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?

What makes you think it hasn’t been designed by a human? There is a difference between ‘make a sheet about WWII’ and the teacher specifically asking it make a sheet asking specific questions about a certain aspect of WWII.

Like any other tool it’s about how you use it.
Or would you rather teachers were hand drawing stuff and copying it on a Banda machine?

I'm a teacher and I love AI! It allows me to do things I physically wouldn't have had time to do before. For example if my whole class are reading a text but it's too challenging for a small group I can ask AI to recreate it for year 1 readers.

Spelling homework is often a simple task such as 'read the sentence and choose the correct version of the word'...as AI is writing the 10 sentences for me I can now use the extra time to differentiate it 3/4 or even 5 ways. If I was writing those sentences from scratch each week I'd be doing 2 versions at the most.
Earlier I used AI to create an editing task for my class. I asked for a paragraph on our topic, at the level of a year 2 writer, with some full stops and capital letters removed. My class will correct this tomorrow as a starter activity.
What possible benefit is there to anyone of me taking 5 times as long to write the content myself?

The increasing push to use AI for everything in schools was one of many contributory factors in my decision to retire earlier! My heart really wasn't in it. But I am a bit of a dinosaur.

I use AI for worksheets because they look better and it’s generally time saving, but I have to check things and have the professional knowledge to know what’s good or not and so often have to make several revisions before it’s worth using. I have an Oxbridge degree and know that my subject knowledge and teaching abilities are what make the difference in the classroom, not just the worksheet or ppt. I use, but having visually engaging worksheets helps all my students and particularly those with SEND who struggle to read worksheets which aren’t colour coded and well organised (which most teacher made worksheets aren’t as they’re very word heavy or overly simple but that means there’s no colour blocking etc. to make it easier to read).

Believe me, they do not look better.

The fact that you can’t tell the difference between something you’ve come up with and something a chatbot has come up with is not a great beacon of hope for the future of education

As long as the information is correct and not hallucinated does it matter?

How would you know whether it's accurate, if it's not your own subject? I wouldn't have a clue whether a science worksheet was accurate.

The government have literally told teachers to use AI to cut their workload.

Your son is not doing well in this subject is he @ShakespeareSallo ?

I don’t see why you can’t ask the school to explain their policy on their use of AI. They should be prepared to explain this by now

I have started using AI a lot this year. I’m a year one teacher (in an independent school) and I’ve found it a really useful tool. I don’t use AI to plan schemes of work, but I use it a lot for worksheets. We have a book focus each week which all the children’s written/ phonetic work is inspired by. Because of AI, I can now create worksheets differentiated to the exact needs of each child which follows the theme of the book. Each week has real progression and cohesion. I have also now been able to branch out and create maths and topic worksheets that are following the book theme. For example we did the lighthouse keepers lunch last week. We did phonic and writing lessons with story prompts, and then maths activities where the children pretended to be seagulls stealing food - this reinforced their adding skills which was the skill focus of the week. The worksheets have illustrations on them which relate to the book, and the five year old children absolutely love them. The time it is saving me means I am planning more and better lessons than ever before, so if anyone queried it I would really defend my decision to use it as I can see the children are getting so much ‘more’ from me in every aspect. I also don’t see a difference between teachers who use AI and those who use Twinkl or other resource creation websites, except that with AI the teacher is at least deciding the precise detail that needs included, rather than trying to make something that isn’t perfect fit into their lesson which is what happens a lot with Twinkl etc!

That’s nothing to do with AI.

i was a teacher for twenty years.
I’d have a plan for the lesson but if there was an aspect students did not understand we’d spend more time on it and maybe do some more questions on it.

(maths teacher).

I’d then post on the teams channel the PowerPoint as used in class so with the extra questions and answers written in.

My child is doing well, actually. It’s that it is jarring to see them coming home every day with (obviously) AI generated worksheets, homework… it makes me concerned about the quality of teaching. I am constantly telling my children not to use AI for school work, yet they are being given AI work. School has also sent emails home and had assemblies about the use of AI and cheating, AI being inaccurate and all the usual.

I agree with you op. I would wonder what on earth I was paying for if the teacher was churning out AI slop.

Yes I thought you’d come back to confirm your child is doing very well in this subject

. I am constantly telling my children not to use AI for school work,

interesting detail there

Just ask what their AI policy is - for staff and students.

Surely the teaching is good then, if your child is doing well in it?

By the art style? I have no idea what you mean. Obviously if you think the teacher is not doing their job talk to the head.

Yes yes to this.

What we are gaining in superficial but highly visible productivity, we are silently losing tenfold in depth of understanding. Outsourcing our cognitive struggle to AI is incredibly seductive but the cost is that we are no longer engaging with ideas in the same way and it is demonstrably eroding our capabilities.

It requires enormous discipline at a personal and organisational level to restrict AI use to non cognitive tasks so as to fully preserve and develop human experience and expertise, and that just isn't happening.

So yes, OP, I agree with you.

Automatically marked homework has been a thing now in some subjects for a very long time.

i used to teach maths and we’ve had resources like timestables rockstars, dr frost maths and mathletics for a very very long time. These aren’t AI but the questions are set by computer and marked by computer.

the students benefit because they are practicing, the teacher does not need to write every question personally.

these days this is possible in lots of other subjects - science has tassomai which is daily questions, there are many language apps that modern languages departments use etc.

the point of this is that it allows the students to practice at their level without any teacher input.
most homeworks either have to be very general or you need several different versions of them in order to actually help students learn.

so for example a general homework might be write a paragraph about yourself in French. Students hand in work at a variety of levels. Or you have a sheet with individual comprehension questions about a short paragraph in French.

the second homework is harder to write but unmotivated students hand in very little for the first sort of homework.

I don’t know how else to explain this.

I know the difference between a chatbot and a human, but it very much depends on what you put into it.

But clearly some people won’t be happy unless every scrap of work is slaved over for hours getting the lay out right.

@ShakespeareSallo YABU

I'm a teacher and I often use AI.

If you don't put the effort IN to AI, then the output is rubbish. So it is highly unlikely all the PowerPoints are AI, but may have been run through AI to improve them.

I often use AI to add some quick fire starter questions to my lessons, or help modify a worksheet that I've previously made for a lower/higher ability group.

But I don't trust AI to get it right, so anything that I do use AI for, I then check and modify it so that it works for me and my class.

It's a helping tool, but certainly not a replacement.

A teachers work load is insane in secondary school. 10 to 11 hours per day you work in term time. So anything that helps is good.

I’m not inherently against the use of AI in a general sense, and can see some of the benefits of using it in teaching. But when every worksheet, every homework, every PowerPoint is AI, that’s another thing altogether.

And my child has said that the teacher will often say things like, ‘oh I’m not sure what that’s about’… not in relation to her not understanding the content, but as in not realising it was on there and it’s not relevant… in relation to things on the PowerPoint.