Priten: Welcome to Margin of Thought, where we make space for the questions that matter.
I'm your host, Priten, and together we'll explore questions that help us preserve what matters while navigating what's coming.
Today
Today I am speaking with Varun Gupta, who teaches Accounting and Economics at Wharton County Junior College in the Houston area.
Rowan is honest about his own journey with ai.
He's using it extensively for lesson planning and assignment creation, but he is deeply concerned about what happens when students take the helicopter to the top of Mount Everest.
Instead of making the climb themselves.
We'll explore the tension between efficiency and learning.
The challenge of maintaining academic integrity when you can't play gotcha with your students and what it means to be a teacher who uses the very tools you're asking students to resist.
Let's dive in.
Varun: so, uh, you know the name Gupta.
I've been teaching at Wharton County Junior College here in Houston area, Sugarland area since 2007.
It started out as part-time adjunct.
Then I became full-time in 2013.
I come from a family of educators.
My late mother and father were both educators and never really planned to get into it.
It just kind of happened backwards.
And since I don't have a PhD, I'm sort of stuck at the junior college level, which is fine.
I really enjoy it.
And we're a teaching institution, so all I have to do is teach.
And once I got into it, I really, really found that I liked it.
And so my professional journey as a teacher, it's been interesting because, at least our institution, I can't speak for others, but our institution doesn't expect a lot of us, and they don't give us many tools.
So if you've heard the statement to whom much is given, much is expected.
Ours is kind of the opposite.
They don't give us anything, so they don't expect anything.
Just teach your classes.
Don't get us in trouble and rinse, wash, repeat.
They really I think, judge us on how good our paperwork is as opposed to what we do in the classroom.
Now, pause.
I could have done that for the rest of my teaching career, but over the past few years I've had this mindset that there's gotta be a better way to teach.
Because I don't know how to teach.
I don't know anything about pedagogy and teaching technologies and all of that.
So I went on my own self journey to learn the science of teaching, or I think they call it metacognition.
And so I did a lot of seminars on the receiving end.
I've done some training on this end of it where I'm presenting because I feel like the best way to learn something is to teach it.
So that's what led me down the rabbit hole of AI.
It's kind of the, the new shiny object.
I had just gone to a conference in May, early June.
It's something that's really big in the community college space.
It's called Nyad.
I'm not sure what it stands for completely.
It's a University of Texas thing.
I kid you not.
But then every single session in there, the breakout sessions was a ai, A I A I, AI and how to harness it, how to leverage it.
And I've done presentations on that too.
And what I'm afraid of is I think that it is a shiny object.
It is a great tool.
There's just a lot of uncertainty on what to do with it, how to do it right, if it's actually even useful.
And I don't know the answers to that.
The way I tell it the story is I use the analogy of, the calculator and spell check.
If you were to ask me mental math problem right now with any kind of complexity, I would panic.
It would take me a while and I could probably do it, but I don't use that part of my memory anymore.
I have a calculator to my right, just outta sight here, and I have my phone.
Which of course has the calculator.
So I don't use those parts of my brain if I don't use, and, you know, I, I, I use GPS to go to the airport, even though I've been to the airport hundreds of times.
If I don't have my GPS, I'm not using those parts of my brain.
So this is what I worry about a teacher and as a person, is AI is giving myself and the students the ability to get answers and to get content.
Without any kind of effort.
It's like taking a helicopter to the top of Mount Everest, and I think there's something to be said for that.
Grinding and failing.
So that's sort of my journey and I'm trying to figure out how to use it responsibly, ethically.
Priten: the metaphor of taking the helicopter to the top of Everest is might, might be one that I steal from you.
Varun: Take it, take it.
I stole it from somebody.
Priten: so let's start with, As a teacher in your own workflow.
what have you sounded useful, both in terms of prep work or anything like that, but also you talked about trying to figure out, how to teach or the science of teaching.
Has AI already played a role in helping you get closer to feeling like you understand those things?
Does it play a role in how you teach because, um, of your understanding of those concepts or do they feel disconnected right now?
Varun: So with ai, uh, what I've done is in terms of prep work, if I need to take a problem that I've been using for years and then tweak it a little bit to give it a more local flavor are to make a comprehensive problem.
I use it to create multiple versions of case studies to help them understand the economics context.
And then it's helped me with lesson planning just in terms of step by step by step.
And then, since I'm all about this metacognition, it helps me, since I don't fully understand what metacognition is and all the different tools, it'll give me a sequence.
Okay.
Start with a, you know, lecture.
Have them read, have 'em recall.
Here's a quiz, here's a way to interleave it.
So I let it do that heavy lifting, and then I tweak it.
And then of course I use it to answer those troublesome emails from the kids that you get with for various reasons.
I can say, okay, hey, help me write this in a firm tone, just to kind of save time.
And I use it for quiz questions also.
Priten: When you do use it, do you tell your students you're using it?
Varun: So the way I phrase that is when they have an assignment, I say, listen, it's out there.
I know you guys are using it.
I don't need an AI detector to tell me that you're using AI to generate your answers in your term papers.
I use it from time to time to create assignments, and then when I give them the assignment, I'll say, Hey, by the way.
If this was AI generated, if you find an error, let me know.
I don't announce it on the emails.
Priten: Tell me a little bit about how students are receiving that.
So when you tell them that, okay, this assignment was AI generated, but I'm expecting you, to produce original work, are they able to grasp why you using it is different than them using it?
Varun: That's a great question.
I've thought about it, but not on a deep level.
Because it is a bit of, hypocrisy.
It's almost like you seem like you're too young to have kiddos yet.
Certainly they're not of any significant age.
If you do, it's like you tell your kids, okay, don't drink when you go to college.
You know?
'cause bad things happen.
Did you drink when you were in college?
Yeah, but
Priten: right.
Yep.
Varun: When I've told them I'm using it, I'll say, Hey, listen, I created this assignment.
In chat, GPT or whatever.
And if you find errors, let me know.
Now, when I asked them to write their papers and discourage the use of ai, I said, listen, you can do that.
You'll get the answers, but you won't understand the thought process behind it.
It's the journey, not the destination.
And that's what I try to impose upon them because they're using it.
I know they're using it.
The stuff that I have them do that are ai, potentially, it's low stakes and you can't really do anything because our college doesn't have a robust policy.
They've just left it up to each individual instructor.
thing with ai.
It's like, listen, I know you're using it.
I can't prove it.
I can't do anything about it.
Sometimes it's obvious they'll include the prompt insight in their answer.
They're not even smart enough to remove the prompt.
And then sometimes they'll do it that way and you can.
maybe The idea is that we can work together on an engineering, you know, is this any good?
Is this content any good?
Cause they won't know if the content's any good.
If I enter in a prompt on econ, I'll understand if the answer's any good.
For example, I was in California last week.
Asked chat GPT to plan out a public transit route from where I was, to where I wanted to go.
And it printed out a very nice itinerary when I got to the ferry terminal and I'm waiting for the 9:10 AM ferry, because that's what chat GPT said, I'm looking at the ferry board.
Ferry board says, no, there's no nine 10 ferry.
Priten: I think at face value there might be hypocrisy, but I think there's also a difference between, what you're expecting from your students and why the journey is important for them.
But the journey might just not be as important for you in creating the assignment as it is in them completing it., So, We do hear from some teachers that they're able to have that conversation with students.
, And often it comes up when there's a lot of pushback from the students.
So when the teacher says, oh, I've used this to, create some initial feedback on some writing that you've, given me, that starts to create some pushback from the students.
It's like, why are you allowed to use it to grade if I'm not allowed to use it to actually write the essay?
And so those conversations sometimes are interesting to hear about, just in terms of how students are thinking about their work um, and
what they think about the role of their productive energy um, and how they're spending it during classes or for schooling in general?
Varun: and I feel like, you know, I've been on the journey for most of this stuff.
I know how to do most of this stuff, but I think if I keep overusing it, I'll forget how to do, i'm trying hard not to make it my default fallback.
I try to grind through it on my own and then have it tweak it, but, that's a slippery slope.
I'm slipping more into.
language, just tragic.
Priten: you talked about, like the GPS and you talked about the calculator.
And I think I share concerns about what that's shown already about what happens to our cognitive skills when we offload even a component of them.
Do you have concerns that are specific to the subject matters that you teach about what that means for um, your field like if students in the pursuing careers, um, , and economics or accounting, what is your worry if they become over reliant on the technology?
What does that mean for their wellbeing, their career trajectory?
Varun: That's a good question.
I think there's a couple of layers to that.
One is, I think then the risk is that they are just, bots in a way that they respond to feedback and then they just put it in the chat.
GPT, they get an answer.
They don't know if the answer is any good or not, and they just send it up the chain.
and so one concern is, is if you send garbage up the chain.
Then that's gonna look bad on you.
the other concern I have is, is if everybody's using chat GPT, then every layer of the chain, they won't know if it's garbage.
We had one of our departments, they had to do a collective exam.
So everybody submitted 10 questions and nobody checked.
Only one person checked the question and answers.
Nobody else checked.
And then one of the sets of questions, most of the multiple choice responses were wrong.
And only because one other teacher took it upon themselves to check that.
Did it get caught, otherwise, it probably would've ended up in the lab manual because whoever generated the questions were chat.
GPT didn't check.
So at what point does somebody say, oh, this is garbage.
Discipline specific.
If these kids, if they do choose econ and they don't know the underlying the grind and the journey and the fundamentals, then they're just answering questions.
There's no texture, there's no layering, and then if the garbage just keeps getting pushed up
Priten: And I think the idea that like there's no checkpoints to make sure that what the AI is generating, is accurate or not garbage, , is a concern I think, across different industries as well.
So you mentioned about, yearning for the good old days of teaching.
I would love to hear more what that means.
Um, Like the use of technology in your classroom, Um, you're obviously embracing it.
, You're, , figuring out ways that you can use ai.
Are you happy with that?
Are you, you Like the direction in which education is moving?
, Or would you want something different?
Varun: I think the, the way that I learned all those years ago, I started college in 1982, we didn't have any options.
It was go to class, face to face.
There was no.
Zoom, go to class, face-to-face synchronously, and listen to the teacher.
And she or he could talk about anything they wanted to.
And we had a textbook, maybe a study guide, maybe some notes from a classmate and we had to figure it out.
I don't know that that was a very good model.
Uh, Especially, you know, you get the teachers that have credentials and from all over the world, of which my father was one who couldn't really understand a lot of what they said.
You figured it out, and that's part of that journey.
So if that's the good old days air quote, and then fast forward to now where they had so much content, even before ai, they could just go to YouTube, Khan Academy, so many places were offering them an easy way to get 24 7 content if they wanted it.
It's like, you know, Facebook or Instagram.
They can just get it anytime they want.
There's no time appointment that's necessary.
So if the good old days are how I was and then the bad old days are where they are now, where there's no urgency to come and be in a group, I would like something in the middle.
I don't think that I know for a fact that sage on the stage, me talking and you writing isn't working.
Because they have options.
They're easily distracted.
Very good book called Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haight and another book, Chris Hayes.
The sirens call.
There's so many things competing for their attention and in the classroom setting, this idea that they're gonna sit there and set up ramrod straight and listen to me just because I'm the teacher that ain't happening.
So I have to compete for their attention.
How can I do that?
I can't be more entertaining, but maybe I can make my activities robust enough with the help of AI that they want to engage with the activities and not think about their phones.
Priten: Yeah.
So I'm curious to hear more about like Like how the students shows up in your classroom.
Right?
So You talk about um, their attention spans, which well documented at this point across all levels of education that students' attention spans have dramatically gone down, um, since technology,
um, has grown in their personal lives and especially over the last decade when um, short form video and all of that have kind of taken over, , how they consume media outside of the the classroom.
Do students show up differently to your classes now than they did even like four or five years ago?
So if you think about, the first week that you have with students and things you notice about them, um, and how that experience was for pre-ChatGPT um, versus now.
Are you noticing any sort of difference or are students arriving relatively similarly in terms of background capabilities um, things like that.
Varun: Okay, so that's a good question.
I would answer it with a small modification.
I haven't noticed anything because truly this ai, what did it, November, 2022 is when it really came on huge.
So that's not even three years yet.
I would say that pre COVID, post COVID, there's definitely a difference.
I wouldn't tie it necessarily to GGPT, but pre COVID, post COVID, what I've noticed with the pre COVID kids is if they missed class, they seemed a little more concerned about, Hey, what did I miss?
And trying to get the content.
And then after COVID, they'll miss days at a time.
They don't even think twice.
I think they got into the habit of not showing up during COVID,
With the homeschooling and all of that, and then they could get the information anytime they wanted.
We took it easy on 'em during COVID, so a lot of the kids just passed.
So I did notice that huge difference.
I haven't noticed anything specifically about their preparation in coming to class that I that I thought was related to ai.
On a practical basis when I have my term papers due, I mean, they all, they still turn them in at the last minute,
but they don't seem to be as stressed about the term paper.
So this is one I could tell you, before co, before ChatGPT, they had a lot more questions about the term paper during the semester.
Hey, what's the topic?
Hey, is this good?
What format do you want?
Is this good?
They would try to bring me samples throughout the semester.
Now very few students ask me any questions about the term paper because I think they know in their minds that, listen, I'm not gonna put a lot of effort into this.
I'm just gonna go put it into a GPT.
I'll tweak it a little bit and then I'll put it in a spinner or something that makes, that it's not GPT or whatever.
So that's about the only thing that I've noticed that I can put my finger on.
That they don't seem as concerned about the term paper as they were before the arrival of GPT.
Priten: Yeah.
And that, That's fascinating to me, like that component of it, just noticing stress levels go down and normally that's a good thing, but this seems like uh, maybe for the wrong reasons.
it's going down.
What does that mean for how you approach the term paper?
Do you think that, you're going to continue assigning the term paper the same way that you have pre-ChatGPT in the last few years?
Or do you foresee that that will play a different role going forward?
Varun: So I have lowered the stakes because the way we way we're set up is we have to follow what's known as an administrative master syllabus that WC JC Wharton County Junior College has told the state of Texas in order to meet their guidelines.
'cause we're state funded, every econ oh one and econ oh two class is gonna have these grading components.
30% test, 20% final.
And the state of Texas mandates that we assess communication skills, so we have to assess their communication written or oral.
And so we do that with, in the face-to-face classes.
We do the term paper so that I don't anticipate that changing other than I do try to make the topics more personalized and more tied to what we did in class.
And then the online classes.
We don't do the term paper as heavily, we do more of the robust discussion between students and we can assess their communication that way.
So just trying to find some AI resistant, assignments.
'cause I don't think there's anything that's AI proof.
Priten: Yeah, whatever seemingly seems AI proof right now is definitely not going to remain that way for very long.
yeah, So online classes in particular are, are interesting because I think a lot of like in-person classes have shifted to figuring out how you know, they can bring assessments into the class or maybe have them write the paper in front of the instructor.
Your online classes, are they fully online?
Varun: Yes.
So I have face-to-face, which has an online component, could do the learning management systems, but the instruction is all face-to-face, synchronous.
The online classes are fully online, asynchronous.
Priten: uh, yeah, What does assessment look like in your asynchronous classes online?
That I'd definitely be curious to hear about that,
Varun: It's the same sort of setup, the differences instead of a term paper, they do group discussions where they, you probably have seen it.
Here's the prompt answer, the prompt reply to your.
Classmates use net etiquette, those kind of things.
And then they have a heavier homework component, which the LMS grades and a heavier quiz component, which the LMS grades, they do three exams in a final, which the questions come from a pool and then the system grades it automatically.
They have to take that on uh, with a respondent, with the monitor at the camera, and we have to go back and watch them.
So that hasn't changed too much other than they're heavy on the discussion.
And then the face-to-face.
The only difference is their tests are in person test, everybody gets the same test.
Priten: Has the quality of those posts changed, um, as AI became more popular among students?
Varun: Yeah, you see a lot fewer discussion replies and prompts and and starter thread threads, their grammar is spot on.
You wouldn't have no idea that this is a 16, 17, 18-year-old kid who's used to texting with the little eyes and the emojis and the abbreviations.
So the quality is definitely gone up, but they're very superficial and very sort of wordy, and they repeat themselves over and over.
'Cause then there's a minimum word count, right?
So if you tell 'em you need 200 words, you're, there's only so many words you need to make the point.
Priten: I would assume that the um, , dramatic difference in the polished nature of the writing is partially related to, um, AI usage.
Especially in an asynchronous context.
I'm, I'm curious to see, hear about like.
When you think about assessing your students, maybe even in a few years, , and you notice like that continues, that trend of the discussion posts are largely looking very different than they did pre chat GPT.
Did that change how you view the discussion forum?
because.
The background to this question is that we're speaking to a lot of college students who are making it very clear that that's one of the first places that they'll use chat.
GBT is for the discretion forums because it's like, it's a, usually there's a quick turnaround time, um, if you a little bit more low stakes.
Um, And they can put in what their classmates said, the reading and say, okay, like, can you make a response to this?
And Obviously that,, that was a place of learning initially, right?
That the goal for the discussion forum was to provide a way for the students to interact.
Would you say that it's no longer playing a role?
, And what role do you think it will play going forward?
Varun: Before I answer the specifics on the discussion part,, I love what you said about a space of learning, and I'm wondering if education has the way it's set up with 16 weeks, semester, whatever, and then at the end you get a grade.
Is the goal knowing, or is the goal learning?
I think all of us as teachers would like uh, we want you to learn critical thinking, and you and I were students.
Presumably you have some advanced degrees and you were in school for quite some time.
There were times when I'm like, you know what?
I just need to get this off my to-do list.
I don't give a dang about Texas government.
Let me just dah dah, dah.
There's always going to be that challenge in education with the semester system.
As long as we have to assess people and provide grades, there's going to be that component of knowing versus learning.
Fascinating ted Talk from many, many years ago talks about this idea of are we do, at what point in our lives are we going to be where we don't need to know anything.
We just need to know how to know.
I just need to know what to ask Google.
. And I think that's where the kids are.
I like what you said about their perspective is it's low stakes.
It's the easy entry.
So I think what happens with the discussion to try to answer your question now is they probably, 'cause we all do the same online, we all sort of use the same uh, techniques.
They probably just use the same intro post for all of them.
. so there's a little bit of that reusing.
Of previous content, putting it into the chat GPTs.
And then, I can only speak for me, in an anonymous way.
The idea that I'm going to read hundreds of discussion posts and thousands and thousands of words in a term paper, that's just not a reality.
I do, I have the time.
Do I have the interest to just read every single word?
So you find ways to just like, baby, I need to take this off of my, to-do list.
But just like you said, The discussions are low stakes.
And For me as a teacher, I haven't done it yet 'cause I haven't figured out how it, that would be if I was gonna start letting AI grade my stuff, not the test and all the multiple choice objective stuff that's done by the learning management system.
But if I were gonna stick my foot into the water of letting AI grade my stuff, that would be my entry point.
My entry point would be, here's the rubric or here's the guidelines for the discussion.
This is what the student gave me.
You grade it based on this rubric.
That would be my entry level.
You might want to call it an entry, entry level drug.
Right?
And, And then where does it go from there?
Once you get used to that, the bot's gonna run your class.
I mean, that's obviously an extreme.
Priten: I wanna end with just like thinking about, what do you think your role will be?
In your students' lives um, in the next three years, five years, 10 years.
I'm kind of curious about, um, how you see the technology changing.
You talked about like, potentially using the bots to do some of the grading, a bot run classroom, maybe.
you had to justify, to an, an admin person or the student, the role that you play versus like an AI run classroom would play.
Have you thought about what, that argument might look like?
Varun: No, but I will say that, if I split that question up in the way I understand it, you know, what do I see my role as in the next few years?
So I've got three or four more years than I'm invested.
I hope to teach for another nine years.
That'll put me at 70.
My role as I see it in the next few years is, you know, listen, this is out there.
How can you make sure that you don't get replaced by ai?
How can you leverage it?
And that's the journey I'm on now.
But you have to understand the grind.
You have to do all of the heavy lifting to get there.
Don't take the shortcuts to try to convince them not to take the shortcuts.
It's like taking steroids to gain muscle.
It's just a short term.
And then, you need to go through and grind every day.
That's the satisfaction and then the conversation, this is gonna only really be true for the face-to-face classes because the reality put them in a online asynchronous class, I'm sitting here answering emails.
That's all I do.
And you know it, it's no different than a bot.
They put in, Hey, Mr. Gupta, I missed the deadline.
Can you extend it?
And I'm like, okay.
Hey, thanks for your email.
Sorry.
No extensions not any different than a bot in a face-to-face class where I think the value that, myself I try to play is as a resource, Hey, listen, I have a life experience.
You know, I struggled as an undergraduate.
40 50% of my students are, from our community.
And it was a real shocker to me that not all of us are high achieving and smart.
They struggle like many of us do.
And I said, Hey, if I could be a resource, let's talk.
Let me give you some ideas about a career path.
I think that human empathy, that human touch, figuratively speaking and because otherwise we sit behind screens all day.
I can try to get them to have a human connection- Uh, you know, showing up every day on time, professional work product, having them and helping them do their best and not want those shortcuts.
It's very seductive to take that steroid to get that short term gain, short-term gain, long-term pain, short-term pain, long-term gain.
Priten: Yeah.
No, that seems accurate.
thank you.
Marone's willingness to acknowledge his own increasing reliance on ai, even as he worries about cognitive offloading reflects the complexity we're all navigating.
This is the core issue we face grappling with these same tensions between technological possibility and pedagogical purpose.
For more complex case studies that push out these dilemmas, pre-order my book Ethical [email protected].
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