For a lot of teachers, real teachers, the signs of ChatGPT abuse are obvious. There’s the overreliance on the em dash, repetitive phrases, or the oddly formal tone that stands in stark contrast to the cadence of your average broccoli-headed, middle school dingbat, most of whom can’t utter a complete sentence without referencing Italian brain rot.

Me, though? I didn’t pick up on any of that. I still don’t even really know what an em dash is. Or care to know for that matter. What clued me in to the creeping digital subterfuge wasn’t a syntactic breadcrumb trail or suspiciously coherent prose. No, it became painfully obvious to me that my students have been using ChatGPT to write their essays because I am definitely not this good of a teacher.

Like last week, a student “wrote” a book report on Moby Dick that cited a postmodern reading of the whale as a metaphor for climate change. But I have no idea what postmodernism is, and I never was able to actually read past the first page of Moby Dick because I kept snickering at the title.

Another kid submitted a suspiciously well-written and glaringly accurate essay on the Magna Carta, which I had mistakenly told my class the week prior was a Jay-Z album. I even spent an entire afternoon covering the Jay-Z and Nas beef, and offered extra credit to anyone who could succinctly explain Jay’s involvement with “Becky with the good hair.” And yet, Hova makes nary an appearance in this thing.

Do you really expect me to believe, Aaron, that you learned all this on your own? Where was this thirst for knowledge when I ran through my personal tips for buying lotto scratch-offs?

The final straw came when a student used ChatGPT to conduct a real time fact check of my claim that Marie Antoinette was the inventor of cake.

You know, there was a time in this country when students actually put real effort into not trying. Where are those blessed slackers crafting inane run-on sentences to hit an arbitrary word count, or putting in the hard work of copying and pasting Wikipedia pages?

ChatGPT is making a mockery of my half-assed pedagogy. And, I assume, it’s also pretty bad for good teachers; the noble, hardworking educators that diligently plan their curriculums, challenge young minds, and who didn’t learn the word “pedagogy” while looking up “teaching” in a thesaurus. I also assume that ChatGPT short-circuits critical thinking, discourages original thought, and could potentially turn classrooms into glorified prompt entry booths.

Again, I do not know anything about that. And I do not care to know. I’m just trying to get to the bell without trying too hard.

The truth is, I’m totally fine with cheating. Particularly, when it makes my jobs easier. If my students want to have their little robot buddy regurgitate the world wide web into a soulless dissertation on ancient Egypt or whatever, more power to them.

Hell, they could dig up a Teddy Ruxpin from a yard sale, pop in a cassette of Ken Burns prattling on about the Battle of Who Gives a Shit, and plagiarize the animatronic monstrosity word-for-word. Whatever blows your hair back, you know? Just put it on my desk, or if I’m nursing a hangover, slide it under my face on your way out the door.

But please, don’t insult me by delivering a highly-polished, well-researched article with a ton of information that I know nothing about, and Venn diagrams I can’t even begin to understand. Because you’re now putting me in the uncomfortable position of having to verify what you wrote.

Hopefully, I can use ChatGPT to review and grade these papers, but it’s frustrating that after years of honing my inept methods of educating, I now have to figure out how to correctly construct an LLM prompt.

I didn’t become an incompetent teacher to learn stuff. I just wanted summers off.