Some MHS teachers have begun using generative AI to assist with their responsibilities and everyday workload, such as grading, lesson planning, creating tests, or even refining students’ letters of recommendation.
Because of the large number of students he teaches and the fact that Advanced Placement (AP) classes require many typed responses—the majority of which are packed densely with information and don’t need to adhere to a strict organizational structure—Google Gemini has been helpful in grading student responses, social sciences teacher Danilo Escobar said.
“I’m looking more for their specific skill analysis or content, which makes it really hard to grade their responses,” Escobar said. “So what I’ve done is, using Gemini, I have created specific ‘gems’ (Gemini’s custom “AI experts” that can be adapted to a user’s specific needs) for the type of grading I’m doing to parse through their responses.”
In this way, Gemini helps him identify thesis statements, evidence, and analysis so that he can grade more efficiently, Escobar said.
“Also, it gives some generic feedback,” Escobar added. ”Rather than me having to type out the feedback, I get some generic feedback from it, and then I kind of tweak that to give students some feedback.”
He’s upfront with his students about his use of Gemini to grade their written responses, and he hasn’t received any direct negative or positive feedback, Escobar said.
“I’ve never heard any students say, ‘Oh, thank goodness you’re using AI,’ but the thing is that it allows me to have them do more writing, and then I’m able to look over that writing more often,” Escobar said. “In a way, they’re doing more practice with feedback than before, when I would have to do it by myself.”
Moreover, while grading with AI doesn’t actually save a drastic amount of time, it does lighten the cognitive load that he experiences as a teacher, Escobar said.
“I teach 3 sections of AP World History,” Escobar said. “On the 90th essay I’m grading, it feels like I’ve been pummeled by essays. Cognitively, without the AI, I start to miss things. That’s why the AI is helpful.”
However, he does caution against students using generative AI to complete their school assignments, Escobar said.
“The way I see students using it, I don’t think is effective,” Escobar said. “The analogy I always think of is (this): they’re a second grader who’s trying to learn arithmetic, and someone handed them a calculator and said, ‘Here, learn arithmetic.’ All they’re doing is just punching the numbers and getting the answer without actually understanding the arithmetic that they’re supposed to be learning.”
Still, he does believe that AI can and will eventually be a useful tool for everyone, Escobar said.
“But we just have to make sure that we’re using it in a way that is improving us, not taking the thing that we’re supposed to be doing right now—which is growing as a critical thinker—and exporting that job to something else, and then leaving without having learned or developed,” Escobar said.
AP Psychology teacher Lauren Byler-Garcia uses AI beyond grading and lesson planning, sometimes using AI to assist with writing tasks, Byler said.
“Sometimes I’m just not that great with spelling and grammar, so copying and pasting it into AI will help rephrase it in a way that is more manageable for people to read, or has less mistakes, or any of those kinds of things,” Byler said. “I usually write student letters of recommendation, but sometimes I’ll put them in AI just to have it edit for coherence and to polish it up.”
Additionally, she uses Google Gemini to generate more graphic options for some of the slides that she uses in her in-class presentations to “jazz it up a bit” and make the slides more visually appealing, Byler said.
“Sometimes I don’t like them—so I’ll generate it, but sometimes I’ll trash it and just end up using what I have in the slides already created by me,” Byler added.
A downside of AI use in the classroom, though, is that students can tend to trust the accuracy of AI without questioning the validity of the content it generates, Byler said.
“I’ve literally argued with this thing (AI bot) before,” Byler said. “One time, it told me that something was the Phi phenomenon, and I said, ‘that’s not the Phi phenomenon, that’s stroboscopic movement.’ It was like, ‘Oh, yeah, you’re right.’ So it doesn’t always give the right answer, and I feel like students need to learn how to use it because they don’t scrutinize the answers that it gives.”
Moreover, her stance on students using generative AI to complete coursework really depends on “how much free thought you’re supposed to be putting into the task,” Byler said.
“It’s supposed to be a supportive tool,” Byler said. “It’s not supposed to be the thing doing everything for you, where you’re not thinking at all. Really, it’s supposed to be meta in a sense. It’s supposed to make you think about thinking.”
Senior Gisele Fan does not believe there can be any “ethical” use of generative AI by students or educators at this point in time, Fan said.
“I think AI can be used in an ethical way, but the way it’s being produced and marketed towards you now makes it seem like it’s not for the benefit of humanity; it’s for the individual benefit,” Fan said. “Eventually, that will lead to a dystopia rather than the utopia that AI companies are marketing.”
While AI can increase efficiency significantly, it’s still a questionable practice for students to use AI on assignments, Fan said.
“On one hand, AI is helping students do more and complete their assignments,” Fan said. “On the other hand, they’re not doing the assignments and not learning.”
Today, we’re facing less of a question of how AI should be used in schools and more of a question of how AI affects the need for schools and higher education, Fan added.
“School is mainly helping people to get jobs, but if AI is replacing those jobs, then why do people feel the need to be in school anyways?” Fan said. “And the environmental impact—I think it takes away a lot of the hope for the future that you might develop in school. What’s the point of doing all these things to better yourself and try to make the world a better place if the world is going to end sooner than you think?”
