The English Teacher Who Did Not Ban ChatGPT. The Third Option You Have.

This is our reading of Bill Gates's 2023 essay The risks of AI are real but manageable (Gates Notes). Read the original →

You have probably been in this staff-room conversation more than once.

Half your colleagues say: we have to ban it, otherwise these kids will never learn to write. The other half say: you cannot ban it, the tide is turning, we have to teach them to use it. Nobody convinces anybody. Everyone goes back to grading the same essays, pretending it will sort itself out.

In July 2023, Gates offered a third path in his essay. Not as theory. He named a real teacher who was already walking it.

Her name is Cherie Shields.

In January 2023 she wrote a piece for Education Week about how she uses ChatGPT in her English class. She did not ban it. She did not pretend it did not exist. She redesigned her entire class around the tool.

Gates quoted her: "Teachers will have to embrace AI technology as another tool students have access to. Just like we once taught students how to do a proper Google search, teachers should design clear lessons around how the ChatGPT bot can assist with essay writing. Acknowledging AI's existence and helping students work with it could revolutionize how we teach."

What did she actually do? Two things, worth stealing.

One: turn AI into a whetstone, not a ghost-writer.

Her assignment stopped being "write an 800-word argumentative essay." It became a four-step assignment.

Step 1: get ChatGPT to write an 800-word draft. Turn in the prompt you used, so I can see it. How you ordered the food is itself a skill.

Step 2: read the draft aloud and mark three sentences that "do not sound like something you would ever say." Write a short note on why.

Step 3: rewrite those three passages in your own words.

Step 4: submit the AI's draft, your final version, and a 200-word reflection: "what did I learn from the AI, what did I cut, why."

When she graded, she weighted steps 2, 3, and 4. Step 1 was raw material. The result: her students did not learn to write less. They learned to write better. Because every assignment now forced them to practice discern, critique, rewrite: three abilities AI will never build in you.

Two: turn AI's biggest weakness into your best teaching material.

In the same essay Gates writes: "educators can have AI generate articles and then work with their students to check the facts."

This sentence is gold. It takes AI's most painful problem, hallucinations, biases, made-up citations, and converts it directly into a lesson.

You can assign it like this. Have AI write a short piece on some historical event, some scientific topic, some figure. It does not matter which subject you teach. Then require students to pull every specific number, name, date, and "studies show" phrase, and verify each one. Getting the right ones right earns no points; catching the wrong ones earns real points.

Do this a few times and your students will: one, never blindly copy AI output again; two, learn a genuinely scarce skill for the AI era, fact-checking; three, develop muscle memory for what "trustworthy" even means.

Gates also brings up an older piece of history worth mentioning in your next staff meeting.

"It reminds me of the time when electronic calculators became widespread in the 1970s and 1980s. Some math teachers worried that students would stop learning how to do basic arithmetic, but others embraced the new technology and focused on the thinking skills behind the arithmetic."

You may remember, or your older colleagues may. The first teachers who worked with the calculator and the last teachers who refused it produced students separated by a generation. Your choice now, facing ChatGPT, is the same shape. And the same size.

One last thing, for you personally.

Cherie Shields did not do this because she was a technology expert. She did it because she decided: instead of waiting for the school to hand down a policy, she would try it herself. Then she wrote it down so others could see.

You do not have to wait for your school. You can, next assignment, pull one class period and try one version of "AI writes the draft, students take it apart." It does not have to work the first time. Tell your students you are experimenting. Tell them why. A teacher who is willing to learn alongside their students is more powerful than a teacher who pretends AI is not there.

### Questions to sit with

1. The last time you were grading and knew, halfway through, that a piece had been written by AI. What was your first reaction? Does that reaction match the kind of teacher you want to be for that student?

2. In the subject you teach, how is "source trust" being taught right now, citations, sources, fact-checking? If it was already weak before AI arrived, you have one chance now to move it to the center. Which assignment do you start with?

3. Does your school currently have any written policy on AI? If not, and if you decide not to wait, which class period next week do you plan to run the first open experiment with your students?