Page 16 of Coming Home for Fall
“Wanna talk about it?”
Do I want to talk about my day? With David? Like we used to…
“That’s okay,” she said, sliding off the stool and pushing the hair out of her face. It felt strange, talking with him like that. “I need to finish grading a couple more papers and take a shower before dinner. Thanks for cooking, by the way.”
“Of course.” He smiled. “It’s been kind of nice, don’t you think? Sitting down to dinner every night? I can’t remember the last time you and I even shared a meal that wasn’t leftovers I brought home from a work event or whatever.”
Callie smiled. “Yeah, it is nice. We should try to make it a more regular thing even after Sasha leaves. But maybe not every night. My fingernails are a wreck from having to do so many dishes.”
“Once a week would suffice, I think,” he said.
She nodded. “Sounds like a plan.”
*
Standing in front of her Rhetoric 101 class, Callie waited for at least one of her twenty-two students to answer her question. They all stared at her with blank expressions. Was she the only one who could move? Who could talk?
But when a girl in the second to last row popped her gum, she realized they were just brain-dead after sitting in the stuffy classroom for over two hours.
“Alright, I can see we’ve reached the point in my lesson where you all tune out,” she said, “so I’ll let you go a little early tonight.” At that, everyone stood up and started packing their things. “But don’t forget that your midterm paper summaries are due Friday! Don’t brush off those summaries just because they aren’t the real paper. I’ll be spending a lot of time this weekend going over your ideas and giving feedback that I promise will help you write a better essay, so don’t pass this up!”
But her warning fell on deaf ears. No matter how many times she gave this speech, she still had students turn in a single-paragraph mess of half-baked ideas or ones that were stolen directly from an essay she could easily find online.
“Oh, and don’t you dare use AI for these,” she said. “I send your assignments through three different AI detectors, and if yours shows up as being written by a chatbot, you get an automatic zero.”
This seemed to get the attention of a couple of her students, who shot each other worried looks as they exited her classroom.
While most of the kids left, Calvin—her only favorite pupil—lingered.
“Great lecture tonight,” he said. “I really enjoyed that section on female American authors. I wrote down the entire list and I’m gonna head to the library right now.”
Callie smirked. “Are you trying to get extra credit or something?”
“No, I mean it!”
She gave him a look. Calvin was an excellent, hardworking student, but he was also a bit of a suck-up. She had a feeling he was about to ask her for something. An extension perhaps?
“Yeah, yeah,” she said, waving a hand in the air. “Let’s cut to the chase. What do you want?”
He slumped his shoulders. “You make me sound so devious… But since you asked, there is something I’ve been meaning to talk to you about. It’s the whole AI thing.”
Callie folded her arms. “What about it?”
He winced. “The chatbots are so good now, they’re tricking your scanning programs.”
“How do you know?”
“Because my last paper was written by AI and you gave me an A.”
Callie gasped. “Calvin! How could you do that?”
He reached into his bag and pulled out a stack of paper. “I wrote a real essay too. I just turned in the AI one to prove a point. You need to find another program or figure out a different system.” He handed her his other essay. “Just so you know.”
She sighed with the weight of a twenty-first century English professor and tucked the paper under her arm. “Okay. That’s… good to know. But don’t pull another trick like that again.” Callie arched her brow.
“Sorry.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “It was a little underhanded, I know… Honestly, I just wanted to see how good the chatbots were and, well, they’re pretty advanced.”
“Great...” Callie pinched the bridge of her nose, closing her eyes briefly. “So, none of my students are going to learn how to write in this class, and the art of literary analysis is over...”
