All summer long, we interview employees, freelancers, and business leaders about their relationship with generative artificial intelligence. How do they use it, how do it change their professional practices? Today, Hadrien Courtemanche, French teacher.
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Hadrien Courtemanche is 33 years old, he has been teaching French for 10 years to second and first year students at Benjamin Franklin high school in Orléans. He also runs writing workshop classes at the university. He heard about generative artificial intelligence a little over a year ago, through ChatGPT.
“My first reaction is fear and anxiety, because generative artificial intelligence is capable of creating intellectual content. It is a strong competitor, which does not run out of steam, which has extraordinary capacities, and access to a mass of information, which we cannot possess.”
Hadrien CourtemancheFrench teacher
But it was at the start of the 2023 school year that generative AI really came to shake up his teaching practice, when it came to correcting the essays written at home by his first-year students.
“I quickly saw some students, who had a perfectly good level, return copies with formulations and argumentative structures that were not those they were able to use with me on a daily basis. That alerted me, I did some copy and paste and found diagrams directly in chatGPT. Afterwards, when we talk with the students, some show total good faith, they say: well yes sir, I used the machine, it’s still much more practical and faster! It was a terrifying experience.”
To make his students think, this French teacher organized a course on the concepts of plagiarism, intellectual honesty and effort in learning. With mixed results. For the start of the school year, he is moving towards a radical decision.
“I think I will no longer give homework, because we have copies generated by someone other than a student. It is becoming dramatic, because we no longer have the right tools to evaluate them, I do not know if I am evaluating a student or a machine, I no longer know how I am going to take the pulse of their progress. In my case, we will have to give up a certain amount of homework, which was part of my teaching, to allow them to take the time to appropriate the exercises in question.”
“What is certain is that it is a question that worries. We talk about it a lot, even more so among literature teachers. There is a symbolism behind our discipline. We feel much more attacked than our colleagues in hard sciences.”
“National Education does what it can” he said, but he would like him and his colleagues to be trained in artificial intelligence to ward off certain dangers, and also to learn to work with them. “Not being supported contributes greatly to this feeling of anxiety” he says. According to him, the subject is far from trivial, because it will profoundly disrupt practices and the relationship with the teaching profession.