Thank you for this response. You really articulated what I was trying to get across in... What frankly was a pretty off-the-cuff post I didn't expect many folks to see.
If I regret anything about it, it's including the A grade. It was true, but it does come across as boasting; I could have phrased it better to get across my point.
Because frankly and honestly: I am naturally a good writer. Even at that age, I was. A good portion of that was practice, but it was also talent. We've all got natural talent somewhere or other, and mine lies in writing.
And I absolutely do not want the takeaway from this to be "speed writing a last minute essay works if you have natural talent, but if you don't, there's no point. Might as well use ChatGPT."
What I didn't include in that was all my failures. Cuz I had failures. There was one chemistry quiz I studied for week after week, a teacher kept re-assigning me, but I just couldn't remember the various ion configurations to his satisfaction. Years later, there were organic chemistry compounds I similarly struggled to internalise. Lots of tear-filled studying nights.
Mathematics. Ugh, mathematics. I got a D grade at a midterm exam in Year 10, enough that it risked completely flunking my overall grade score. It terrified me.
For the next six months or so, every Saturday morning, for 2 hours, I went to a math tutor hall, and just did math exam questions. I hated it. It was a unique combination of boring and stressful.
... But after all that work, I did, to my amazement, bring my mathematics grade to an A for my final exam.
Generative AI, to my knowledge, can't really produce answers to these things the same way it can with writing an essay (though I suspect it would try if you ask). So students don't really have chatgpt as an option to speedrun those.
But I'll say now: if such a speedrun option had existed when I was a student, I would have been sorely tempted by it. Sorely.
And that would have been a mistake. Because while I'll never really have any natural talent in chemistry or mathematics, I do have some hard-won skills in it. And I use those skills in my day-to-day life, both professional and personal, all the time, in ways both direct and indirect.
I'm not saying that our school systems are perfect. God, they are not. I stopped being a teacher in PART they were so flawed, that I could see it. I didn't want to be assigning kindergarten students six textbooks of homework per week. We've got some fucked up perverse incentives going at every level, and I can't BLAME students for seeing this, and baulking, and revolting.
But I'm not saying this for the sake of the system. I'm saying this for the sake of you, and your growth.
The only way to build the muscle is to lift the weights.
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