AI in schools: St. Paul teacher says it's 'like bringing a forklift to the gym'

NINA MOINI: We're excited about this here on Minnesota Now. As students and teachers are settling into their school year routines, this week we're looking at how artificial intelligence is changing teaching, learning, and well-being in the classroom. You might remember my conversation yesterday with Jon Fila, who spoke to us about guiding schools, consulting with districts on artificial intelligence policies in the classroom.

Well, today we're going to dive into one of those classrooms. At Humboldt High in Saint Paul, Carl Haefemeyer is an English teacher and joins me now to talk about how AI is shaping his lessons. Thank you so much for your time today, Carl.

CARL HAEFEMEYER: Thank you for having me.

NINA MOINI: I almost want to call you Mr. Haefemeyer, because I always want to call teachers by--

CARL HAEFEMEYER: Well, the students call me Mr. H.

NINA MOINI: All right. Well, Mr. H., then. So I think it's really important to be talking about this because I think it's something that people are very curious about. We're still learning a lot about it, and it's one of those things that you want to be on the front end of, not reacting to things years down the line. I wonder if you would give us an idea, Mr. H., about just how you're using AI in the classroom right now. Does it go beyond what students are using on their tablets, or what does AI look like for you?

CARL HAEFEMEYER: Well, there's a couple challenges and a couple of advantages that come in. One of the most commonly incorporated ways we use AI isn't intentional necessarily, but when you do a simple Google search, now you have the AI results at the top of the page. So students are interacting with that anytime they're doing any kind of research in which they might be using Google as one of their search engines to find that. And so understanding what that means, and how those results are formed, is an essential thing that they have to do.

As an educator, it's a tool that I can occasionally use. I never want to present something to a student that was generated by AI. But it can help with brainstorming or rephrasing, and things that can help me simplify my job a little bit.

NINA MOINI: Sure. Yesterday, the conversation I mentioned with Jon Fila, who is a former educator as well, he was saying that he talks with students all the time who really feel like it's not really cheating, or it's not really bad to use the tools that they have at their fingertips, even if they're doing a whole paper off of ChatGPT or whatever. And it reminded me of when I was growing up and people used to say, well, when I was your age, we didn't have calculators. [LAUGHS] I mean, technology is always advancing. How do you know when it's cheating?

CARL HAEFEMEYER: Yeah, and I think I'm going on my 14th year of teaching, and we've gone through various cycles and various challenges-- students using SparkNotes, students plagiarizing. But this is another challenge, and the most important thing for me right now is emphasizing the importance of education. What they're trying to do, the goal isn't to have the paper done. The goal is to learn from the experience of writing the paper.

And so it's like weightlifting. You wouldn't bring a forklift to the gym. The goal isn't to get the bar up in the air, the goal is to build your muscle by lifting the bar. And so trying to reemphasize that and having growth as a goal is something that helps just prevent that desire to use it to cheat along the way.

NINA MOINI: Do you think that students use AI a lot physically in the classroom, or is it more happening at home?

CARL HAEFEMEYER: It is both. Most of the work we do is done in the classroom. And so we are a one-to-one school with iPads, and students will use it. I know Saint Paul Public Schools has Google Gemini with student access for every student hooked up to their school Google account.

NINA MOINI: Oh.

CARL HAEFEMEYER: But ultimately, motivating students to complete the work themselves is a goal. We're also adapting some of the ways we teach-- more discussion, more presentation, annotation assignments, things where the product can't necessarily be directly produced by AI.

NINA MOINI: So how do you set rules around this, or do you? Say a paper is due. What are the rules that you would express to your students?

CARL HAEFEMEYER: That's a good question. Sometimes we just tell them straight up, do not use AI to produce anything.

NINA MOINI: Please! [LAUGHS]

CARL HAEFEMEYER: Other times, I know there are teachers-- and I've tried this myself-- where you have students use it for the brainstorming process, but you tell it all the words that are turned in have to be their own.

NINA MOINI: Mm, OK.

CARL HAEFEMEYER: And we have tools. If a student writes on Google Docs, you can track the progress as they write to see that they're the one writing it, as opposed to copy-pasting in a giant chunk. But it does offer some challenges.

NINA MOINI: Yeah. And so I understand that English is the second language learned by nearly half of your students. How, if in any way, is AI helpful for students who are learning more English?

CARL HAEFEMEYER: So there are various tools. I know several of my students-- by choice, not by teacher direction-- have used, I believe, Grammarly AI to help them with some of their writing, that will offer tone feedback, grammar feedback as they write, and that can be a useful tool for them. However, it also offers additional challenges in making sure, like I mentioned earlier, the Google result automatic AI, helping them understand what that means, and the language elements involved in that.

NINA MOINI: OK. And I understand you also worked on putting some language around AI in the Saint Paul teacher's contract. Is it a concern that AI would one day replace teachers? Or how much of that type of conversation, I wonder, is happening in your field?

CARL HAEFEMEYER: Directly, very little, and I have no fear that my school board is going to replace teachers anytime soon.

NINA MOINI: (LAUGHING) Right.

CARL HAEFEMEYER: But I'm also a parent in Saint Paul. I have a child who goes to a Saint Paul public school. And I want to make sure in the long run, he is a human being with a human teacher who he has a relationship, who understands him, and who can help him individually. And I'd be sad to see if education transitioned to 300 students in a great hall, interacting with their devices with one supervisor.

NINA MOINI: Yeah. So what early on-- I mean, you're talking about way in the future, which I think is something that all of us think too, what's it going to be like in 10 or 15 years. When you were thinking about this language, what are the concerns specifically that you're wanting to address now from the teacher's perspective?

CARL HAEFEMEYER: So there's two things. One is maintenance of work, that no one in our bargaining units is going to be reduced as a direct result of adopting AI, that AI exists to supplement rather than replace educators. And the other thing is, in terms of discipline and feedback, in Minnesota, educators have to be observed on a regular basis by an administrator. And we want to make sure that the person doing our observation, the person looking at our curriculum, is a human being who knows us, who knows our students, who knows our classroom, so they can give us worthwhile feedback from those observations. And we don't want that just to be AI-generated analytics based on a lesson plan.

NINA MOINI: Yeah, yeah. So there's concerns around students' roles, teachers' roles. I think one of the core things that folks are concerned about is just that if students are always relying on technology, that they're not really learning. Like you mentioned bringing a forklift to the gym. I mean, are you seeing that over the 14 years that you've been teaching? Or what do you think about that reliance on googling or having things looked up for you, or retaining information? Do you think that students, just from your perspective, are getting better or worse at that when they have all this technology and AI at their fingertips?

CARL HAEFEMEYER: I don't think it's better or worse. It's just different. I believe education is connecting new information and skills to what you already know and can do. And so if those skills involve using AI in some way, that's what's going to happen. But ultimately, I want students making those connections and seeing how they can grow and advance their knowledge and skills.

NINA MOINI: Anything that can be done at home, from your perspective, to just try to curb maybe some of the cheating or anything that might be going on? Who's responsible for teaching students about how to responsibly use all of these tools?

CARL HAEFEMEYER: I think ultimately we need school policies, and it'll be on classroom teachers. But I think parents should absolutely be talking to their kids about what they're learning in the classroom and how they're doing work.

NINA MOINI: All right. A team effort on all fronts. Carl Haefemeyer, Mr. H., thank you very much for your time. I appreciate it.

CARL HAEFEMEYER: All right, thank you.

NINA MOINI: That was Carl Haefemeyer, an English teacher at Humboldt High School in Saint Paul.