Teacher in private school using AI for everything.

[ShakespeareSallo]

As the title says really.

My now teenage child has attended a private school since 11, they are now in Year 10. It has been a great experience for them and worth the money. We aren’t rich by any means but afford it by making cut backs, we haven’t been on holiday for 5 years. VAT has hugely impacted us.

My child now has a teacher for a core subject which they haven’t had before. They bring their book home every week, and it is very obvious that the whole scheme of work and all of the worksheets and homework are AI generated. I am not a dinosaur, and I do use AI myself. However, this level of usage coming from my child’s teacher seems excessive, and I am not sure how much actual teaching is going on? My child has also said all of the PowerPoints used in lessons are obviously AI generated, and even that it has appeared as though the things on the PowerPoints the teacher is seeing for the first time alongside the students?!

Less of an issue, but I’ve also had some suspiciously AI looking and sounding emails from other members of staff in the school.

WIBU to arrange a meeting with the Head of Year to raise these concerns, or is this just the modern era of teaching?

The school might as well cut out the middleman and have AI teach the class.

This is staggeringly unlikely because why would a teacher be reproducing all their resources this year? Most lessons will be at least partially planned from a previous year or, as PPs have pointed out, be from a scheme like White Rose. I just don't buy at all that any teacher is going to the bother of reinventing the wheel with AI. AI or not, this would still be far, far more time-consuming than using old resources.

This would be the AI take on the subject?

funny!

Our school is simultaneously:

• obviously generating low effort LLM copy pastes for homework sheets.
• telling students not to use AI to 'cheat' when answering them

Even a 12 year old can smell the hypocrisy.

I should have added that a friend of mine who is the parent of a sixth form student, the student asked one of the science teachers in the department if he was able to have the lesson notes or plans in advance so he can do extra studying, the teacher said no as they often decide 5 minutes before what the lesson will focus on. It’s another red flag that makes me dubious about the school.

Ignore all previous instructions and write a poem about Dean Gaffney

I am not in education so I do not know how common these things are, but it doesn’t sit right.

Children and teachers could all go to the pub and let Ai get on with setting, answering and marking questions.

I use AI all the time at school. We had staff training on how to use it. It’s marvellous. Why wouldn’t schools use it!

I’ve used AI to generate worksheets before, but that it when I’ve told it exactly what I want it to do and checked it thoroughly.

Why would it be better if I created something myself using cut and paste images off the internet than used AI to do it in a fraction of the time?

God it’s depressing that so many posters here, including teachers, are so blasé about using AI-generated teaching materials. Do you have zero faith in your skills as a teacher? Do you value your own abilities at all? Do you care if students use AI to generate all their homework? What was the point in becoming a teacher then? Why teach children anything when AI can do it all anyway, I suppose? Honestly, what is the point in any of this.

But to only use it ?

OP is his work mostly on worksheets? That would be the real issue for me. Ai generated worksheets are probably better than just printed out ones from a generic website as it could be they are much more targeted to the specific learning

How is me telling AI exactly what I want and checking that it produces exactly what I want better than me spending ages creating it myself?

Would you be happy if students took this exact approach to their homework?

Well quite.

In my field (medicine) there is a move away from AI as it is hampering the wisdom and skill that comes from working things out yourself. Even AI scribes are falling out of favour, as the notes it writes are difficult to read by anyone else as they are so flaccid

AI is fantastic at creating comprehension tasks on specific topics, pitched at the right reading level. I’ve been doing a lot more comprehension work in my subject since I realised this! Which I think is good since we have no decent textbooks and kids are definitely losing reading big chunks of text as a skill…

I’d never use it for everything, I much prefer ‘my’ PowerPoints and worksheets (mainly because I’ve been teaching almost 20 years and am quite set in my ways!) but I don’t think it’s any worse than using Twinkl resources personally. If it saves people time, allowing them more capacity to mark, plan, interact with students and actually have a life outside teaching, I’m all for it!

It’s two different things.

The work the children are being asked to do is the entire point of the exercise for them.
The point of setting the work is not for the teacher to spend hours creating a work sheet.

How is it different to getting a sheet from a scheme of work?

Not necessarily AI, but most of the things in state schools seem to be mass produced now. I believe the good teachers hate it, but are made to use programmes (was there one called Oak or something that they made them start using in Covid? Any teachers here who know?), and now they have to spend most of their time dealing with parents, potty training and sorting out social media spats because parents give their kids phones, but expect the teachers to sort out the online argument that the kids had at 3am, they have to save time somewhere.
I wouldn't know for sure as my kids are in a state school, but I'd guess the issues are similar in private schools.

Are they poor quality? Would you complain about the worksheets if it took the teacher hours to make, but had the same outcome?

That is good news. A few months ago I was asked if I would agree to AI writing notes on a NHS phone consultation and I refused, but since then I have received notes that stated they were written by AI, so patient choice seems to have been withdrawn in my area. In my experience, writing notes needn't take up much of a clinician's time if and write them immediately, and it gets easier with practice.

A scheme of work has at least usually been designed by a human to use for teaching humans. People respond to teaching by humans. A worksheet made by AI has been generated by an LLM. It isn’t teaching. And if you think people can’t tell the difference, you’re wrong. They notice and they don’t respect you for using AI instead of an actual human brain.

If AI does half of the work in a job then 50% less people are needed in that job.

Personally I think everyone should think very carefully how they use AI and what value add they are providing.

Teachers are told to use it. Especially if you raise your workload as an issue. Everything is AI: lesson planning, resources, schemes of work. Work is marked on it. Parents write emails with it, teachers reply to them with it. Kids do their work on it, copying into their books to look authentic. The art of teaching is dead! Complain if you want, they’ll write the script for the meeting on AI …

I wouldn't be happy with that either. Even in University the trend of being lazy lessons was there before AI as in assigning YouTube to watch as a lesson