The Points Bank

or how a misreading has led me to one of the key issues behind AI and education

Photo by POURIA 🦋 on Unsplash

I’ve been experimenting with AI. I just want to figure out what it can do and what it might mean. I am aware that my experimentation comes with real environmental cost, but it seems to me that, with every teacher I know in a deep Greco-Roman wrestling clinch with issues arising from AI, I’d better figure out what it does well, and fast. My way of handling any new technology is to play with it, and so I got to work. So far, there are moments where AI is immensely helpful and even insightful: I like NotebookLM to go through a fair number of documents (or one long one) and make sense of them. It’s pretty good at themes and deep-ish readings but not great at nuance. It occasionally misreads whatever text I feed it. (By comparison, ChatGPT is useless at reading long documents: it talks like the smartest kid in the class who hasn’t done the reading, making up stuff that sounds good but isn’t actually in the text.)

But I am more interested in AI writing and what that has done to humanities classes. AI has, simply put, changed everything it means to teach English. As a writer, when AI stays away from hallucinations, it can produce clean, serviceable, boring prose that could pass a class. I still wouldn’t trust it to write lesson plans without me giving it a really close once-over, because there’s a small chance it will be wrong and a strong chance it will be dull as all get-out. (Text prediction doesn’t exactly produce exciting stuff.)

So why would a student bother using AI and putting their name on top of soulless work when they could write and create?

I think the reason is found in a misreading of an education classic.

I got through my education coursework without reading Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. It came up just often enough that I felt like I had read it. But I had not–it hadn’t ever been assigned to me. And as a result, I had some false “knowledge” (sort of like Chat GPT) of his “banking metaphor” of education. Where Freire used this to refer to teachers pouring knowledge into passive student receptacles, I had a more complex view, perhaps from my four months of experience as a bank teller. I thought the metaphor was about students bringing some sort of product to the teacher as a customer might bring a check to a bank teller. As a bank customer expects cash in exchange for their check, so a student expects points in exchange for essays, projects, or whatever writing they bring to the teacher.

Tha’s not at all what Freire wrote, of course, but I have thought about this metaphor for years, and it’s my non-Freire metaphor that I’ll be talking about here. (All love for Freire here, but I think my banking metaphor is cooler.)

In this world, the teacher runs The Points Bank. They hold of all of the world’s wealth of points and are the sole arbiter of how those points are distributed. Students bring materials to the bankers in hopes of getting as many points as possible: enough points to be exchanged for grades, college admissions, lower car insurance rates, and prestige.

Teachers certainly want to be thoughtful and responsible in their role as Points Bankers. I’ve never met one who was cavalier about it. But there are some who take quite a bit more pride in this role than others. I am thinking of a 1980s teacher surrounded with calculators and adding tape as they determine grades. I am thinking of the creators of the most precise (and longest) rubrics in the world. I am thinking of a teacher sitting back and thinking about who is worthy of extra credit, who needs to be penalized with half credit, and how they notify kids who refuse to walk into the Points Bank that they get zero points.

This teacher becomes not just the arbiter of points; the points become a stand-in for a kid’s value as a scholar. School, for this teacher, becomes less about teaching students and more about determining who is a good student and who is not.

Kids who are good at playing the game of school figure this out quickly. To them, school becomes about accumulating as many points as possible as effectively and efficiently as possible. Learning is ancillary to walking out of the Points Bank with as many points as they are able to stuff in their pockets.

To that kid, a way of generating a 5-paragraph essay about The Great Gatsby in seconds with no chance of detection would be a goose laying golden eggs. As long as the bankers keep granting them points in exchange for those eggs, why wouldn’t they keep bringing them in? What’s the point (pun intended, I think) in spending more time and effort when you can spend less for the same pay?

Of course, this is a really cynical position to take. But it is a position that many students have taken. If you doubt it, ask your students if they’d rather get an A+ and learn nothing or get a B- and learn more than they have ever learned in their lives. You will find a disturbing majority of your kids value points over knowledge.

Teachers are aware that the entire existence of The Points Bank depends on making student cheating impossible, or at least difficult. Now that AI enables them to cheat without detection on so many of the assignments that humanities teachers have most relied on for years, the market is flooded with counterfeit points, and the teachers’ power to designate who are “good” and “bad” students becomes meaningless.

But it’s not hopeless. Speaking as a guy who taught English and History for over two decades, I can say that there’s one key solution:

Burn down the points bank.

I am not saying we should get rid of grades (although I would passionately welcome a gradeless world). Instead, I am saying that we can run our classes with assignments that communicate that students come to school in order to think and learn rather than to accumulate points.

For starters, let’s just think about the words teachers use. If I had the power to eliminate one word from teacher vocabularies, it would be “points.” For a certain kind of teacher, this word keeps coming up. The kids hear it, and they get a message that points are the reason we work. A few teachers might even agree. But now that kids can get points from AI without any real thinking or learning, it’s time to shift the conversation to where it probably should have been all along.

Instead of creating assignments that students carry to us in exchange for points, we need to create activities that generate learning: that prove what a kid knows and is able to do. Instead of learning being an ostensible byproduct of points, which has been our past reality, we need to create activities that show beyond a doubt that kids have learned–activities that AI cannot generate. These can be verbal presentations, artistic creations, handwritten journals, or written products where the teacher can observe the entire process. But the rubric needs to be more about what is inside the kid’s brain and less about the product handed to the Points Bank teller.

We’ve been through a lesser version of this before.

When I started teaching high school as a student teacher in 1998, the World Wide Web was just getting started. A few enterprising students figured out that they could copy and paste articles from this new Internet thingy, put their name on top of it, and get points. As the young whippersnapper student teacher, I taught my older colleagues how to use search engines–shout out and RIP to AltaVista! I taught my colleagues how to take a particularly unique phrase that their Spidey senses said the kid didn’t write, put it inside quotation marks, type it into the search engine and see if a cut-and-pasted article popped up.

I got a reputation among students and faculty as a guy who caught cheaters–a reputation I was proud of. In retrospect, I should have spent at least a little time asking myself why these assignments were so meaningless to kids that they didn’t care to spend any time on them.

In any event, some of the questions we were asking a quarter century ago about the Web are just as relevant today. Why should a kid have to work on a skill–like writing or like memorizing–when there is a tool out there that is so powerful that it can do it for them? Is it worth it to say “go home and write a 3-5 page essay this week” when the temptation to cheat, using the Internet then and AI now, is so great?

Ultimately, I feel like the young generation is headed for an imminent backlash. Kids will start to value things that humans can do that machines can’t. One of those things is learning, understanding context, understanding nuance, enjoying relationships. Another is a kid not being a bore or a square. Is there anything a teenager wants less than to be so predictable that they could have been generated by the entire internet? That’s more or less what AI has to offer them, and sooner, rather than later, I can see AI looking hopelessly square to rebellious teenagers.

Still, the tech isn’t going anywhere, so we can’t ignore it. While I wish I had had the foresight to buy stock in the blue book company 12 months ago, I don’t know that having my classroom party like it’s 1989 is the answer. Like it or lump it, AI is going to be a part of everyone’s lives and careers henceforward. Hiding teenagers from it will do no good. It makes more sense to show them what it can do, and to train them that their thoughts, not AI’s, are to be central to their papers, their educations, and their lives. I like the metaphor where AI is your friend and supporter. It’s there to help you accomplish your goals, not to accomplish them for you.

Last week, an English teacher came to me distraught. He is in the same sort of existential crisis so many humanities teachers are about AI. I told him I get it. I went through a similar crisis about a year and a half ago. As AI was starting to become a more tangible reality, my boss–the assistant superintendent–said it would be really helpful for me as an instructional coach. “Think of that newsletter you write every two weeks,” he said. “Now, AI can write it for you! Think of the time you’ll save!”

Excuse me, but…hell no.

I don’t pretend to be a transcendently wonderful writer, but if my biweekly newsletter has any value, it’s because it takes ideas that I have in my brain and soul and recreates something like them in my teachers’ brains and souls. I view that reader-writer relationship to be sacred, as I view my relationship with the teachers on my staff to be sacred. Why would I offload that? It makes me think of that ubiquitous quote that the internet tells me is from Joanna Maciewska: “I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry.” If kids understand that AI, used well, can enhance their humanity rather than remove it, that’s a key lesson to learn (and one I hope my former boss has learned).

So, back to that distraught English teacher. He knew he had to make some changes. His first change is going to be to try out an assignment he calls “beat the bot.” He will put some sort of prompt on his screen and ask AI to answer it. He then will ask his students to come up with a response that they feel is better than AI’s and to tell him why.

This assignment celebrates humanity. In the process of that celebration, it values the kids for what they bring to the table. It tells them not to offload humanity in order to gain points from the Points Bank.

I actually feel optimistic that we as humans are going to figure this out simply because our lives will be a lot less interesting and fun if we don’t. Teachers like this one, and the students who will leave his classroom, are going to be our first line of defense–or maybe offense–in that clunky process of figuring out the place AI has in our classrooms and our lives. People who value their humanity and learning over the soulless transactions of the Points Bank are going to lead us to a better place, where AI supports us rather than supplants us.

Wow! That was a long one! Did I miss anything? What do you think about AI and where it needs to be in the classroom?