AI’s Wide Open

By Sarah Humm, Communications Coordinator

"What it has been able to do in one year is breathtaking. What is it going to be able to do in ten years?" 

This wonder of the near future excites the imagination of Peter Sweeney, Computer Science Teacher at the Upper School, and anyone who has ever asked ChatGPT a question. Only a decade-older Mr. Sweeney with a time machine could tell himself exactly what the future holds for generative AI. But today, he is certain about one thing: tools like ChatGPT will change teaching—and the world—fundamentally. It is already happening.  

Sam Altman is a founder of OpenAI, the organization behind ChatGPT, and has no regrets about the decision to release the chatbot despite the things it cannot do well (yet), and, more crucially, despite the marred future it could help generate. In fact, that was the point. "He believes people need time to reckon with the idea we may soon share Earth with a powerful new intelligence…ChatGPT was a way of serving notice."

Teachers and students around US have taken notice and are experimenting with ways to live, teach, learn, and work with these new generative AI tools. It has been a year of fascination and discovery, tempered with thoughtful caution, as everyone prepares for this new world with eyes wide open. 

"Computers can only do math. They can only do numbers. So how can it tell you the motivation of a minor character in a Shakespeare play?"  Mr. Sweeney understands how this kind of power briefly turned some colleagues into self-professed ostriches after the launch of ChatGPT on November 30, 2022.

Aiming to demystify the technology and to encourage experimentation, Mr. Sweeney has delivered presentations to faculty and staff that include a graphical and simplified illustration of how ChatGPT might be working. It is a set of processes that can extract "meaning" from words using a reported 1.7 trillion parameters from the content it was "trained" on. This includes practically the entire internet, among other sources. His point? It's not magic. Teachers leave these sessions better equipped to dive in and explore it in their own way. 

A working group composed of Upper School faculty from all subject areas meets regularly to share ways they are using the technology in their classrooms. The group, led by Director of the Upper School Krystopher Perry, discusses advances in AI technology, ways to better understand how students currently use AI tools, and ways in which faculty may experiment with AI in the classroom. The group grapples with what it means for students to find and express their authentic voice in the age of AI, while recognizing the potential value of AI in teaching and learning. Faculty in this group are planning ways to keep open dialogue with students about ethical issues, in school and beyond, surrounding its use. Faculty in all divisions have also participated in webinars and attended conferences with sessions devoted to best practices in AI for education. Lisa Ulery, Director of Technology and Libraries, says now that generative AI is widely available, "It makes what we do even more important. Teachers have to inspire students to harness deep knowledge and make connections with other content, then draw conclusions based on their own interpretations to demonstrate their learning." 

Bridgette Nadzam-Kasubick, Middle School teacher and Conway Chair in Social Studies, points out the importance of adaptability while emphasizing faculty have the tools and methodologies to guide students, and each other, through this technological leap. "Just like anything that enters our habits and practices, we have several choices: Are we using it for good? Are we questioning it? Are we reflecting on our use and evaluation of it? But we're ready. We've been teaching this our whole lives."

In the early days of the school year, some second-grade boys found a renewed interest in the air conditioner in the library window. And not just because it was cooling them down after recess. That day, in coding class with Lower School Librarian Amber Gasper, they had just learned that somewhere inside this metal box, coding is at work. "They were slightly mystified, but soon started naming other things they thought must be using code, like the smart boards at school and 'anything with a screen' from televisions to parts of a car." They already knew their favorite games, like Roblox, were built by coding, but this was eye-opening for most. 

Miss Gasper teaches digital literacy and coding to all boys in first through fourth grade. Students use an individually-paced program called Code Avengers to learn and practice coding, but a lot of class is spent talking about technology. They have covered a lot of ground: from the binary language of computers to the algorithms that will suggest another Roblox video to intellectual property and plagiarism. Though these boys are aware of tools like ChatGPT, they are not yet using it for schoolwork. They are, however, already benefiting from the capabilities of generative AI. 

Because an algorithm suggested a video to Miss Gasper (who follows mostly authors and other librarians), she learned about Diffit, a tool that reads an article and rewrites it to any reading level. She used it to provide materials to fourth-grade boys as they researched ancient Chinese musical instruments in preparation for building models in the STEAMworks Innovation Lab. "It adapted content from a college-level book, and put it in language they understand," she says. The boys have the chance to learn from a rare and unique resource and have the benefit of seeing both the adjusted and original text side-by-side to expand their learning.

At the beginning of the school year, Lindsay Arnoult, Director of the Middle School, surveyed faculty to learn more about their knowledge and opinions of generative AI and its applications. The range of feelings was vast. But, as eighth grade Social Studies teacher Matt McCarter said, "We all agreed it would be a disservice to our boys if they did not understand how to use it, because it is so revolutionary, and will be such a big part of their lives." 

Mrs. Nadzam-Kasubick and her seventh-grade sponsor group had an impromptu conversation about artificial intelligence. The students already know and love some AI tools, particularly Grammarly; and though none had experience with ChatGPT at the time, their discussion soon turned toward ethics. If they were to use it, they decided it would be ok to use it for brainstorming ideas but not actual written work, and that they would be transparent by "paraphrasing, citing, and linking to the chat." Mrs. Nadzam-Kasubick was impressed with their thoughtfulness and concerns about how misuse or overuse of these tools could be detrimental to learning. 

As a division, Middle School faculty are discussing policy as AI tools evolve and as awareness and usage increases among these students at a critical crossroad in their development, and educational journey.  As Melissa Hamburg, English Department Chair, explains, "We want to make sure boys are doing their own thinking. We are most concerned with creating critical thinkers who can formulate arguments, and ChatGPT can circumvent that process." 

To illustrate the point, Mrs. Hamburg showed her students how ChatGPT would complete an assignment. She asked it to "characterize Atticus Finch," something all eighth graders have done. They had some things to say about the chatbot's first attempt, "Oh, that quote is not integrated!" So Mrs. Hamburg asked it to use citations. "Ok, the quote is there, but it says 'the text states' and you told us not to do that." Subsequent refinements were still not quite good enough. "Past tense verbs! Personal pronouns!" The boys came to the realization she intended: "It would have been better and faster if we just wrote the answer ourselves." 

Veronica Zawie, Middle School English teacher, loved their certainty. "So much of what we are doing in the Middle School is helping them grow into a more confident student. That is the student who is willing to take risks, be wrong, and learn from his mistakes. We want them to be proud of their own work." 

"It speaks Persian, Italian, French, and Spanish fluently. It speaks Urdu, Hebrew, and Chinese ok, enough to converse with," Mr. Sweeney rattles off some of the human languages ChatGPT can process. However, it is ChaptGPT's adeptness with programming languages that has changed the game in his classes, where students may use it with no restrictions. A coding project that took boys two weeks to complete in 2022 was completed in fifteen minutes in 2023. The students are able to tackle bigger and more complex challenges now that their personal coding assistant can churn out the basics, and beyond, when given clear and detailed prompts. 

David Baker ’24 uses it in his Post-AP Data Structures class with Mr. Sweeney, but has found ChatGPT useful in other endeavors, too. "I can paste in a transcript from a video I'm using for research. It gives me notes and an outline to work from." Jack D'Cruz ’26, uses it to study Spanish, "After I've done my homework—for example, on a specific verb ending, tense, or irregular verbs—I will feed in the concept and ask ChatGPT to give me a new practice sheet with blanks so I'm not just going over the same examples again."

Ian Broihier ’26 uses it in Upper School math teacher Mostafa Rousta's Post-AP Optimization class where, "It can do things like create 60-line code which is entirely accurate, and kind of wild." Optimization is a math class, not a computer science class, but now, as Dr. Rousta explains, "Students are not limited by their knowledge of programming. They work on real problems with millions of variables, they use actual data from cancer research. When I took Optimization for my Ph.D., we learned the details of how the optimization algorithms worked, the theorems, but nothing practical." 

During a summer internship at a hospital, Tejas Rajagopalan ’26, saw some practical applications of generative AI in action. "The doctors and researchers were doing big-data analysis and they were using it every day. Obviously, they are qualified and have so much training, but it shows that it is, and will be, really important in medicine."

Though it turned out some "truly awful" woodshop-based dad jokes to entertain boys in his Woodshop class, Andrew McKeown, Upper School Technical Design Teacher, also uses ChatGPT to create project profiles based on real census data for his Intro to Design classes. Like the experience of the students in Mrs. Hamburg's English classes, Mr. McKeown's students have realized they may do a better job of developing their ideas for these projects rather than trying to shape the AI to do it. "Either way, they are learning how to more clearly communicate their intentions and goals, so it works as a win in both ways. Teaching teens how to communicate effectively is how I spend most of my time no matter what class I'm teaching." 

The future of learning and teaching is being transformed in ways that seemed impossible even one year ago. But for all these coming changes, it is hard to imagine the idea of a school—its buildings and the people who show up there every day—going anywhere. In what other single place can someone make a lifelong friend, exhaust himself in an epic game of freeze tag, delight in pizza day, shake over 400 hands in less than fifteen minutes, get his feelings hurt and make amends, laugh until he can't breathe, soak in the sweat and victory of a hard-fought competition, and pour his love into a speech or performance? These experiences make us who we are.  

  

While ChatGPT does contain a large swath of our collective knowledge, it is nice to remember it has had zero experiences and so no real wisdom or creativity. We must continue to turn to other humans for that. 

Take it from the chatbot itself, "True creativity is associated with the ability to produce something genuinely novel or original. Humans can create entirely new concepts that have never existed before. For endeavors that require deep understanding and emotional intelligence, human creativity is irreplaceable." It learned that from us.