What Happened When I Tried to Replace Myself with ChatGPT in My English Classroom
July 28, 2025 at 11:17PMUsing AI in the classroom is fraught, to put it mildly. Can AI help humans learn to read and write more effectively? Instead of doing the work, can AI act as a coach and enhance learning? These are some of the questions that Piers Gelly explored recently as an assistant professor of English at UVA. Instead of banning ChatGPT, Gelly had his students share their attitudes toward the technology and then experimented with what they could learn about reading and writing with the help of the bot.
I attempted the experiment in four sections of my class during the 2024-2025 academic year, with a total of 72 student writers. Rather than taking an “abstinence-only” approach to AI, I decided to put the central, existential question to them directly: was it still necessary or valuable to learn to write? The choice would be theirs. We would look at the evidence, and at the end of the semester, they would decide by vote whether A.I. could replace me.
What could go wrong?
Call it an attempt to inoculate my students, or masochism, or plain old curiosity, but I considered this to be a key question for my students to answer: even if they believed that college-level writing instruction should occur, did it follow that such instruction must include human instructors?
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/07/28/what-happened-when-i-tried-to-replace-myself-with-chatgpt-in-my-english-classroom/
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