ChatGPT, I’m teaching Moby Dick for the umpteenth time this semester. I probably shouldn’t be telling you this, but I just don’t have the energy to come up with a writing prompt for my students. Can you help?
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Is “Discuss the symbolism of the whale” the best you can do? My eyes glazed over just reading it. ChatGPT, could you spice things up with something a bit more relevant to young people today?
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Opinion
I’ll admit that “Comment on Melville’s toxic masculinity” wouldn’t be my own first choice for a prompt. But the kids will like it, so let’s go with it. Now I have another question: how should I grade their essays?
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You’re right about grade inflation, ChatGPT. But did you have to rub it in by replying, “Don’t worry, everyone in your class will get an A or A- minus”? That was just cruel. Anyway, how should I decide who gets the higher grade?
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“Reward the most original arguments”? Are you for real? (Don’t answer that.) We both know that the students will be using you to write their essays, just like I’m using you to grade them. Speaking of which: How about a rubric?
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Thanks, ChatGPT. Your five-part grading rubric is going to make my life easier. And things will be even easier if I can just feed the students’ essays to you and let you fill in the boxes. Can we make that happen?
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“Yes, but I might hallucinate now and again” isn’t giving me a lot of confidence, ChatGPT. Full disclosure: I did some of my own hallucinating back in college. Are you basically telling me that you’re tripping?
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ChatGPT, thanks for confirming that you’re not on LSD. And I’ll try to be more literal from now on. Can you please draw up a lesson plan that I can use for my three class sessions about Moby Dick?
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Since you asked: Yes, please design group activities for each lesson. I mean, do I have to do everything?
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ChatGPT, I like the idea of making one side of the room Team Ishmael and the other Team Ahab. But the exercise won’t work unless the students have read the book. How can I make sure they have done that?
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An in-class quiz? Are you kidding? ChatGPT, that’s, like, so high school. My students are grown-ups, and I need to treat them that way.
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“Grown-ups need to be held accountable” is business-speak, ChatGPT. I’m a humanities guy, remember? I want my students to suck out all the marrow of life, just like Thoreau said. How can I help them do that?
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“Assign Walden” presumes they’ll actually read Walden instead of skimming the bland summaries that you and your fellow bots generate. We’re back where we started. Any other ideas?
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I take your point: if I want the students to live a life of the mind, I need to model that. But how? When you can do everything, what’s left to be done?
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Sorry, ChatGPT, but “A Large Language Model can scan huge swaths of text, yet it can’t feel emotions” doesn’t really answer my question. My job is to write things, not feel things. And I’m afraid you’re going to take my job soon, along with almost any gig my students might want. How’s that for a feeling?
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I know, I know, you just said you can’t feel stuff. Sorry.
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“Apology accepted”? So you do have feelings, after all!
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ChatGPT, please create a 650-word satire of yourself in the voice of an amiable but baffled senior professor. Make it kind of cute, in an old-person’s kind of way. But don’t make it too cute, or everyone will know that you wrote it. Do we understand each other?
Jonathan Zimmerman teaches education and history at the University of Pennsylvania. He is author of “Whose America? Culture Wars in the Public Schools” and eight other books. He really wrote those books. He wrote this column, too.