The One-Million Dollar Teacher

Good Day!

Coachella has been happening this weekend, and I wonder who they will resurrect this year as a hologram? If you are a teacher and are out enjoying Coachella, you deserve it. Teachers deserve many things, and enjoyment and indulging in pleasurable events is something all teachers deserve. Remember that as we near the end of the school year. Take some time for yourselves and enjoy a little bit of something that will make you smile and laugh. What puts a smile on our faces? Coffee, of course.

Cheers to your morning brew ☕

How would you like to be remembered?

Lillian Orlich, or Mrs. O as everyone knew her, was a teacher for 67 years at Prince County's School in Virginia. She retired at the age of 89 and recently passed on March 7 at the grand age of 95 years.

There is a lot to be impressed about Mrs. O—living until 95, teaching for 67 years at the same school district, and having one of her students thank her for teaching the student's grandpa. On top of these superhuman feats, she left her life savings of $1 million to the school district's education fund, SPARK.

How is that even possible - a teacher with $1 million in savings? Doing the quick math meant she had to save about $15,000 every year for 67 years. To put things in perspective, the average public school teacher's salary when she started in 1960 was only about $4,000 (after inflation, at the time she retired in 2018, that would be equivalent to about $43,000).

The logical conclusion is that Mrs. O was a prolific investor. Instead of making millions, she dedicated her life to a life of service to educate future generations. Impressive and selfless. (But this is just speculation).

After retiring, Mrs. O established a $2500 scholarship fund for graduating seniors from Osbourn Park, the school she taught at.

She never had children, and her obituary reads, "I am survived by the many lives helped and touched by my teaching, loving, and caring."

An angel got her wings that day.

Can AI grade papers?

The short answer is it’s complicated.

Chat GPT itself cannot identify a paper it wrote itself and has shown to identify even previously published works as AI-written.

Chatgpt burst onto the scene on that Thanksgiving weekend of 2022, and by Spring, every single teacher was pulling their hair out because they were baffled by how a student who barely had command of grade-level grammar and mechanics at the 9th grade level just produced a graduate-level paper on “The Impact of Climate Change on the Coast of Florida and How Soil Erosion Can Lead to a Quarter of Florida Underwater by the Turn of the Century.”

Of course, all the citations are there.

But the sources don’t exist.

Educators have been grappling with this issue, with some schools and districts resorting to bans, others implementing AI detectors, and a few focusing on educating teachers and staff on responsible AI use. However, there are also educators who have embraced AI, harnessing its power to educate students more effectively and responsibly, offering a glimmer of hope in this complex landscape. 

As we are still trying to figure out how to alleviate this concern of students using AI to write their papers, there are now tools that claim they can use AI to grade student papers. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH), a company that makes around 90% of school materials, including textbooks for U.S. K-12 teachers, bought a company called Writable. 

With Writable, teachers can upload a student’s paper, and it provides feedback and comments on the work. However, Writable emphasizes that this feedback should not be the sole basis for grading. It underscores the crucial role of human judgment, reminding educators of their irreplaceable value in the learning process.

Yet, many teachers use what is given to them at face value. As an educator, think about how you would feel if a teacher graded your narrative paper, a science fiction story that you crafted using your overactive imagination to create a vibrant world and a colorful set of characters to only get feedback that seems bland and robotic and makes no mention of the creativity that was put into your story. An AI does not possess the subjectivity that humans have. It cannot distinguish between what makes a great literary work a masterpiece or just a really great piece of writing because it does not have the capability to do nuance. 

Let’s take Jackson Pollock. We think his work is not great. Give a two-year-old a bucket of multi-colored paint and a large canvas, and it can produce paintings just as great.

Some will counter and state that his works are masterpieces because he understood colors and chaos in a way that people at that time did not. They can go on and on about why Pollock created masterpieces.

As humans, we have the self, which can be subjective, and we understand the nuances of human capabilities and emotions. We can read a paper with horrible grammar yet conclude that the story was beautiful.

As teachers and educators, we believe that our students deserve better. Let’s not be lazy in how we approach grading just because we have all these fancy gadgets at our fingerprints. That is not to say don’t use them, but use them as tools like a hammer, a calculator, or Google Docs. Use them to enhance what you do. It's great already.

Teachers burning out

Lisa Harding came from a family of teachers. Her parents met while they both taught at the same middle school. Harding spent 15 years placing teachers in the classroom when she got another calling.

Michelle Auger spent 35 years as an educator and spent her last year as a Principal at an Elementary school near Tampa. She believed she would remain in education until she saw how burnt out all her teachers were. Then, Auger re-evaluated what she wanted to do when COVID hit. After signing up with CTTA, it was an eye-opening experience she had as a school principal translated into project management. She is currently the educational program coordinator for a camp in Florida. She loves her job and credits Harding and her company for making it happen.

Too many teachers are continually burning out, and it is safe to say that every school district in America has a teacher shortage, especially in STEM and special education. In the next several years, it should come as no surprise if there are more companies like Harding’s start popping up, but then what happens once all teachers have transitioned into new professions?

Well, artificial general intelligence, of course. Time to prepare for a world in which every child is implanted with a chip in their brain that can create their own personal teacher avatar.

On a serious note, we have certainly mentioned this before, we need to do better by our teachers. That is not to knock on what CTTA is doing because, right now, companies like these are needed. A burnout, depressed, teacher should not have to subject themselves to stay in this profession at the expense of their overall health and well-being. It is wonderful what CTTA is doing in helping put the plethora of skills teachers acquire and showing that it can work in other professions.

We are not at the point of no return yet, but we are close when it comes to if we can fix our public education. If you still believe in our system, let’s do what we can to help fix it.

Closing Bell

On this day in 1865…

President Abraham Lincoln, his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, and their guest Henry Rathbone and Clara Harris, attend a play at Ford’s Theatre, Our American Cousin. A well-known actor by the name of John Wilkes Booth found a way to go undetected into the President’s theatre box, and upon entering, he fired nearly point-blank at the back of Lincoln’s head. On the morning of April 15 at 7:22am, The President of the United States was declared dead.

 Two weeks after his successful assassination, Booth was tracked down on a farm in Virginia. He was shot and mortally wounded by Sergeant Boston Corbett on April 26.