In January this year, Australian educationalist Adam Voigt published an opinion piece in the Sydney Morning Herald titled “Schools right now face a choice — fight the wave of ChaGPT, or surf it”.

It’s a good, sensible article. It opens with the not-unexpected knee-jerk reactions from educators and parents in somewhat of a tizz. There’s been fairly widespread gnashing of teeth and wringing of wrists, as the end of homework, Aids posters and the papier mâché volcano is in sight. Children will plagiarise left right and centre and not even the plagiarism detection program Turnitin can stem this unravelling catastrophe.

Oughtn’t we teachers be producing innovative, creative, collaborative problem-solvers? How is that possible when so many of us in education are by default so risk-averse and suspicious of the new?

But Voigt moves on to express just how exciting this disruptor is — if educators embrace it and, as his title says, “surf this wave”.

Teaching ought to model agency and proactivity. This panic about how ChatGPT will “lead to cheating” is sad, and says way too much about how too many educators view the children they teach.

Of course, it could lead to cheating, unless we begin to think differently about the tasks we set and the purpose behind them. Children are generally better than that — if you expect more of them and you show that expectation every day in every interaction and in the way you nurture your relationship with them.

It’s not our job as teachers to impose our own fears and limitations on the children before us. It is our job to encourage them to think differently; to create new knowledge based on existing knowledge. We should rejoice when we see our children having the courage to see new paradigms that stretch our own understanding and worldview. It’s also our job to role-model the choice to behave ethically too.

What an amazing and exciting tool ChatGPT is for a teacher who’s willing to surf the wave! Bear with me for a wee bit, as I take myself back into my early role as a teacher of senior English and French, and imagine how I would experiment with ChatGPT, were I still in the classroom.

In senior grade poetry, and a first encounter with the sonnet for example, I’d get half the class to ask the bot to write a Shakespearean sonnet on, say climate change, and the other half to ask it to write a Petrarchan (Italian) sonnet on the same subject.

We’d spend some time discussing what differences we notice between the two forms produced by ChatGPT. We’d unpack what conventions make a poem a sonnet in the first place. They’d learn the terminology of the elements of a sonnet (14 lines of iambic pentameter, quatrains, tercets, sestets, rhyming couplets).

Moving on, we’d look at one or two actual sonnets. I’d ask how the Chat compositions compare? What differences do the students see or feel? Now write your own — and experience how demanding a format this is.

Visit Daily Maverick’s home page for more news, analysis and investigations

As a French teacher: list the new terms you have learnt from ChatGPT’s composition on a visit to the Louvre… as a history teacher: have ChatGPT compose a stirring speech in support of cause A, then write your own reply in favour of cause B… as a science teacher: get Chat to explain hydrogen bonding to a five-year-old (something I’d have found really helpful back in my day as a bamboozled matric science student).

What an opportunity to discuss the ethics and intrinsic value of producing one’s own work, of creating original material and supporting one’s own point of view, as opposed to simply relying on the instant output of a machine.

What an opportunity to debate the benefits of problem-solving collaboratively, as opposed to finding the quick-fix answer on a machine — and when either of these approaches is more appropriate.

Speaking of appropriateness, what an amazing opportunity to discuss when Chat could be fitting and useful, and when it very definitely is not: (“ask Chat to tell a family that their child has been diagnosed with a terminal illness and has two months to live…”). Would you want a machine to deliver this message to you?

What an amazing opportunity for teachers to have a long hard look at just how creative their teaching can be. What an amazing opportunity to change outdated assessment methodology for the better.

We have, as teachers, to stop thinking about our kids in terms of their next test. We have to think of them 10, 20, 40 years from now, not in terms of their matric results, but long after ChatGPT has morphed into ChatGPT 4.0 and they’re navigating virtual spaces and ethical issues that none of us old farts can imagine right now.

(Having said all of this, could we use ChatGPT to do something to boost literacy in our early grades? Urgently?) DM