Listening to the news each day highlights that the educational world faces greater challenges every day; educators need students to think critically, even as we move into an Artificial Intelligence era. The headwinds of change create new problems for teachers and students to solve: How much AI use, if any, is too much? Should we ignore it altogether or embrace these tools so that students know how to use them in college and beyond? Should we do tedious things ourselves or let ChatGPT help us with those tasks?

Trinity School’s leaders have encouraged every teacher to learn about AI ourselves so that we can help our students enhance their academic experience without taking away the important part - learning. Through this exploration, I have discovered that all of us need to ask ourselves what we want to discover and how we want to accomplish it. When we are stuck, logging into Claude AI and asking it about organizational ideas for a paper can help end a stubborn bout of writer’s block. I might not agree with Claude’s suggestions, but they can guide me to make better and faster decisions. Using AI as a tool for assistance and not as a replacement for my writing will only save me time and make my thinking more productive.

Each year, the Upper School English department dedicates a considerable amount of class time to learning about grammar rules even though Grammarly and other tools can clean up our words and sentences for us as we type. We work on grammar, especially punctuation rules, because the way that authors arrange words in a sentence connects to the purpose of their pieces. Understanding syntax develops better readers and writers, people who understand and recognize irony and humor, and this knowledge can even lead to creativity in a world where the directive to “make it new” feels difficult. I repeat a mantra in class, “We have to know the rules before we can break the rules.” Creativity comes from the purposeful manipulation of the rules, like E.E. Cummings choosing to eliminate most of the capitalization in his poems. And, since I understand these rules, I can apply Grammarly’s suggestions or ignore them depending on my purpose. 

Therefore, we move our students cautiously in the AI era, while teaching students to think and decide for themselves on their electronic devices. And the best part about Trinity students is that they listen to their teachers and try every day to rise to the high standards that we set.