A little over a year ago I published an essay that implored my fellow educators not to panic amid the dawning of Artificial Intelligence. Since then I’ve had two and a half semesters to consider what it all means. That first semester, many of my students had not even heard of AI. By the very next semester, a shocking number of them were tempted to have it research and write for them.
Many of my earlier observations about how to avoid AI plagiarism still hold: an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure; good policies and clear communication from the jump are vital; assignments such as in-class writing and oral exams are foolproof inoculators...
However, other, more abstract questions with profound pedagogical implications are emerging. These can be put under the larger canopy of: What am I teaching them and why?
Us Historians specifically, and Liberal Artists more generally, help students develop certain skill sets. We train them in the Humanities and Social Sciences, teaching them to find or develop data and use it effectively through critical and creative thinking. Obviously a political scientist and a continental philosopher go about this differently. However, the venn diagram of their techniques and goals probably overlaps a fair bit more than a lay person might realize. For starters, we all have the same broad subject matter. Everyone in the Liberal Arts, from art historians and literature profs to psychologists and economists, studies some aspect of the human condition. And while we each have our own angles of observation and methodologies, there are also substantial similarities among them. We all find or generate data (even if forms of data are different), analyze them, draw conclusions, and present our findings.
Time slips
past us, fast flow,
like a river rushing over gray stones
Time drips
slower than slow
like thick sap hanging from pine cones
I’m not sure time is real. I mean, things happen. Entropy and whatnot. But I don’t know if I accept that measuring the pace of happenings is anything more than a construct.
Don’t get me wrong. I know the world is round, or a close approximation thereof. I’m down with the science. But physicists, as a group, aren’t united on what time is. Something about time being “measured and malleable in relativity while assumed as background (and not an observable) in quantum mechanics.”
So while we experience it as real, it may not be “fundamentally real.”
And that’s kinda how it feels to me.
I remember my 6th grade English teacher, Mrs. Newman (Ms. was not to her liking), telling us that the older you get, the faster time goes by. I’m not sure why, but that idea immediately clung to me. Though I was only 11 years old, or perhaps in part because of it, I got what she was saying. And I believed her. After all, she had lived four or five or six times (who could tell) as long as I had. So even though what she was describing sounded like a cliché passed on from generation to generation, I assumed her own experiences had borne it out. During the four and a half decades since, I have always remembered her words and noticed that, in a general sense, she was absolutely correct. Back then, a summer was endless. Now, the years roll on like a spare tire picking up speed down a hill.
But that is a historical observation I make as I look back.