My Most Elderly-Coded Opinion...

You darn kids get off of my lawn and stop using AI.

There was a cheating incident at Adrienne’s school.

I was especially cross to find out about it, because it was an assignment I’d stayed up late to help Adrienne finish. Adrienne is an extremely good student and I barely ever have to help with homework. But this particular evening, we both stayed up past midnight making a slideshow and emailing it to the teacher for her to grade. Adrienne did the real work, while I read the wiki on a book I hadn’t personally read so I could offer suggestions and moral support. We got an A for our effort.

Several of Adrienne’s fellow students earned an F on the assignment, because they copied and pasted AI gibberish that wasn’t even about the text. The teacher reamed out the whole class, banned laptops until the end of the year, and announced they’d all be turning in assignments handwritten on loose leaf from now on. If I had been in the classroom for that performance, I’d have given her a standing ovation. I do not like cheating, and I do not like lazy people who use AI for an assignment. Also, the loose leaf paper meant I’d never have to stay up late helping make a slideshow again. Adrienne wrote out the next term paper on loose leaf, and got an A on that one as well. All I had to do was explain how to underline the titles of books instead of italicizing them.

The school cheating incident isn’t the only reason I’m thinking about AI and assignments right now. For some reason, young people on social media are trolling their elders by insisting that nobody has time to read the sources they cite or write a ten-page paper about them. I can’t even count the number of silly, probably rage bait social media posts insisting that studying is too time consuming.

I keep thinking about the time I was home on Thanksgiving break and the public library was closed for the holiday weekend, but I had to finish a take-home exam, so I found a Burger King with free refills on soda and sat there drinking diet Coke after diet Coke while reading the entirety of Plato’s Republic. At the end of the text, I realized the paragraph I wanted to cite was actually in the Phaedo. Thankfully I was reading a big fat anthology of Plato’s works instead of just my skinny copy of the Republic, so I got another Coke and kept reading. I don’t even like diet Coke. But I liked books, and I liked getting good grades, so I made do. I got an A.

Personally, my most elderly-coded opinion is that every student who gets caught using AI to cheat should be locked in the library without wifi until they finish their term paper using only a manual typewriter and a stack of leatherbound encyclopedias. Mix up the order of the encyclopedia volumes first so they’re not even alphabetical. Hand them a bottle of White Out and one of those funny round erasers with a brush on the end, but don’t tell them what they’re for. If they want a book other than the encyclopedia, they have to us an actual card catalog to find it.

Maybe, as a bonus, we should give them microfiche but not teach them how to use the microfiche reader, just so we can laugh when they squint at the slides to try to read them.

If they plead for mercy for long enough, we’ll relent and bring them a computer to write on. Specifically, we will bring them a nice old Macintosh from 1994 with a floppy disc drive. See how long it takes them to figure out that you have to turn on the monitor separately from the actual computer. And then they can figure out how to load printer paper.

In all seriousness: I am not against technology. I like it. When I teach my classes at the after school outreach, I love to show them YouTube videos on the big projector screen to illustrate my lessons. But it’s really a shame that there are so many dishonest and lazy people who want to use technology to cheat and make it harder for everyone. If you don’t like to study, I wish you’d just play hooky from school.

That’s my exhausted end-of-the-school-year rant. I’ll be glad when we get to summer break and can read books just for pleasure again.

How’s everyone else’s end of the year going?

( Mary Pezzulo is the author of Meditations on the Way of the Cross, The Sorrows and Joys of Mary, and Stumbling into Grace: How We Meet God in Tiny Works of Mercy.

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