Good morning! This week we’re featuring teaching ideas from readers of this newsletter. We’d love to use yours next! — The Learning NetworkFive readers, five great ideas
What’s your favorite Times piece you ever taught or learned with? We asked in August, and you sent in wonderful responses. This week, we adapted five of them for our 15-Minute Lesson Plan feature, and we plan to use many more.
Do you have a piece to tell us about? The form is still open! What would your students say about …
We ask a new question every school day, then call out our favorite answers in our popular roundups. Some teachers bring their classes daily; others send students once a week to choose from recent prompts. How would your classes answer these? What do you notice? What do you wonder?
This week’s edition of What’s Going On in This Graph? is about the popularity of emojis over time, and students are asking some excellent questions about it, including …
What do your students notice about this graph? What do they wonder? Recent Times reporting about education
See what teens are saying about writing in the age of A.I.
Dana Goldstein recently reported that “somewhere between two-thirds and 90 percent of high school and college students are already using A.I. for schoolwork.” We asked students how much learning to write still matters, and nearly 400 wrote in. Here are just a few: My question is, how can an intelligence that has never seen a sunset speak on its beauty? It only knows that humans find sunsets beautiful, but it has no idea why. Writing is an emotion-based craft, and in order to preserve the art itself, it is crucial for students to create and write stories of their own. — Delia, Central Bucks High School South, PA I can generate the ideas myself, and list the facts, but refining it into a good piece of work is quite challenging. I view A.I. more as a thought partner than an instant write. Sometimes we’ll go back and forth asking questions in a debate to study for history, or I’ll ask it to grade my work as a teacher would. — Abby, Madeira School, Northern Virginia History has shown me that with every major systemic change there is major social pushback. I do not want to be someone who rejects change out of fear and ignorance, but in the same breath, because of the vast implications and the fact that we as humans cannot possibly conceive of all the implications and effects of A.I., is it fair to restrict A.I., and is it fair to exhibit high levels of caution and avoidance? — Gabriel, AFS, PA It is incredibly important to learn how to write because it also expands your ability to form your own opinions and justify them. That skill will help you in many phases of your life, including choosing a candidate to vote for in elections. When we rely on A.I. to do all our thinking for us, we become like sheep, doing what we are told. — Mia, Earth The cost of this extremely integrated method of using A.I. may probably result in our brain shrinking but you know what they say: When God closes a door, He opens a window. If we’re not spending years on the mechanics of writing, that time goes to something else like learning to direct A.I. well, or other skills. I might be too optimistic toward this seemingly gloomy future because of all these data centers, but looking back at our human history, we went from hand writing letters to now typing on a keyboard. Humans are constantly evolving and I believe we can adapt using A.I. to do our writing. — Jimmy, Montclair High CA We’d love your feedback on this newsletter. Please email thoughts and suggestions to LNfeedback@nytimes.com. More next week.
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