ChatGPT has thrown colleges across the country a major curveball ever since it hit the digital ecosystem in November 2022. Students in high school and college classrooms immediately began employing the large language model to generate essays without doing an ounce of the work required to compose a thoughtful piece of writing.

Composition Class in Peril

I’ve been teaching writing classes for the past few months and can say from personal observation that the problem is not just AI but also the failure of AI detection systems to meaningfully identify fake papers. It’s also a difficult situation because there are still a good handful of students who genuinely want to learn, improve their writing skills, and come about their assignments by their own diligent work ethic. It’s put many other professors across disciplines into a bit of a conundrum. A teacher named Peter Raleigh quipped in exasperation on X:

KOCO News 5 station interviewed several professors in the state of Oklahoma on AI and its impact in the classroom. Professor of philosophy Cody Weaver of Oklahoma City University (OCU) notes how it is a “nightmare scenario,” and has led him to conduct many writing assignments in class using just pen and paper.

Back to Pen and Paper?

Perhaps the AI apocalypse will paradoxically encourage educators to adopt more traditional approaches to teaching and giving assignments. After all, students used to always write their papers on paper or on typewriters and didn’t even have access to the internet. Imagine that! Without denying the many benefits the internet offers in terms of finding relevant research materials and information sources, maybe a return to the written word should be embraced wherever possible. Access to a wide catalogue of online information does not necessarily mean we know more than prior generations. In fact, exposure to so much knowledge might ironically impair our ability to organize, retain, and communicate everything the online world barrages us with. We weren’t designed to take in one million words a day. And we don’t. We simply skim it and move on without pausing to think.

Studies show that writing by hand enhances retention and strengthens the brain. Students who write notes by hands must be more selective in what they put down, while those notetaking via laptops offload too much brainpower to the screen without truly listening to the lecture. Laptops are also weapons of mass distraction, which is why Dr. Weaver of OCU prohibits them in the classroom.

Enduring solutions may go beyond just a return to the basics. The job of the educator is to (ideally) instill a love of learning in the students. If the students genuinely want to learn, he or she will put aside the chatbots and do the hard work of creating valuable writing. Dr. Alan Noble of Oklahoma Baptist University offers this viewpoint in his Substack article “The Alternative to AI in the Classroom is Desiring to Learn.”

No Difference Between Writing and Thinking

Whatever one’s approach and viewpoint, teaching students how to write well is vital. Writing is distilled thought. It means making language compelling, coherent, and articulate. Writing is the path to becoming good citizens who can weigh important issues, and it shows the depth, intellect, and maturity of the writer. Psychologist Jordan Peterson, in one of his older recorded lectures in his own classroom, extols the importance of learning how to write. “The best way to teach people critical thinking is to teach them to write,” he says.

Writing and articulating various topics and issues in a compelling way is one of the greatest strengths students can bring to the table. Whether it’s communicating with friends or potential employers, communicating effectively in the real world beats out mere proficiency in working with AI systems.