THE ARTFUL DODGER

When Cheating with AI Is More Useful Than the Homework Assignment

What we want is for our kids to learn relevant skills rather than isolated facts, right?

My teenage daughter came back from school today with a homework assignment which was, in my considered, fatherly opinion, bullshit. For Spanish class she was supposed to make a list of ten words in Spanish, then use a dictionary (ask a boomer, kids) to find the same words in Catalan, Galician and Basque. And then Portuguese, French and Italian.

I should point out that we live in Spain, so this is ‘Spanish as first language’ rather than ‘¿Dónde está la biblioteca, por favor?’, which makes it seem rather less weird. But no better structured, contextualised or developed.

Clearly there was intended to be a point in there about the relationship among the Romance languages, and a little eye-opener about the batshit craziness of Basque. All perfectly valid. But for starters, there was no suggestion in the phrasing of the task as to why they were being sent on this little wild oca chase.

And by the time they’d slogged through all those five dozen online dictionary searches, there would be neither the time, much less the inclination, to pursue any valuable lines of inquiry on their own initiative. So I pulled rank over her teacher and suggested we set about it another way.

Point number two: I do actually have a university degree in Spanish language and literature, so it’s not as if I’m some ‘philology’s bunk’ Philistine. And my teenage self would quite happily have thrown himself into the exercise in the school library.

But that was nerdy me. And it was forty (yikes!) years ago. For this day and age, and for the specific student in question, I felt it was a suboptimal deployment of her study time.

So instead I suggested that I show her how to get ChatGPT to generate that information in the required format. On the basis that basic prompt engineering is a more relevant and transferable skill, and is more intellectually stimulating, than what she was being asked to do.

I gave her some pointers about explaining the task clearly, giving an example, specifying the desired output structure. And bingo! Jeepers did its thang and produced a neat little table with a column for each language, all nicely lined up.

This meant that the task got done, while a new intellectual discipline and reusable skill was acquired. And crucially, time was gained for some useful exploration and discussion of the dry bones that her teacher had sent her off into the desert to retrieve.

How they linked up, where they might have come from, and what the hell was going on with that Basque stuff?

So we chatted about the fact that they all came from Latin, that Italian seemed generally to still be closest to that common root, which made some kind of sense. How it was odd that for the words she had chosen, Catalan and Galician had a lot more in common with each other than with Spanish, despite being at opposite ends of the country.

And the weirdness that out of all the basic nouns on the list, ‘book’ and ‘paper’ were the only ones in Basque that resembled Spanish and all the other Romance languages, and what that suggested about how old the language was, and how long it must have lived without being written down in any recognisably modern way, before having to borrow a word for this newfangled ‘paper’ technology.

It was, we felt, a worthwhile and productive use of our time. Which the assignment as set most certainly wouldn’t have been. Not only did my daughter learn more useful skills and explore more fruitful ideas, but she also appreciated her dad being on her side against the secondary school sausage machine.

Opening the supposedly taboo Pandora’s box of AI to expedite a bit of schoolwork, and making sure that Hope didn’t get left at the bottom.

I’m actually quite looking forward to the next stodgy dollop of Gradgrind drudgery, to see how we can subvert and transmute that into a meaningful experience.

More moaning from me about the education system: