Sarah Dully (Sarah D.) is Rhode Island’s Teacher of the Year, and she uses ChatGPT to help keep her lessons to her high-school students alive. When the reference in a handout goes stale, when a class needs a fresh way to approach a text, or when her plan doesn’t land as she expects with the students in front of her, Sarah rebuilds the bridge fast with AI.
While growing up in New England, Sarah loved school, because her teachers made it feel personal. She currently teaches juniors and seniors English, practical literacy, and true crime, and ChatGPT helps her teach to different students in different ways. Practical literacy gives students support with the reading, writing, and communication they need after graduation. True crime lets her leverage what already hooks them: researching motive, evidence, credibility, the cultural phenomenon that is true crime, and the ethics of the genre.
Sarah’s students are close to adulthood. They are thinking about jobs, college, family, and the lives they will have to build. Her students have to keep up with the economy and the culture, so her lessons do, too. She used to have students write 140 character takes on their readings. But her kids aren’t on Twitter any more, and it’s not called Twitter, and it has no character limits.
ChatGPT helps her adapt. She uses it to refresh examples, rebuild handouts, draft sentence starters, simplify directions, sharpen rubrics, and make alternate versions of the same assignment for students who need different first steps. In a true crime unit, that might mean turning a student’s fascination with a case into a lesson on sources and evidence. In practical literacy, it might mean taking a workplace writing task and making it clearer by morning.
For Pi Day, while her class was reading Catcher in the Rye, she asked ChatGPT for tenth-grade math problems tied to the novel, and called the activity “Catcher in the Pi.” Her students walked in wondering why they were learning math in English class, then found themselves thinking about Holden Caulfield in Central Park from a new angle.
For Sarah, ChatGPT is a jumpstart for a blank page. It helps with the labor around the teaching so she can spend more of her attention on the part that made her love school in the first place: seeing the students clearly enough to know what they need before they say it.
