"For me, one of the biggest shifts [in marking papers] has beent he way that I relate to polish, to students being able to produce things that are perfectly grammatically correct and have elegant turns of phrases — that used to be something that delighted me. Now, sometimes it's something that makes me suspicious, and I find a comma splice, I find some awkward syntax, and I'm relieved... because I think, 'Oh look, here's someone who has indeed done this work themselves, who is struggling to figure out how to say something.' And I'm a lot more generous..."
"One of the biggest things I'm struggling with as an educator — and I don't I'm alone in this — is how do I let go of valuing perfection and instead focusing my valuing my students' process: giving them a chance to make mistakes, accepting work that may not be grammatical perfect. I want my students to know that they can be authentic... but that involves me accepting their imperfections."
Listening to this last night, I burst out in laughter that ran for about five minutes. I'm still tittering about it now, because it gets to the heart of a fundamental error that has ingrained itself into educational thinking since the 19th century, and perhaps earlier: a problem that has been insurmountable until apparently now, when an existential threat to post-secondary institutions has forced the ground to move against the will of those who would otherwise hold that ground comfortably until their deaths. It is a question that every student of every subject other than English Literature has asked: "I am studying Geography... why does it matter if I spell the word 'defence' incorrection in my essay."
I burst out laughing because for me and for millions of students, the clouds opened up and the sun shone down because for the first time, a professor got a stick out of their ass, thinking maybe this stick didn't need to be here when it was put here in the early 19th century by everybody who had the same stick up their ass.
The only thing capable of removing that stick was the demonstration that grammar is a tool that can be managed like a computer program. It is not a human trait, and the demands that humans need kowtow to this arbitrary requirement is, will be and always fucking has been pedantic and insupportable. Not that the type of person who becomes a professor, by sucking up to other professors, would ever have admitted that until they were forced to.
More to the point: grammar is not a trait that separates one human being's value from another. That historical period is done. No teacher, professor or self-righteous pundit can ever claim again the sorting mechanism, grammar, is a legitimate soruce of judgement for human worth, intelligence, diligence, seriousness or fitness.
For this, the sacrifice of the entire artistic community is a fair exchange. Though of course, we haven't done that. Like bad writers, who could preen themselves on their grammatical prowess, we've emasculated bad drawers and painters, who preened themselves on being able to draw a straight line. It's the same for the same.
Naturally, not ever professor is going to accept that which the two quoted above are moving toward. The context, beginning about 18:30 to 20:00 in the linked video, does not include an acknowledgement on the professor's part that perhaps "elegant turns of phrases" never did have anything to do with the work; that their personal pleasure in this comes from the worst task in education, the marking of essays and exams. A turn of phrase gives a momentary dopamine hit amidst a disaster of poor student writing, which sustains an educator — which yet only suggests that the fundamental quality of a paper's value is how entertaining it was for the marker in comparison to the work of other students. As a student, my papers tended to be heavy with argument, strange off the wall propositions, even jokes (as I got more experience with newspaper writing on the university newspaper), so that my B or B+ grades usually included a note at the end that read, "I enjoyed this," "A bit off the mark, but a good read," or words to that effect... which enabled my 3.3 average out of "four-point-oh," but really had fuck all to do with my university education. That did not stop professors from exposing their humanity in ways they shouldn't have. Not really.
The multiple choice exam was invented, I believe, though I refuse to research it because I can't be bother, because it was just easier to mark it. I remember in school when we were told that computers were going to mark our exams in future, which is why we were given a particular kind of green computer paper that we needed to fill out with a specific number-2 pencil, so the computer could read it so the teacher didn't need to. We were told things like how we had to "fill in the whole box" and not to "write lightly" and stuff, because any mistake on those lines would cause the computer to read the answer incorrectly. Naturally, it ended up that the teachers, or someone, had to double-check the computer, because that's how it goes. Nonetheless, the answer was obviously to alleviate teachers, in at least some part, of the horror of having to mark exams.
It stands to reason that at some point teachers will realise that A.I. enables them to side-step marking altogether, at which point the entire profession would HAIL the arrival of the program as the son-of-a-bitch they've been looking for all these years.
This is the pattern with all technological innovations. Everyone hates the motorised horse for how dangerous is it, expecting someone to walk ahead of the vehicle with a red flag, until it becomes evident that the horse dung will evaporate from the streets as the horses are all replaced. Naturally, the car creates other problems, but no one — except Robert A. Heinlein, who made a point of still arguing the horse-and-carriage in science fiction stories into the 1970s — has ever seriously suggested we should go back to a world that smells like horseshit. Film is despised until it turns out all the actors, designers and producers who can't get work in the theatre industry have a place to go. Television is despised until all the actors, designers and producers who can't get work in the film industry, again, have a place to go. The internet sucks... until it turns out that people can actually meet each other online and communicate with friends, whereupon it's immediately embraced. It is always the same thing. An innovation's usefulness must hazard this resistance... it's the only way we know for sure whether or not it's "good." And the longer it lasts, the more evidence it compiles towards that conclusion, the better it is.
Humpty Dumpty, in the form of many industries right now, has fallen off his wall. Humpty Dumpty is the metaphor that everyone should be using. The old world died in 2022.
But see, the phrase, "And all the king's horses and all the king's men" does more than simply say, phenomenal amounts of strength and power are not enough. It also says, or at least this is how I always heard it, that the king's horses and the king's men tried and failed. They didn't just look at the problem and throw their hands in the air. They refused to believe that they couldn't just put Humpty back up there.
This is where we are. We're stuck between those who are afraid of it, those actually stoking the fear because for the grifter it's a tremendous opportunity to vouchsafe panic about something only a comparative few understand or even need to understand, and those who are defending institutions, like Big Publishing, Big Business and Big Church, whose pasts have already put them on the veritable ground beneath the wall, trying to put their own Humptys back together again. We're seeing something amazing here, and between all the grasping at straws and the crying into handkerchiefs, we're missing it.
Between 1908 and 1910, going back quite a way, it was possible for an ordinary person to obtain for a price, about the cost of say a computer laptop, a projector that would cast pictures on a blank white wall. If the individual had access to a space large enough for thirty people and could get together a number of cheap chairs to sit on, then it was just as possible for the projectionist to charge people to attend their "theatre," and expect people in a small town, where there was very little to do at the time, to attend. This was a very simple time, when film theatres did not exist, where virtually no one had seen a film of any kind, who would come just to see because the alternative was... well, sitting in a park.
There were nickelodeons, but they did not exist in thousands of small American towns and they consisted of individual machines that solitary persons bent forward to look into, to show films. Most had never been seen by a person outside of a big city, or had been seen only when they went to the big city. The projector provided a very different experience. In the beginning, it didn't need a predesigned building. An empty room, without any features at all, was sufficient.
Further, the projector was easily movable. If you owned one, you made a deal for a few films which you could show; at the time, these were not plot-driven, though such films did exist. The bulk were things like watching people play at a beach you were never going to see, or walking along a street you were never going to visit. The sort of performance a clown might perform on a vaudeville stage you'd never in your life visited. That was enough. You could then move from small town to small town, remaining a few days until everyone had seen your product, then moving on. You made so much money, and were so able to move, you could avoid the law catching up with you to make return the films you'd been granted the right to only for a few weeks, while benifitting from them for months.
It is difficult for us to fully comprehend how shattering the experience of film was for people who would never see Coney Island in person, never see a woman in the sort of ballgown typically displayed in early film, never imagine seeing a trainrobber actually pointing a gun right at you, as was the case in the 1903 film The Great Train Robbery. It was unimaginably desirable for the "customers," who were ready to pay and pay and pay again for the experience, even if it meant the same film over and over. There was nothing at the time to compare with it and the effect was socially catastrophic for anyone in an entertainment field that was not the explosively developing film industry.
What matters most was the money being made. It literally poured in. For the price of a projector, listed earlier as equivalent a computer laptop, you could expect to raise enough money in a six month time period to buy the equivalent of a modern Porsch Cabriolet. People tried to contain this. The Patent War over the camera is a long, fascinating history of very rich people trying to ensure they would be the only ones to get rich. It failed. The money was so easy to make, so immediately translatable into one's pocket, that there was no hesitation to use whatever chicanery necessary to obtain the films to show them. When the films could not be obtained, people rushed to make their own. Those who were best at it rushed all the way to California to escape the Patent War. That's how we got Hollywood, which was built mostly on ignoring the laws surrounding the use of the equipment and content. In the end, the law caved. It realised that it was better to regulate the industry than to stop it. Humpty had fallen off the wall. The Film Industry was free to define itself, regardless of what the powers that existed before that time wanted.
I am NOT using this as a metaphor for A.I. If we compare the start of the film industry, which came well before 1908... let's say, 1896 as a round figure, when rumblings began to reshape filmmaking in France, then we today with regards to A.I. are in about the year 1900. No one in 1900 could have guessed the effects I've just described above, or the evolution of story logic, comedy, the social ramifications of scandal around Fatty Arbuckle, the sexualisation of artistic representation, the studio system, the Hays Code... and on and on. It's just too early.
I am saying that when something is too valuable to suppress, it does not matter how many are hurt by it, or how many industries fail, or which rich people's lives are destroyed, or what some might think of the culture as it used to be, Humpty is falling and he's going to fall. That's the lesson here. We can scream in panic, we can cry over the broken shells, we can bemoan the loss, we can try with all our might to rebuild the good old fella... but the reality is, Humpty is gone.
The change wrought by film affected those with agency in two ways: there were those, as described, moaning over the Humpty model... and there were those who, like the two teachers quoted at the start of this post, realised that the time has come to change what we're doing, because the old model isn't working.
This is not a post that says, the old way is dead, suck it up. Oh no. It is a post that says, look at the opportunities ahead of you. Yeah, poor Humpty, but hey, look at all this that's happening. Look at how an archaic, dead approach to teaching is being wrested into a form of teaching that respects the students' thoughts and ideas OVER the diction of grammatical inflexibility. Look at the opportunities to obliterate the old ways that are in the way of new ways that are going to be a whole lot better. Consider the opportunities for artists who will make livings based on their imagination and not their finger dexterity. Consider the educations bestowed on students who will be rewarded for new ideas, ideas that may change the world, because those ideas will be fed and supported, and not cast aside because of occasional bad spelling. Consider the hope the future offers.
Stop crying. This is actually pretty fucking fantastic.
Which is what people thought as they sat watching people dance on the sand at Coney Island. They were not thinking at the time how this was going to kill vaudeville.
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