Commentary

Weapon of Class Destruction

June 26, 2025   ·   0 Comments

By Anthony Carnovale

Well, that’s a wrap. Another school year has come to an end. I’m cleaning out my classroom, sorting my files and folders, and looking back on a year like no other in my career. A year filled with excitement, disappointment, drama. There was also violence. Plenty of violence. The principal of my school was physically assaulted; a former student was shot and killed. Our school bus was involved in a drive-by shooting. The police said that a bullet missed my colleague’s head by about five inches. There were fights, fire alarms and lockdowns.

A school reflects the community it serves; if a school needs help, it’s because the community needs help. It’s a much bigger issue than class sizes, resources, and hall monitors. So, what do you do? How do you respond? For me, I respond the only way I know how: with more love and more presence (I mean, what else is there to do?). I try to counteract the punches, jeers, tears, and slurs with acts of love and kindness. It’s how I interact with kids in the hallway. It’s how I engage with kids in my classroom. I try to give more because our children need more. Being kind and loving is not the same as being a pushover.

But there was something else that made this year particularly trying. Another type of violence took place. In one way, the violence was self-inflicted; in other ways, the violence was targeted and intentional. I haven’t stopped thinking about it since I witnessed it.  

My Grade 12 students were performing their spoken word pieces as a part of their year-end culminating project. As I sat in my chair and watched them perform their spoken word pieces, I was happy to see them take the space, to own the space, to stand up and be heard. It made me feel so alive, so proud of them; but my ears began to contradict my eyes. I didn’t recognize the words coming out of their mouths; I didn’t recognize their voices. It was as if they were speaking in a different language. I knew their ‘voices’ from our interactions, conversations, from previous assignments. In their poems, they used words like ‘supercilious’; ‘magnanimous’ and ‘denizen’. They weren’t being poets; they were ventriloquists. They had cheated. It felt like I had been kicked in the head.

I remember the first time I caught a student cheating. The young man simply handed in another student’s essay. He didn’t even bother changing the kid’s name. When I called him on it, I told him that I was disappointed, that I felt a little disrespected, and that he disrespected himself by not trusting himself.

It wasn’t a  “Gotcha moment!”. It was a teachable moment, and it helped shape my career. Moving forward, my plan was, and is, to try and get students to love learning, to enjoy the act of learning, so that they wouldn’t feel the need to take shortcuts, to cheat.

They would enjoy the learning process. The hope was, and is, that they would, and could, put into play their critical and creative thinking skills onto the page, in the halls, on the street, online, at home. That was a different time, a different world; that was the world of ‘copy and paste’ and old-school plagiarism. The world of Justin Timberlake and Britney Spears.

Large Language Models (LLM) like ChatGPT, have changed everything. In a report published in Forbes Magazine, 48 per cent of students admitted to using ChatGPT for an at-home test or quiz, 53 per cent had it write an essay, and 22 per cent had it write an outline for a paper; 72 per cent of college students believed that ChatGPT should be banned from their college’s network. That was in 2023.

In 2025, many of my students cannot write a basic essay. Am I supposed to teach them what a thesis statement is in Grade 12? A topic sentence? How can I go back to teaching the basics when I’m competing with AI? These are kids a few months away from university, college, and work. How is it that a record number of kids make the honour roll, are accepted to engineering and medical-science programs, and yet, I still feel as if we’re failing them?

Simply put, educators weren’t prepared — we’re still not. Last year, a colleague sent out an email with links to AI detection sites. We banned cell phones (they’re not), and we blocked AI programs from board servers (students just use a VPN). We’re playing catch-up, while AI continues to feed on itself and invent an entirely new game. Training? As if. I sit in staff meetings, watch and complete training modules on DEI, and phishing scams. Are we simply going to outsource learning and education to artificial intelligence?

About five years ago, when libraries were being closed across the UK, the writer Alan Bennet compared the closures to acts of child abuse. I feel the same way about all these tech-bros and capitalists feasting and scheming on our minds, on our children’s sovereignty.

If we don’t catch up quickly, if we can’t come up with a plan to teach ourselves, to teach our children, our students, how to work with AI instead of simply surrendering to it, our kids are going to lose themselves before they have a chance to find themselves.

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