"If an algorithm is the death of high school English, maybe that's an okay thing."
John Warner has been teaching writing at the college level for more than 20 years. During that time he has become an articulate critic of why most college kids can't write, pointing a finger at standardized tests at the middle and high-school levels.
"Rather than having students wrestle with the demands of trying to express themselves inside a genuine rhetorical situation (message/audience/purpose)," he writes, "they were instead producing writing-related simulations, utilizing prescriptive rules and templates (like the five-paragraph essay format), which passed muster on standardized tests, but did not prepare them for the demands of writing in college contexts."
So he sees technology like ChatGPT as an opportunity. "Many are wailing that this technology spells 'the end of high school English" meaning those classes where you read some books and then write some pro forma essays that show you sort of read the books, or at least the Spark Notes, or at least took the time to go to Chegg or Course Hero and grab someone else’s essay, where you changed a few words to dodge the plagiarism detector, or that you hired someone to write the essay for you.
"I sincerely hope that this is the end of the high school English courses that the lamentations are describing because these courses deserve to die, because we can do better than these courses if the actual objective of the courses is to help students learn to write."
"...I’ve been thinking about these things for years, so I have a head start on others, but let me be clear ChatGPT has not created a problem that wasn’t already present."
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