4th grade student using ChatGPT

So I teach a class of thirteen 4th grade students as part of an “early intervention program”. In my opinion, this whole program is a shitshow, because there is nothing “early” about an intervention delivered to a fourth grader reading at a kindergarten level. I feel like I am retroactively trying to fix the mistakes of so many adults dropping the ball before me. All that paired with me being a first year teacher has made this transition into teaching pretty hellish, but all that is a post for another time. I have one student who I have been trying so hard to connect with to no avail. She is one of those students who seems like they are made just to test your patience and resolve in teaching. She knows exactly how to push my buttons, she does the same negative behaviors every day, she is a copycat who will copy others doing bad behavior and has been caught cheating on a quiz, she LIES like no other. I mean, lies about things that are so obviously not true but still will not admit it even when confronted with undeniable proof. In general it seems like she cannot think for herself at all, and is always trying to take the easy way or cheat her way out of things, even though (I’m sorry to say) she’s not even smart enough to do it well or convincingly. This was only further proven to me a few days ago when I was grading papers. I give weekly homework packets with a few math problems and simple writing prompts per day. With this being a class of students behind grade level, the writing prompts are typically very simple (things like “what is your favorite summer activity” or “write about a time you were sick. What did you do to feel better?”) and I’m happy if I even get one complete sentence in response, let alone multiple sentences or a paragraph. This little girl submitted three different packets with responses such as “This is a creative writing exercise where you can share what you enjoy doing most during the summer break. Here are a few ideas to get you started.” And that’s it. That’s literally what she wrote. No actual “ideas”, just the clearly AI-generated introduction to the answer she was looking for. What’s ironic is that she is so illiterate that she couldn’t even tell that what she copied completely exposed her scheme. There are several other examples of her responses just like this, things like “The task is to write a persuasive argument to the principal about the students.” And other things like that. Aside from the fact that it was obviously, without a doubt AI-generated, I also knew it couldn’t possibly be her because I know her reading and writing abilities and she can barely string together CVC words without support. So, I confront her about it, and of course she lies immediately. I expected this reaction, so I asked her to read what she had “wrote”. Of course, she couldn’t, but even then she wouldn’t admit it, just avoided eye contact and said she’s going to tell her parents to tell the principal on me or some other bullshit. Joke’s on her, I already emailed both her parents, her grandma who is heavily involved in her life, and the assistant principal with proof of her academic dishonesty (including the cheating off another student on a quiz). After wearing her down she eventually reluctantly admitted that she did it. I obviously already knew that but I just wanted to hear her say it. As I said, I contacted the parents and documented everything, but my fear is that the parents are actually encouraging this behavior. I’ve known for a while that they were “helping” her with her homework because it was actually written legibly, but this was the first time the use of AI was so blatant. I can’t imagine that her parents would send her to school with that; if they just took one look at it they would see that it is not only obviously AI, but she didn’t even answer the prompts in question! But then again, I find it hard to believe she would’ve come up with the idea to plug the prompt into chatGPT on her own, but maybe I’m underestimating her. Anyway, I’m not really looking for advice or support or anything, I just wanted to rant and share this anecdote that honestly makes me lose hope for the future generation. We have ten year olds who can’t distinguish between uppercase and lowercase letters who think they can get away with doing whatever they want because “their phones can do it all anyway”. Lord please help these children. submitted by /u/Bajookie [link] [comments]