In this day and age, when students google and copy whatever AI tells them from the prompt they put in, getting students to attempt their own thoughts becomes harder than ever.\u00a0 Creating a common sense of reference, likewise proves difficult.
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\nTeaching high schoolers about story structure, I cannot rely on them to know associations that even ten years ago, would have been common place.\u00a0 They do not know Phineas and Ferb or Shrek or even The Avengers Endgame.\u00a0 They\u2019ve not seen Lord of the Rings or the sequels or any of the Harry Potter movies, much less read the books.<\/p>\n
Many I teach shrug their shoulders when I ask, \u201cWhat\u2019s your favorite movie?\u201d seeking to find a reference I can hook the lessons to.\u00a0 \u00a0One admitted, they don\u2019t watch television or movies, and that leaves me with they scroll.\u00a0 That\u2019s it.<\/p>\n
Imagine channel surfing perpetually, never resting, never listening, never stopping.\u00a0 That\u2019s what scrolling does.\u00a0 Listly going from one place to the next, desiring story, desiring connection, and never finding it because story, like life, takes place over time.\u00a0 It must unfold.
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\nThe google generation doesn\u2019t know story, and that\u2019s different from all generations before, even those that never had books.\u00a0 They told stories.\u00a0 They shared them over a fire. They memorized the stories, they shared them with generations, for generations.<\/p>\n
The modern world, the phone, the internet, AI, all of the technology at our fingertips, changes how a person processes information, and it disconnects story continunity from the experience.\u00a0 \u00a0So when one describes the Hero\u2019s journey, they don\u2019t have all of the moments from the Tik Toks, or Instagram versions they\u2019ve seen.\u00a0 \u00a0All the wells are puddles, masquarading as oceans.\u00a0 People post that they understand things more, but the more they propose as understanding, hasn\u2019t been fact checked or vetted, it\u2019s just their observation presented as truth.<\/p>\n
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However, with knowledge and story now instantly created, the reality of knowing, the importance of the journey in a story, and of creating itself, have been devalued.\u00a0 \u00a0I know AI is useful, I also know google is useful.\u00a0 I also know, we have as a people, to a person, never done well with limiting ourself and embracing the struggle required in learning.\u00a0 \u00a0We have seasons of willingness and of unwillingness.<\/p>\n
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To be fully human, we must connect, we must create, and we must create connections through our creations.\u00a0 \u00a0We need art, music, story, sport, philosophy, love, friendship and play.\u00a0 \u00a0We need all the things through all the mediums and methods that AI cannot do, not because people cannot use AI that way, but because they are disciplines which at their core, require a pouring out of the soul, the risk of vulnerability, of being incorrect or rejected.\u00a0 \u00a0We need to teach our students, our children, ourselves, that the struggle itself, is worthy, more worthy than the answers we might google in an instant.<\/p>\n
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The theory of moderation didn\u2019t take and it was proposed back when Aristotle reflected on the nature and importance of knowing.\u00a0 \u00a0What I do know is, our society will be poorer for every answer we aquire cheaply, because the lessons won\u2019t be learned even if the kids all score 100 on every test.<\/p>\n
If we do not help the future generations learn to read and retain stories for their own sake,
\nwe will fail at understanding either our past or our present, and wander listessly into a future dominated by machines we neither control or understand, managed by those who do.<\/p>\n
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\n<\/h4>So I know what I\u2019m doing with my students going forward.\u00a0 We\u2019re going to read stories, lots of stories, and hope each one, each story, helps\u00a0 each of my students fall in love with the struggle itself.\n<\/p><\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In this day and age, when students google and copy whatever AI tells them from the prompt they put in, getting students to attempt their own thoughts becomes harder than ever.\u00a0 Creating a common sense of reference, likewise proves difficult. Teaching high schoolers about story structure, I cannot rely on them to know associations that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4510,"featured_media":4457,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1256,1298,28,650],"class_list":["post-4454","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-struggle","tag-ai","tag-hope","tag-teaching"],"yoast_head":"\n