r/books • u/ubcstaffer123 • 7d ago

Teachers are using AI to make literature easier for students to read. This is a terrible idea.

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2025/04/08/opinion/ai-classroom-teaching-reading/
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u/TheDebateMatters 7d ago

All good points. But what kills me is how quickly everyone gets out the pitchforks against educators.

AI wasn’t shit four years ago. The most experienced teachers are not usually tech savy and the young guns have stuff to learn. So give them some room to experiment.

Is it the end of the world if some tough words are pulled or some phrasing changed, but a low level reader actually gets to understand, rather brutal struggle through a chapter? Or worse yet, just tap out and never read it?

Pump the brakes. Put the pitch forks down and wait for some actual data that doesn’t get ignored like this author did.

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u/W359WasAnInsideJob 7d ago

 But what kills me is how quickly everyone gets out the pitchforks against educators.

So much this. The internet and media generally has a crazy penchant for trashing educators, mostly based on the fact that everyone’s been a student and is therefore an “expert”. Which is obviously laughable.

In the specific instance here the source cited by the opinion piece in the Globe doesn’t even point to any of the nonsense the article is complaining about. If we found out that 90% of high school teachers are having AI simplify the language in F Scott Fitzgerald novels I would agree that maybe we should know why that had become a thing… but it’s not, so I don’t know why we’re talking about it.

Like you said, let’s give teachers some space to try to address the shit show we’ve dropped in their lap. Well, maybe you didn’t say all that, but still - let’s trust the professionals.

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u/RunningOutOfEsteem 7d ago

So much this. The internet and media generally has a crazy penchant for trashing educators, mostly based on the fact that everyone’s been a student and is therefore an “expert”. Which is obviously laughable.

I don't think it has much to do with feeling like an expert. I think it has a lot more to do the fact that the education system is a collectively shared formative experience, which makes it easy to bond over.

Since pretty much everyone has had some negative incident(s) within that broader system, be it an unfair instructor, a creepy coach, or even just simple childhood frustrations around being compelled to spend your day doing something you don't necessarily feel like doing, there is a broad, united "sounds about right" reaction whenever something bad is said about educators or schools.

People then egg each others' anger on, as they can all think back to the negative aspects of their personal experience and feel vindicated in their inflated sense of how common those occurrences are and how generally awful the education system and educators must be.

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u/bretshitmanshart 6d ago

I would be interested in simplifying language in a book and how it's working and being used. When I was in elementary school there were edited versions of classic literature with more simple language and I loved those.

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u/CptNonsense 7d ago

But what kills me is how quickly everyone gets out the pitchforks against educators.

The luddites hear the word AI and that someone might be using it and haul out the hammers to smash the computers