Students Are Not Your Prisoners

And other lessons from teaching freshmen how to write

My first semester as a grad student is over and it’s crazy how much space I have to think again. I’ve told some people that being in school again makes me feel like the end of Matilda, where she has to use her whole brain for the first time in her life and can no longer use all the excess power to make things fly around the room.

In two of the classes I took, I was asked to submit a draft of a teaching philosophy statement. This is a document that I’m told is typically included in one’s portfolio when trying to get a teaching job, whether it’s in higher ed or elsewhere. (I never knew that before, having backdoored my way into a twelve-year teaching career up to this point; I’m back in school to finally get a master’s degree so that I can go in the front door, too.)

When I sat down to compose this statement for the first time, having been asked to consider my values and how I bring them into my classroom practice, I decided that it was important for me to illustrate and stand behind a principle that has been slowly resolving into focus for me over the past few years: the importance of resisting those educational practices that I find unjust, and the accompanying need to create curriculum and standards that disincentivize or mitigate those student behaviors that institutions use to justify unjust educational practices. My statement includes the following paragraph:

I am opposed to the normalization of surveillance technology as an educational tool. I base this commitment on moral and economic principles: I do not believe educational spaces should replicate unjust societal divisions, and I do not believe that corporations should profit from the use of student work, work for which students are not paid and to which they cannot consent…This commodification of student work contributes to the students’ devaluing of their own writing, which is antithetical to the model of process and growth that I offer. Accordingly, I reject accumulative “plagiarism detection” tools like Unicheck and TurnItIn, the practice of feeding writing prompts into AI sites to test similarities to student responses, and LMS tools such as time trackers and embedded textbook page counters that monitor student participation. 

I’m ashamed to admit that before this semester I had thought about this issue on moral grounds (as I’ll explain below), but had failed to consider the economic implications: namely, that the entire profit model of these educational surveillance companies is to be given student work for free and then sell that work back to teachers and administrators for the purpose of punishing those same students. As the authors of Critical Digital Pedagogy explain:

The gist: when you upload work to Turnitin, your property is, in no reasonable sense, YOUR property. Every essay students submit — representing hours, days, or even years of work — becomes part of the Turnitin database, which is then sold to universities. According to the company’s website, as of this writing, Turnitin has a “non-exclusive, royalty-free, perpetual, worldwide, irrevocable license” to more than 734 million student papers.

…Behind this surrender to efficiency over complication, Turnitin takes advantage of the perennial mistrust of students by teachers. Turnitin relies on suspicion of plagiarism as an assumed quantity in the teacher-student relationship, and it feeds that polemic through its marketing.

That last part of the paragraph in particular has become a core part of my attitude toward these tools. Even if students were able to consent to this practice, or were even compensated for their contributions to the database, the existence of these tools is funamentally in service of an adversarial model of education. That model fails to serve students, and it fails to serve educators.

My thinking in this regard began with a piece that I’ve linked in here before at some point in the past, called “Against Cop Shit.” The paragraph that has really stuck with me is as follows:

“Here,” cop shit says, “you will learn how to do this thing. We will know you learned it by the acquisition of this gold star. But in order for me to award you this gold star, I must parse you, sense you, track you, collect you, and—” here’s the key, “I will presume that you will attempt to flout me at every turn. We are both scamming each other, you and I, and I intend to win.” When a classroom becomes adversarial, of course…then there must be a clear winner and loser. The student’s education then becomes not a victory for their own self-improvement or -enrichment, but rather that the teacher conquered the student’s presumed inherent laziness, shiftiness, etc. to instill some kernel of a lesson.

That adversarial model of education is one I have no intention of perpetuating, to whatever degree I’m able to resist it. I taught a required freshmen gen ed writing course this semester, and I repeatedly told my students that if they were going to miss class, they just needed to let me know ahead of time. I didn’t want or need doctor’s notes, obituaries, or anything else that constituted a detailed explanation about their situation. I simply needed to know if they would be gone so that I could prepare for class without them and make sure they had what they needed to be ready for the next session.

Some students embraced this practice, but I was crushed by how frequently I still received excuse emails that went into great detail about deaths in the family, car accidents, surgeries, and in one tragicomic instance, IBS. Students offered all manner of proof, begged for lenience, and overpromised the quantity of work they would put in while absent. It broke my heart, truth be told. It didn’t matter how often I told them what my policy was (and why it was); they had been well trained by the system to lay bare their traumas, beg for forgiveness for experiencing normal events and circumstances, and lie to themselves and to me about the priority my class took in their lives.¹

I want no part in a system that demands and requires that kind of obsequiousness. So it’s important for me to continue on my journey of figuring out how to build a classroom environment that keeps all of us, as much as possible, outside of that carceral paradigm. Doing so requires constant attention to the lens through which I view my students. If I view them as suspect, or explicitly immoral or unethical, I do us both a disservice.² Here’s the trickiest part: This holds true even if they willfully engage in academic misconduct. The thing about principles is that they shouldn’t really have the luxury of exceptions. And this is not naivete on my part; in fact, I consider this stance to be one that treats students as rational actors in their own lives and allows me to act accordingly.

Consider the following from Kelly' Ritter’s “The Economics of Authorship,” another piece that transformed my thinking in this regard:

These students patronize online paper mills not because of any desire to outwit the academic system of authorship, but because of their cultural and ideological disconnection from the system itself. The rhetoric present in online paper mills and in our students’ support of them challenges our comfortable and traditional definition of plagiarism, which is predicated upon academia’s intrinsic defense of authorship as an intellectual, creative activity. The papermill Web sites, in order to rationalize their existence, negate the academic value of authorship in their easy online commerce with our students, instantly changing that innocent eighteen-year-old in one’s composition class to a plagiarist, or, in the rhetoric of the paper-mill sites, from a student to a consumer. In order to truly understand how and why students continue to engage in dishonest practices in the composition classroom, we thus must seek to understand how and when students see themselves as authors; how students see themselves as consumers, not just in the purchase of a college education, but also in a society defined by anonymity, convenience, and privacy; and how students reconcile the warring concepts of author and consumer in the space of their own writing.

I am reminded of the early months of the COVID pandemic, when it became trendy to bemoan the quantities in which toilet paper was being bought up, the product of an irrational populace that seemed to think it was doomsday. Right? Well, no. No one was going in to the office any more, and kids weren’t going into school, so the waking hours at one’s own home roughly doubled for 300+ million people for months on end. If you’re only using one bathroom per day instead of several, your TP demand is going to go up accordingly. A pretty easy conclusion to reach, and a reminder that a lesson I’ve had cause to learn over and over again in my life is that the misanthropic explanation is usually the wrong one.

When we see behaviors we don’t understand, we tend to believe ourselves the only rational one present, which is frankly a depressing and terrifying way to live. As my friend Devon Price wrote, in the article that became the foundation for his phenomenal book Laziness Does Not Exist:

If a person’s behavior doesn’t make sense to you, it is because you are missing a part of their context. It’s that simple…No psychology class, at any level, taught me that. But now that it is a lens that I have, I find myself applying it to all kinds of behaviors that are mistaken for signs of moral failure — and I’ve yet to find one that can’t be explained and empathized with.

Besides the myriad dramatic situations I mentioned above that make up part of my students’ context, there is also the very important one that they are all first semester freshmen navigating a new social and academic world and having to make choices about how they spend their limited time to meet the varying (and often inscrutable) demands of their professors and instructors. Accordingly, I see it as my job to set high standards and teach students to write well, while still seeing them as full human beings with choices to make, choices that I can actively choose to validate or excuse even if I would not have made the same choice.

This brings me back to willful academic misconduct—the use of ChatGPT to write papers in particular. When I talk about this framework of mine, I am sometimes asked: “That’s all very kind of you, but you just LET your students cheat??” Well, no. I neither punish them for cheating nor “let them get away with it.” The course I just taught was predicated on the idea that writing is an iterative, collaborative process, one that requires planning, feedback, and revision. As such, every piece of writing turned in to me received detailed feedback for areas of improvement, and the requirement that it be revised and resubmitted. Much of this revision happened in person, during class time. My thinking was that even students who did not write a draft themselves would be forced to engage in the process of writing something, because they would end up needing to write entire paragraphs to make good on what ChatGPT had failed to deliver.

The craziest part was that this system mostly seemed to work. I say mostly because I did run into a few actual problems with this at the end of the semester, when students had one last paper to complete and even less time to do it than usual, given the finals they needed to study for in their other classes. I got handed a raft of papers that were clearly or probably written by AI. This is obviously a thorny situation, made more so by the principles I am practicing adhering to, which include not seeking proof of AI usage (and therefore not making accusations of it).³ But what I ended up choosing to do was marking the drafts incomplete and providing feedback as though they had been written by students who had simply fallen short of the standards described in the rubric. I demanded more analysis, more quotations, more evidence of their own language and thinking (none of which an AI tool can provide, though it attempts to in many laughable ways). I required multiple rounds of revisions from students in each case so that they would be forced to participate in the generative act of writing as part of the process, but I levied no accusations of plagiarism or misconduct. I still don’t know whether my choice truly served those students, or was fair to the other students who had clearly done their own work, but I also don’t think education should be a zero-sum affair where the value of one student’s B+ is enriched or cheapened by another’s.

This is all to say that if you work in education at any level, or are even just in charge of people in one way or another, I think it’s your duty to take stock of when, how, and why you’re being asked to implement or enforce policies, practices, and technologies that are fundamentally unjust. I’m certainly not saying you have to do things my way, but I am saying that you shouldn’t let things keep going they way they’re going. It will never be perfect, and you won’t get it “right” the first time. But that fact creates no less of an obligation to try. This is true of the day-to-day stuff, where everyone who makes curriculum or engages with students is regularly asked to participate in normalizing an adversarial framework that profits off of and punish students. But this is also true of the more dramatic moments that the world provides us.⁴ It’s a tremendous privilege and responsibility to be given the task of educating children and young adults. And the system as it exists makes a mockery of it.

Thanks, as always, for reading. I’ll talk to you next time.

-Chuck

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1. Writing this I just had a vivid memory of being asked in my senior year of undergrad to email my instructor with documentation of the funeral I was attending that would cause me to miss class. This was for a one-credit elective: soccer. What are we even doing here?

2. And don’t get me wrong: the system has trained me well, too, and this is my gut reaction often enough to make me ashamed of myself.

3. Another of those things I’m fighting against in myself is the self-righteous need to “let them know that I know,” to “not let them get one over on me.”

4. Living as I have for my whole career in states whose legislatures aren’t completely draconian on social issues, I have never been put in the position to have to choose between my job and respecting a student’s chosen name and pronouns, or their willingness to take action in support of besieged Palestinians, for example. So it’s maybe easy for me to say, from my position of relative safety, that teachers who don’t resist state laws like those in Alabama and North Carolina requiring adherence to legal names and birth sexes, as well as functionally outing trans kids to their parents and administrators, are cowards failing to do a basic duty to humanity. But it’s hard for me to feel otherwise.