What Can One English Course Actually Teach?

By now, I know you’ve heard this desperate plea from a teacher or a writer in your life: Please don’t use AI to write for you.  

I’m a professor of English at a community college. I too have codified this plea into my syllabus, dutifully using the boilerplate language my institution suggested: “The use of generative AI tools such as but not limited to ChatGPT is prohibited on all assignments and assessments in this course.”

Like all of my colleagues, I’m sick of reading student work claiming to “delve” into the texts I’ve assigned or that argues the reading “isn’t X—it’s Y.” But the common arguments against using AI in the English classroom are, in a word, cringe. AI is forcing a pedagogical crisis when there is an equal crisis in what we believe English courses can do and how we describe them. As AI shows no signs of slowing down, this moment is a chance to change the professional and public conflation of literary appreciation, knowledge of literary history and essay writing.

Each of those things is distinct from the others, but the distinction is often disappeared. Take the title of the course I teach, a requirement for every student in the college: Literature and Composition. The more I’m in the classroom, the more I feel the fuzziness and the burden of the “and.” Reading texts for the first time, learning about the existence of literary devices and logically describing their effects in shorter-form responses is frankly a lot for students new to literary study to take on. A course plainly called Literary Appreciation or Identifying Literary Techniques would certainly have enough to cover, and students would know on a more granular level what they were signing up to study.

The details I love showing students for the first time—rhythm and rhyme aren’t the same, but they often go together; meter is more than the number of syllables in a line; a line is the defining feature of a lyric poem—have nothing to do with composing essays. And they don’t have to. There’d be no more hand-wringing about whether AI wrote the essay if I had the freedom to elucidate and drill down on the details of the texts without worrying so much about students’ pages of deliverables. Expecting students to write well or expertly about texts they’re encountering for the first time is a crazy ask, like asking a total novice to ace a drop-the-needle test on all of classical music after 15 weeks, and also learn to play an instrument.

Frank Bruni, an opinion contributor for The New York Times, recently rhapsodized about the benefits of majoring in English. “You’ll better understand the seeds of creativity and how they’re made to flower. You’ll swim in a borderless sea of thoughts beautifully expressed,” he wrote. “The wetter you get, the more expert you’ll be at shaping stories, at persuading, and I can’t imagine any profession or any world in which better communicators aren’t better off.”

What is a better communicator? A more succinct emailer, a more entertaining giver of presentations, a more precise poet? I’m not sure I know anymore. Nevertheless, understanding the seeds of creativity seems different from shaping stories or producing written text. An English department should have room to teach each skill, but it might take longer than a semester to arrive at a positive feedback loop between the two. In the meantime, could we recognize that when Socrates dialogued with his interlocutors, they didn’t have to write a paper about it in MLA format?

It will be a sad day if English teachers abandon the essay altogether, but a first step to saving it is to admit that vivid, logical writing doesn’t need to be about literature, and reading literature doesn’t need to come with a writing tax. You want young people to learn to write essays? Call the course Writing Essays. You want young people to know the source of the phrase “Out, damned spot”? Without assigning pages of essays by semester’s end, there’s still plenty to cover in a Shakespeare course, and plenty of ways to teach it rigorously. You want students to write essays about literary texts? Let’s admit that it takes a sustained environment to do so, maybe not one every college can offer or every student wants to inhabit. It beats the lie that cramming reading and writing assignments into every semester-limited course, and calling it humanity, is going to make it happen.