Guide the pen yourselfgettyWay back in 2022, pundits were already declaring that “ChatGPT will end high school English.” But as writing expert John Warner pointed out, “ChatGPT can’t kill anything worth preserving.”Four years later, classroom teachers continue to question how to manage the threat of Large Language Models to a traditional writing assignments. Can assignments be structured so that a cheatbot can’t successfully complete them? Can repeated barrage of ethics lessons convince students not to hand over their assignment to their computer? Probably not. So what should teachers do instead?First, it’s useful to understand why school essays were so vulnerable to chatbot writing in the first place.Writing is messy and personal. There are thousands of ways to deliver a particular message, and the “best” choice depends on the writer and their audience. That means that assessing writing is messy and difficult; even at the highest levels, it would be impossible to come up with a list of the Ten Best Writers on which everyone could agree. How much more difficult to assess the quality of a fifteen year old amateur.Faced with an assessment task that is squishy, particularly when dealing with students who are at the beginning of their growth as writers, many teachers have fallen back on structural measures. I may not feel confident about judging this student’s use of supporting evidence, but I can tell whether or not she’s used five paragraphs. I may not be sure how effective this opening paragraph is, but I can tell whether it starts with a thesis statement or not.Twenty years of high stakes standardized multiple choice tests have not helped. The underlying message of such tests is that for every question, there is a correct answer out there, and the student’s task is to identify it. That’s far different than setting a student task to develop and express ideas from inside themselves. MORE FOR YOUThese factors have fed a tendency to try to reduce writing to an algorithm so that students can follow a step by step process, which too often leads to teachers who assess not how well the student has communicated their own ideas in written form, but how well the student has followed the required steps of a process. This has made classroom writing ripe for AI, which is excellent at following an algorithm with no particular regard for what the content communicates. For students dealing with an assignment that values structure and format, AI is very useful.AI is less useful for an assignment that asks students to provide their own perspective on ideas and material that have been discussed in class. AI is less useful for an assignment in which the student is asked to develop and present ideas in their own voice. AI is less useful when the assignment values thinking and communicating over producing a polished artifact that demonstrates an ability to follow instructions.In his book On Writing, Stephen King answers the question “What is writing” with a simple line.“Telepathy, of course.” And later, “a meeting of the minds.” A classroom with a foundation that values writing as a means of communicating ideas from one human to another will not be AI-proof, but it will be more AI-resistant than one built on following a strict algorithm for producing a written product. Center humans in a human classroom.