Emily Moore
Stuyvesant High School
Inspired by my tenth graders’ interest in AI, this assignment extends Gerald Graff’s classic “They Say, I Say” format to include an ethical, correctly cited use of generative AI related to a literary text. Although I created this particular version to accompany our class reading of Sophocles, the assignment can be applied to any text with abundant online scholarly secondary source material as the goal is to teach into this abundance by challenging students to use secondary sources and generative AI in strategic rather than suspicious ways.
Learning Goals
Original Assignment Context: One of several spring term assignments for my 10th grade “Foundations of Literature” class at Stuyvesant High School
Materials Needed: Access to academic databases such as ProQuest and JStor as well as ChatGPT
Time Frame: 1-2 weeks
Overview
During an academic honesty lesson this past spring of 2024, when comparing a paragraph written by a student with a paragraph on the same subject generated by ChatGPT, I made an off the cuff comment to my 10th grade public magnet school students that AI was not yet as smart as they were. They went bananas. It will be, they protested, and It depends on how you use it. Inspired by their enthusiasm, I created this assignment as an extension of the usual “They Say, I Say” paper I teach in the spring by giving students the option of incorporating AI generated text in a short, first-person discussion of a scholarly secondary source connected to Sophocles.
As a high school teacher, I initially encountered AI as a tool weaker students use to cheat, and because of this I did not require it on this first pass at my “Robots Play” assignment. (In fact, the students who chose to use AI weren’t able to do so during our in-class work time because the NYC Board of Education currently blocks ChatCPT.) That said, I was surprised and pleased by the degree of intentionality the papers incorporating AI displayed, and how specific my student authors had to be in their incorporation of their computer generated text. While Graff’s “They Say, I Say” format reliably gives young scholars the techniques and encouragement they need to engage with college level secondary sources, adding the “Robots Play” element further challenged my students: not only did they need to think deeply about how to prompt ChatGPT to create text that interacted with the scholarly source they’d summarized, they then had to evaluate and incorporate the results into a larger literary argument.
The half of my students who chose to incorporate AI used it to help them generate short arguments or counterarguments, define key terms from their secondary sources, summarize major character arcs, and, occasionally, to generate creative alternatives to the original text. Some of their prompts included:
The quality of the resulting papers inspired me to require artificially generated text on the next iteration of this assignment. Instead of making their work feel, for lack of a better word, “cheat-y,” being required to narrate their engagement with AI made their literary arguments more articulate. I now approach AI with less trepidation, and have begun to feel a sense of solidarity and excitement as my students and I work together to explore this new tool.
Your Three Theban Plays assignment will combine your own ideas from reading and discussing Oedipus the King and Antigone in class with ideas from a scholarly secondary source and some form of ethical, generative, correctly cited AI.
The base for this assignment will be a classic “They Say, I Say” paper. After reading the Three Theban Plays plays in class, you’ll work with the Library to locate a scholarly secondary source about one aspect of Antigone or Oedipus the King that interests you. Once you’ve found a good source, you’ll be required to print it out and bring it to class so we can work together to help you summarize and quote from it in the opening paragraph of your assignment.
Next, you’ll finish your one page assignment by exploring your own opinion on the scholarly article you selected. Do you agree? Disagree? Why? Be sure to quote textual evidence from the original Sophocles as you justify your opinion.
Finally, you must incorporate some sort of ethically used, correctly cited AI in the creation of this assignment. Will you ask Chat GPT to expound on a targeted question, then quote from and cite its response as you parse through whether you agree with your secondary source? Will you ask Chat GPT to write an alternate dialogue between two characters and comment on the chaos that ensues? Will you reveal some new, Generation Alpha use of AI that your teacher can’t even imagine? I have no idea! What I will do is guide you through the process of using and citing AI, and work with you as we explore and understand this new tool.
Technicalities: Write in the first person, use present tense when writing about literature, and use past tense when discussing writing decisions you made or the play in historical context. MLA citation is key! Use in-text citation of your scholarly source and the Sophocles, some sort of signal phrase to articulate the way you incorporated AI, and a properly formatted Works Cited list that includes our Sophocles book, your secondary source, and the generative AI you use. This assignment may not be more than one page long, not including your Works Cited list.
The base of this assignment is inspired by Gerald Graff’s They Say, I Say: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing. I would also like to acknowledge the contribution of Stuyvesant’s librarian Christina Kennedy who augmented her time-tested presentation on scholarly databases and citation to include MLA citation of AI, a field new to both of us. Finally thank you to my student teacher Annie Cooperstone whose exceptional work with our students last spring gave me the bandwidth to create something new.