Speaking English Correctly

If an idea originating in your brain successfully ends up, more or less intact, in my brain, then you have used language correctly -- regardless of such niceties as formality level, spelling, complexity of grammar, or number of emojis you use. If the idea ends up mangled or isn't transferred at all, then you have used language incorrectly. That is the only valid metric for correct and incorrect language use.

Language may be used suboptimally, in that e.g. failing to modulate your formality level to your audience can reduce your audience's opinion of you. (Which goes both ways -- the problem looms equally large whether you're speaking lolcat at an academic conference or using $10 words and academic jargon to trash-talk your Fortnite opponents.)

High-stakes standardized exams, colleges, and many employers all expect a certain level of mastery of formal Standard American English (SAE). I, as a teacher, am expected to prepare students for standardized tests and job and college applications. There is some tension here between this expectation and my personal beliefs.

Personally, my natural mode of communication is somewhat formal (even, some might say, highfalutin') SAE, occasionally meshed with the jargon of Internet memes, so I can naturally teach SAE by modelling it, and by assigning readings of SAE, and I can teach code-meshing by modelling it. Reprimanding students for 'improper' informal English serves more ill purposes than good ones, and vocabulary words and quizzes are well-established in the literature as being of limited value.

Not every assignment should require formal SAE writing -- it is effectively a foreign language for some students, who may more naturally speak, for example, African-American Vernacular English. To require mastery of SAE exclusively privileges some students (mostly white) over other students (mostly Black and English Language Learners), regardless of whether or not they have good or creative ideas, and regardless of what we're actually interested in assessing: whether or not they understand the content. Requiring mastery of SAE to the exclusion of all other Englishes is not just testing the fish against the squirrel on their tree-climbing abilities (as the quote commonly misattributed to Albert Einstein goes); it may be tantamount to requiring the student fish and squirrel to first walk to the tree they'll be tested on climbing.

Generative AI

For starters: No text portion of this portfolio or teaching philosophy, nor any cover letter or resume from me, was generated by, went through, or came within any distance of ChatGPT, or any text-generative AI, in any way.

I have used ChatGPT (for hobby purposes) enough to be generally able to recognize its distinctively beige output, a useful skill for an ELA teacher. But, ultimately, I am (or imagine myself to be) a much better writer than ChatGPT is, so I have no need to debase my voice by delegating any writing to ChatGPT.

And I would take that same mindset into the classroom: encourage students to understand that ChatGPT can deliver only samey pablum, and they have so much more interesting voices and things to say than ChatGPT does.

I am, on the other hand, an atrocious visual artist. I could, in principle, spend the proverbial ten thousand hours to become a competent visual artist... or I could ask generative AI to spit out something half-competent, and spend my hours on something I enjoy more. Which, though it merits more deep cogitation on the similarities and differences between literature and art, I recognize as probably hypocrisy. Especially given that part of the job of an ELA teacher is making students invest some hours towards that ten thousand on writing.

Ethics and Law

As far as my research and reasoning can conclude, training a large learning model constitutes educational fair use, ethically and probably legally. I don't necessarily think that current LLMs are fully persons who fully deserve educational rights ‑ but neither am I willing to dismiss the possibility out-of-hand. I'm certainly not inclined to endorse etching in legal stone any precedent of machines as automatically non-persons.

I'm also not inclined to abandon the right to teach a text to humans without explicit permission ‑ that would be an impetus towards using primarily public domain texts, ie, back towards the old days of the Old White Man Canon's dominance. The closest thing I've done to getting permission to teach a text was when Michael Okuda tweeted about an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and I mentioned to him in a reply that I had (the previous year) used that episode to teach high schoolers about AI ethics. (The episode in question was, as one might expect if one is very familiar with TNG, "The Measure of a Man".)

Out of supererogatory courtesy, I would not personally teach human students with a text that the author has explicitly asked not be used for teaching. Beyond that, all texts are and should be, ethically and legally, fair game.

Considerations and Concerns

The biggest actual problem with generative AI that I see is that, given a choice between paying a small amount of money for an adequate result with generative AI, or a moderate amount of money for a good result with a human artist, corporations will tend to choose the former, making it harder for artists to make a living, ultimately strangling culture. This is, to be sure, bad ‑ and I admit to the possibility that I could be contributing towards this end by using generative AI for personal purposes, thereby normalizing it.

Other Twilight Zone/Black Mirror futures are foreseeable ‑ e.g., a world where every job-seeker uses ChatGPT to write their cover letters and resumes, and every hiring manager uses ChatGPT to sort through cover letters and resumes... why even have humans involved at all? (To reiterate: I do not use, and have never used, text-generative AI for job-seeking. You bet your sweet bippy every word of this logorrhea is artisanal and hand-crafted.)

Precision in Language

"Advanced learners benefit from thinking of the writer as an artist whose grammatical choices represent different brush strokes made to different effects." — Ayanna Thompson & Laura Turchi

"The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter — ’tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning." — Mark Twain

Precision in language is a hobby of mine: I aspire to always say and write exactly what I mean, in terms of both word choice and syntax (precision of speaking tone is less within my communicatory grasp, but I try to be exact with that, too). By always modeling precision in speech and writing (and grading with precision in mind), I hope to inspire a similar precision in students' writing and speech, and to call upon students to notice precisely what is on the page when reading (regardless of whether the author was or was not being intentionally so precise), with the desired end being improved reading literacy skills.

I am not an expert rhetorician, nor an expert changer of minds; I don't know how to convince people to agree with me. I just use the right word and word order to communicate what I intend to communicate (provided my readers or listeners have the language knowledge and attention spans to be communicated with precisely).

"If you've nothing to say, say it any way you like. Stylistic innovations, contorted story lines or none, exotic or genderless pronouns, internal inconsistencies, the recipe for preparing your lover as a cannibal banquet: feel free. If what you have to say is important and/or difficult to follow, use the simplest language possible. If the reader doesn't get it, then let it not be your fault." — Larry Niven's 5th Law for Writers