The Day Every Student Got an A+
It was right after all the students had left school. I turned on my laptop to review and grade writing projects for my grade 10 students.
Students had been reading a novel, “The Giver,” which was also adapted into a film. After the students were done reading, we watched the movie during class period and analyzed the book and the movie together. Because the novel had an open ending, I assigned a creative writing project, which was creating a new chapter based on the book’s open ending, using their own voices and tones.
I was scrolling down one student’s work from a creative, attractive, and eye-catching cover page generated by ChatGPT, then started reading the first two paragraphs.
However, just a few paragraphs in, I had to pause scrolling down to the next paragraphs. With suspicion, I had to open another student’s work, read through a page, then repeat the same thing with other students as well. Without a doubt, I could tell that besides a few students’ stories, the majority of their papers were well-organized with perfect grammar, literary language use, and advanced vocabulary usage.
This unit assessment was supposed to be an engaging creative writing project where my students were expected to become creative authors themselves.
I was already aware of all students’ writing styles and English proficiency through assigning them diverse classwork. This is why I could surely tell that their own thoughts, ideas, and distinct voices were missing from their writings. For some students, I could see from their outline that they actually had brilliant and creative ideas before drafting; however, almost all students depended on generative AI to publish perfectly polished stories.
In that moment, I experienced distrust toward my students, and it was something I definitely did not expect to go through. This naturally led me to question the meaning of education, my teaching philosophy, and the reason for teaching students English and English literature. Then, I turned to my co-teachers and colleagues to share my concerns and discuss the burgeoning AI tools to relieve this feeling and genuine worries.
Are teachers “Detectives”?
As I started sharing this incident, I realized that my colleagues and I were on the same page. We were experiencing despair and felt helpless due to insufficient education about what attitude is needed when facing and resolving issues with AI tools.
For instance, math and science teachers were frustrated due to students submitting answers without providing any solution process. As creative writing subject teachers, they were questioning whether assigning homework was necessary at all since students tend to hand in homework written or copied and pasted by ChatGPT or Gemini without citing sources. Every teacher in that room echoed that our students no longer desire or try to make a habit of logical or critical thinking.
Then, is banning AI use actually effective for students?
In reality, more students tend to evade surveillance by using more advanced and improved AI tools, while the vast majority of teachers still struggle and remain in traditional teaching and evaluation methods.
In fact, a recent K-12 survey proves that nearly 89% of students use AI when completing homework. Moreover, if schools ban or warn students from utilizing AI tools, students learn how to lie first, which causes a vicious cycle between students and teachers in classroom settings. This is how reality is at this moment.
In the case of multilingual and multicultural students, the situation is worse because their unique and original writing styles and works are considered AI-generated texts by AI detectors. This eventually forces the students to make a habit of defensive drafting, demotivating them to write and express in more creative ways and with their own voices.
Not only teachers, but parents’ concerns have intensified due to the increase in generative AIs, as they offer free and subscription versions, which causes gaps between assignments of various students.
Both parents and teachers have fallen into a grey zone, where we do not have clear guidance or solutions when clear guidance is necessary. As Generation Alpha and Z become accustomed to watching short-form content on YouTube, becoming prompters who are good at generating prompts for ChatGPT but lack critical thinking, our concerns deepen.
While my head was full of helplessness and complicated emotions, these thoughts and questions began racing: ‘If we treat students like criminals or suspects, how are schools different from prisons? AI will continue to evolve and develop; how will education look different from 2026 in the 2040s, 2050s, 2060s, and how should it change? Are students really doing something inappropriate and miseducative, and are teachers and parents suggesting the best solutions?’
Get Olivia K. Yoon’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
A New Paradigm: As a Multilingual and Multicultural Person
Setting aside complex vocabularies and complicated theories, I would like to share how I view AI tools, and I want to help you to come up with your own conclusion today. In addition, I want you to be engaged in an honest conversation with me through comments or with your own post about how we should really view AI in this grey zone.
I have grown up as an immigrant and a diaspora member outside of where I was born, and now I am working in a place where I encounter and co-work with people from different cultural backgrounds and ethnicities. I personally am grateful that I have been exposed to diverse cultures and people throughout my life.
It may sound odd, but the reason I bring this up is that growing up in diverse backgrounds, having chances to live with various people, and learning multiple languages eventually helped me fall in love with the English language and literature (poetry, essays, and novels).
I am happy to say that these experiences somehow helped me to understand this AI era.
Through interacting and communicating across languages and cultures, I have learned from early on that every language carries its own expressions, characteristics, and nuances, with different stories and histories in it. Not only that, but each human being, disregarding ethnicity, carries one’s own story and episodes with rich emotions and ideas.
Some of you who are reading my article must be diasporas, as I am; the others might have lived in one country for their lives. It does not matter where you belong; everyone grew up in one’s own unique background, which shapes one’s distinctive language patterns, expressions, culture, and ideas. All these combined together create output, such as a person’s attitude, word choice, and tone of voice.
Through interaction and also miscommunication, we learn through conflicts, and sometimes our words and language might comfort others. This process gradually shapes multiple feelings and desires of a person and whether it is something good or bad, it allows us to be the one and only human being in this world — at least for me.
As a secondary English educator, I strive to convey not only knowledge, but also how accepting diversity and having critical thinking will ultimately help them become stronger thinkers and holistic human beings. I am thankful when I hear my students say that my multicultural and multilingual background broadened their perspectives. Being in the diaspora usually helps me view people with a diverse understanding and guides me to shift my thoughts to think differently, even with AIs.
Being a Human
I believe that rather than teachers or parents being obsessed with whether their student or child actually used AI tools or not, it is now more crucial to ask how a student or a child can remain a critical thinker and preserve one’s own unique voice in the AI era.
If we do not think deeply about this topic now, the grey zone will expand, and the future of various fields will face additional challenges. With the lens I have as a diaspora, I firmly believe that in both education and daily life, it is time for us to use this chaotic situation as an opportunity.
Students and educators should be aware and search for different ways instead of blindly depending on AIs or being continuously confused in the grey zone. At the end of everything, it is humans — not generative AIs — who should make moral judgments and who have to take ownership of our life decisions. To apply this into my classroom, I think I can try redesigning detailed guidelines to determine the exact plagiarism, and making students correct AI generated written works can be a new trial.
While my primary focus is on AI usage and education as a teacher who is teaching secondary students, I know this topic touches everyone who is reading this article. Thus, here are some questions I want to leave for you: What are some unique fields you think AI cannot replace? Do you have experience producing creative products or any type of writings which no one could recreate? Lastly, what methods do you think will work best to yourself and to students?
I am looking forward to reading your own unique stories in the comments below!
References
Derakhshan, A., & Ghiasvand, F. (2024). Is ChatGPT an evil or an angel for L2 education? International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 34(3), 1246–1264.
Fernandes, M., & McIntyre, M. (2025). Drafting defensively, documenting authorship. Computers and Composition, 76, 102926.
Mujumdar, A. R. (2025). Teaching English as second language: Theory, techniques and technology. Routledge.
Tooher, M., & Greene, M. (2025). Encouraging dialogue on academic integrity: A scenario-based approach. Journal of Academic Writing, 15(S1), 1–18.
