What happened on the last day of term.

‘Give me my veil: I’ll unmask. I’ll not be a fool, and so I’ve taken leave of the child I was’

The Winter's Tale - Shakespeare

I have a confession, but it’s not quite what you think. It concerns how we sometimes underestimate our students and make assumptions about them that can be wildly wrong.

Last year, I taught term 4, the class using laptops almost every day. I assumed the network we were all using was utterly secure, locked down by the department in every conceivable way. I assumed they would barely be able to search for ‘Hello Kitty’ without a red flag.

How wrong I was.

On the very last day of term, there was a commotion in class. It turned out that some students were using an app designed to test compatibility between girls and boys…

Whoa… hang on. This was clearly something else, one of the girls was looking uncomfortable and the boys were crowded around getting hyped up on the moment.

Like a nightclub bouncer sensing trouble before a fight, I waded in like a lumbering luddite.

Naturally, they shut it down before I could reach their desks, but I asked one student how they had accessed such an app. With that matter-of-fact candour, and the insouciance only kids involved with tech can have, they told me they could get onto anything they wanted. They always could. All they needed to do was google search ‘game title’ plus ‘crack code’, or something similar, and various random sites would provide a VPN workaround. It appeared all as basic as making a jam sandwich, and even though they knew it was bad, they looked at me like ‘How can you not know this?’

When I asked how long they had been doing this, the answer was “all year.” Of course, they had no intention of telling me until the last day.

Clearly, I had made a huge assumption that the technology they were using was safe, and that their activities were entirely aboveboard.

AI and Classroom Use

I started thinking about this in terms of AI. As mentioned in earlier posts, these same students were already completing homework, assessments, and projects with help from ChatGPT—even getting AI. To write their own poetry during class time. I told other teachers about it, they were incredulous. Students “shouldn’t” have access because they weren’t old enough. So that was that.

However, I don’t recall any significant age check when signing up for ChatGPT. This experience illustrates that if we underestimate our students, they will race well ahead of us, acquiring more knowledge than we ever realise.

In many ways, that’s exactly how it should be: perhaps they know what’s happening in the world—perhaps even more than we do sometimes.

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