Can AI Be A Burnout Lifeline for Teachers and Support Student Learning?

Earlier this year, I shared with a colleague some exemplar assignments from my past students in which they wrote about themselves in the style of Holden Caulfield. She replied that she loved the assignment but feared that these examples had actually been generated by AI. When I told her that those examples were from the 2018-19 school year, we both had a laugh and agreed that “those were the days.” 

That simple exchange illustrates just how drastically the world has changed in such a short amount of time. In the past, you would occasionally read something that sounded suspicious, type it into Google, and find that a student copied and pasted from some website. It didn’t happen often and wasn’t something you had to constantly worry about. Today, English teachers like myself are forced to be digital detectives, comparing student submissions to what they’ve written by hand and combing through data from trackers that can play a video of the writing process, show how long students spent on the document, analyze their typing patterns, and generate the probability that the student used AI. And even then, we are constantly told that the AI trackers can’t be trusted. This all just further exacerbates the feeling of “burnout” that so many of us are experiencing.

I wanted to participate in Lead by Learning’s AI Together Community of Practice, not to “catch” students, but to learn to harness the power of AI so that AI could go from a source of stress, frustration, and creating more work for me, to something helpful for students and me. I wanted to see if I could find ways of lightening my workload through the use of AI. This led me to experiment with using Gemini to help with lesson planning. 

One of my favorite texts to teach is Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, which deals primarily with the Vietnam War. Over the years, I have been aware of the need to diversify the voices that I am representing during this unit, to reflect the diversity of my student population. Last year, I implemented the short story “War Years” from Viet Thanh Nguyen’s collection The Refugees. I believe it made the Vietnamese students feel seen, especially, but a student from an immigrant family of a different background also specifically told me that this story really resonated with her. I wanted to build on this success and continue to grow this unit, so I asked Gemini the following prompt:

 “Tell me some good passages/excerpts of about five pages — from the books In Country by Bobbie Ann Mason; The Sorrow of War by Bao Ninh; and The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen — that would be good to teach to a 12th-grade class alongside The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien.”

I also told it some major themes that I have my classes use to study The Things They Carried, and Gemini was able to suggest excellent passages along those themes and where in the books to look for them.

I implemented some of the suggested excerpts. This saved me a tremendous amount of time. Rather than having to re-read all of these novels, which would have been impossible, I was able to quickly pinpoint the passages I needed with Gemini’s help. That way, I was able to represent the perspective of 17-year-old Sam, who lost her father to the Vietnam War in In Country; of the unnamed narrator from The Sympathizer, who struggles with his half-Vietnamese and half-French identity, and the secret of having played both sides – North and South Vietnam – as a spy; and of Kiên, a young man swept up in the war and forced to fight for the Viet Cong in The Sorrow of War. Students were grateful to see more perspectives, including that of a teenage girl, one that was not really represented in any of our other readings this school year.

“I find it interesting the way that Sam filters most of her experience through TV or music. I feel like that’s pretty realistic for teenagers, except today it’s probably a lot of TikTok,” one student said.

“Being mixed too, I can relate with some of the identity issues that the narrator has in The Sympathizer,” said another.

Seeing these real, immediate benefits for my students was extremely gratifying. The time that I saved by using Gemini to help locate the excerpts I wanted was invaluable. 

Anyone who is remotely thoughtful probably has some reservations about AI. But in this world of technological determinism, we have little choice but to do our best and try to focus on the positives and how these technologies can benefit us. As educators, we have the responsibility to do our best to teach our students how to use AI responsibly and to become well-versed in it for the future. I am grateful for the thoughtful programming and discussions that the AI Together Community of Practice with Lead by Learning made possible. The process made me hopeful that I can stave off burnout for a long time and left me feeling energized and inspired by my fellow educators. As I look forward to next school year, I am continuing to experiment with ways that AI can assist me in managing my workload and support my students’ learning.

James Shapiro is an English Teacher at San Leandro High School. A native of New Haven, CT, he has spent his entire 14-year teaching career in the East Bay after completing a BA at Boston University and an MA at Brandeis University. He is primarily interested in teaching fiction that deals with alienation and the individual’s relationship to society. Outside of teaching and reading, he is into film, collecting records, cooking, following pro sports, and playing golf.

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