PREMIUM: A teacher identifies 3 tasks that ChatGPT is actually good at

My name is Andrew, and I am an A.I.-holic.

I am addicted to using ChatGPT when planning my lessons. I have always overplanned, and since I went part-time, I have really overplanned. However, ChatGPT has taken it to a whole new level, because it can do — or, more accurately, attempt to do — almost every planning task.1 2

Somehow, this has not sped up my planning at all. It’s slowed it down. Not all of that extra time is wasted. I do spend time preparing new resources where, previously, I could only have thought, “Wouldn’t it be nice if this existed?” The time spent creating better resources means I am teaching the lesson the way I really want to. Unfortunately, much of the added time consists of me trying to get ChatGPT to do things which it repeatedly fails to do. Then one of the following happens:

• Situation 1: I give up and either do the task myself or decide I can live with the task not being done.

• Situation 2: I coach and/or argue ChatGPT into compliance, and it does the task. However, this ends up taking far longer than if I had just done it myself.

This is similar to what used to happen when I searched for resources online3 or asked my Twitter followers if they had any good resources of a particular type.4 I know I’m a ChatGPT addict because too often I don’t even regret, or notice, how much time I am wasting in Situation 2. It feels like successful delegation, even though it took three times as long and prompted me to throw my phone at the wall twice.

However, there are a few simple situations where A.I. does save me time and effort.