Hey There

Is it just me, or is the topic of kids, writing, and AI suddenly  everywhere? You might have seen the article in this week's New Yorker about What Happens When AI Destroys College Writing (spoiler alert it takes their attention and critical thinking skills in exchange.) Or this poll in Common Sense Media about how kids are now more likely to use Chat GPT over Google when starting a school related search. Anecdotally, I've heard my share of horror stories from friends about how their college kids at elite schools use multiple generative AIs to craft papers and then use more AI to dumb them down so it can't be detected.

 

But there's hope! If you haven't heard it, you might want to listen in on this amazing conversation between The New York Times' Ezra Klein and Rebecca Winthrop, the director of the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution. If you don't have time to listen to the whole thing, here are the nuggets that really dazzled me, for better and worse: 

 

At the start, Klein reports: In 1976, 40 percent of high school seniors read six books or more, for fun. 11 percent hadn't read any. Now, those numbers are reversed....kids aren't reading the way they used to and the number of kids reading at grade level is slipping. 

 

Around 51:06, Klein says: One theory on how to counteract that trend is to [get kids] reading the great books, developing the attentional faculties... data and anecdata suggest that even elite students are losing the ability to read a long book and think about it.

 

According to Winthrop, "Anything we can do to ensure that young people are developing the muscle, not just of attention, attention is the entry point, the doorway ... of reflection and meaning making which is what you get from deep reading and reading full books, which a lot of young people struggle to do today. You can also get it from long Socratic dialogue, in a community with diverse people. 

 

It makes me so happy to know that this is exactly what we do in the writing workshops. My final intermediate class for the summer just filled today, but there are still some spots available in the late middle/high school writing camp for next week, July 14th, and the elementary school classes the week of July 21st (afternoon) and July 28th, 10am-noon. Everything else this summer is full—take that AI! But the fall session registration will be dropping soon. If you're receiving this, you'll get an early heads up on that as well. 

 

I hope you and your kids are enjoying some great summer reading. I just finished Taylor Jenkins Reid's new book, Atmosphere, which was light and fun, and just started a new middle grade book by Gordon Korman, Snoop, which, at least so far, is all about what happens when kids are consumed with social media. We'll be reading that one in the intermediate class next week. On audio, I just finished a re-listen to Memoirs of a Geisha, which was so much more real after my trip to Japan earlier this summer, and started Tom Sawyer, which somehow, I'd never managed to read before. It's super funny and still fresh. I think it'd make a fantastic family read aloud.