My English class will be tough. AI should not be the easy way out.

Credit: Contributed

Credit: Contributed

I will teach many sections of what the University System of Georgia calls First Year Composition or ENGL 1101. It is at the forefront of the impact of AI because it’s been an essay-centered course for decades. Now many students use the technology to write their papers wholesale or ask it to improve or revise their work. This month, The New York Times highlighted how AI “killed student writing (and revived it).”

All students at all Georgia public colleges have to take the course I teach and a second class in college-level writing as part of the system’s requirements for general education, though some students exempt this requirement with an Advanced Placement exam. About half the students expected in my University of North Georgia classroom this fall will be dual enrolled students, juniors and seniors in high school. The others will be students who graduated high school but who performed average or worse in high school literature class.

While there is an obvious difference there, I tell my students on the first day that they all will struggle in the class because their definitions of writing and reading may be different from mine. In short, I am suggesting that not only is college-level writing harder than high school, but we may not be talking about the same thing. In our AI era that may be more true than ever.

For that reason, this fall for the first time I am organizing my syllabus around this central question: should this class exist in our AI era?

I’m assigning readings about the impact of AI on cultivating reading and writing skills. Once I have convinced them that reading and writing is something different from what they have done in high school and also that AI won’t help, I assign students a massive reading assignment from which they will write their first essay. It’s 25 pages, an introduction to a book about the loss of reading as a cultural and community marker written 20 years ago.

The writing assignment requires students to take up the main question of the reading as their own: what might reading and writing be good for? They can’t merely summarize as I limit quotations to two. They have to think with the reading, not allow it to replace their own work.

Two more essay assignments follow, grounded in decades of research into what first-year students will face in future classes. One is an analysis of photos. The other is a small research essay. These are accompanied by readings about how AI is affecting image creation and the topic of the research, revision in writing. A fourth essay asks students to take up the course’s main question. I fully expect different opinions on that.

Each essay is paired with a 15-minute, one-on-one conference with me where students get detailed feedback on their writing and then revise as many times as they like.

These conferences — because they take up a third of the 15-week semester — are the core part of the course. I cancel class for those weeks because not only do I have to meet with 75 students but these few minutes with each are essential to helping them become more confident writers. Hopefully through this personal interaction, students will learn writing and reading are not done in isolation and contrary to the hype of AI, can’t be done robotically by a human or otherwise.

You may be wondering how all this work is assessed. The first question that must be addressed is AI. While students can of course push off all this intellectual work to AI and there is no foolproof way for me to know, I’m betting my stated desire to actually hear their opinions, voices and thoughts will have a strong impact. If I sense AI use I’ll ask the student. And then we can discuss what to do within the context of the course’s larger question.

In terms of letter grades, the basic rubric is: do students have a clear and consistent argument in their essay and do they fairly use sources. There are other learning outcomes on the syllabus about the writing process. But because I assume students have had little experience with this sustained type of writing and thinking I’m focusing on teachable and reachable goals.

These goals are mirrored in other versions of this class taught at my school and across the state because we want students to have the same education. There are instructors who assign different readings from literature to cultural analysis to topics that have been banned in other states. This kind of diversity is a feature not a bug of the system. The course is about reading and writing but one can learn these skills reading Shakespeare and Substack, though there are obvious differences.

We make students read hard stuff — both hard to read in terms of complexity, length and style and hard to read in terms of content they might disagree with. I have students read pastors, professors and pundits. This is what college is for. Then I ask students to form their own thoughts.

During the course of this course, students discover what reading and writing is good for. In our AI era, I am hoping that will sustain them in the years ahead on and off campus.

Matthew Boedy is an associate professor of rhetoric and composition at the University of North Georgia, and conference president of the Georgia chapter of the American Association of University Professors, a national organization that represents the interests of college and university faculty members.

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