felt warranted, but Rubin has since broadened his perspective. On Jan. 29, Rubin attended the New Trier Parent Community Advisory Group’s meeting about AI in education. With administrators, faculty, IT staff and parents in attendance, the committee discussed both the potential benefits and threats AI poses to students and staff alike.
“I’ve gone through an evolution,” Rubin said. “It’s important that instead of being this thing where, ‘no, [AI] is evil,’ we have to start figuring out how to use it in a way that is ethical and supports critical thinking and creativity without doing the thinking for you.”
To accomplish this, it’s important to recognize that AI functions differently in English than in other subjects. In math or science, AI can aid students’ conceptual understanding by guiding them through difficult units or checking whether they’ve done calculations correctly, allowing students to catch their mistakes and learn from them. In English, however, generative AI risks replacing skills that students are meant to develop themselves. Whether a student uses AI to help find sources or generate an entire junior theme, it’s more difficult for teachers to determine whether AI has been used to support students’ learning or to replace it entirely.
Rubin believes AI can be used to help students learn even in English class. For example, Rubin suggests AI can function as a discussion partner. Touching on the challenging content his Literature and Film class is covering, Rubin believes AI can help students process and organize their ideas.
“So you’ve got ideas, but maybe you don’t yet fully know how to express it even though the thought is there…Go to [AI], but don’t ask it to write for you,” Rubin said. “Have a conversation with it. What’s the difference between that and going to the [Academic Assistance Center] to have a conversation with a tutor?”
Of course, using AI to cheat remains a concern. English teacher Eric Stewart said he’s caught students using AI to cheat on several occasions, including on timed writings and reading journals. As a result, he worries about his students misusing AI on a regular basis and what that means for fairness.
“There are going to be kids that are cheating and using AI,” Stewart said. “What if the kid who uses AI gets into a slightly better school or gets into a program because they cheated, and the computer gave out a slightly better answer than this other kid who did the work themselves? It’s those kinds of things that keep me up at night.”
Many students share similar concerns. Junior Kayla Ritchie feels that using AI to cheat has become a pervasive problem at New Trier. Being surrounded by students misusing AI while doing her best to maintain her school-work and extracurriculars, Ritchie reiterated, can be discouraging.
“It’s crazy,” Ritchie said. “So many students use AI to do entire English assignments. It’s really sad.”
With so many students misusing AI, Stewart believes AI poses a serious threat to their writing skills, stating he’s afraid that it will “take away an entire generation’s ability to write.”
“My worry is that [AI] is making us dumber because people are literally typing in a prompt and it’s writing a paper for them,” Stewart said. “I don’t understand why you think you should receive credit if a robot is doing all the work for you.”
What if the kid who uses AI gets into a slightly better school or gets into a program because they cheated, and the computer gave out a slightly better answer than this other kid who did the work themselves? It’s those kinds of things that keep me up at night.
— Eric Stewart
Rubin too has concerns about students using AI in a way that replaces their thinking, but he has faith that, in the end, authentic human thought will always be needed.
“I have to believe that there is always going to be a place for human beings,” Rubin said. “Students too want to do some critical inquiry, some investigation into expressing the way that they see the world…and maybe AI will help them do that in a way we haven’t even thought about. But I have to believe, and I need to believe, that we’re not just going to let these things do all the thinking for us.”
While Stewart remains open-minded, his biggest concern with integrating AI into classrooms and increasing student access to AI is the possibility of enabling misuse, rather than discouraging it.
“I’m not absolutely anti-AI, but as an English teacher, it’s something that I struggle so mightily with,” Stewart said. “You have to draw a line somewhere, otherwise students are going to say ‘well, you didn’t say I couldn’t do this.’”
Rubin shares this concern for cheating. And while he believes consequences for misuse are necessary, he understands why students may feel the need to rely on AI for English assignments, whether it be because of stress or self-doubt. To combat this, Rubin suggests educating students on when AI can be helpful or harmful on students’ growth.
“With everything on your plate, and as busy as you are, and as stressful as things are, and as hard as it is to get into the colleges that you think you need to get into right now, who can blame students for maybe wanting to lean into [AI]?” Rubin said. “Instead of making students feel bad, how can we have a conversation about ‘can I better learn to trust my own instincts and recognize that my own intelligence, my own ability, my own thoughts are so much more interesting than what [AI] can produce right now?’”
Expanding on AI’s lack of authenticity, Rubin believes that because AI writing is overtly polished and “uncanny,” it makes AI-generated English assignments uninteresting and futile.
“Ironically, what AI removes is the very thing that makes the paper most interesting: the doubt, the flaw, the wonder,” Rubin said.
Many educators believe AI should be banned from schools entirely, but Rubin suspects that doing so may be a disservice to students.
“I realized I can’t possibly discourage students from fully using it because this is now going to be the bread and butter of your everyday lives,” Rubin said. “Going into the professional world, you’re going to need to know how to use it. It’s not going away.”
Rubin’s realization echoes student concerns. While Ritchie is aware of AI’s potential for misuse, she acknowledges that it will likely become more relevant to our daily lives. Rather than ignoring it, Ritchie feels that students should be educated.
“As [AI] gets smarter, if it’s a tool that we’re going to be able to use, we should probably learn about it in school,” Ritchie said.
Rubin acknowledges that this shift can be unsettling, especially for educators who grew up in a largely analog world. At the same time, he believes that resisting it completely is unproductive.
“Change is very scary, but change is always inevitable,” Rubin said. “So, as much as I’m also worried, I’m trying to evolve as well…This is going to be a moment where civilization pivots…I’ve likened it to what it was to be alive during the Industrial Revolution. We’re here right now, at this incredible moment in history.”
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