I’m returning after a 10-year absence to Pierre Moran Middle School in Elkhart Indiana. I’ll be teaching 7th grade and possibly an eighth grade class and I’m really looking forward to being back with 12, 13, and 14-year olds that’s really where I belong. I’ll be honest I really haven’t felt like much of a teacher in the 10 years since I was pulled from Pierre Moran mid-year to join the staff at Northside Middle School completely against my will. I had spent 18 1/2 years at Pierre Moran and I had already had the children of some of my children. I was part of the community. I was a leader. I had been on virtually every committee that the school had and chaired most of them at one time or another. The hows and whys of it don’t matter anymore; the important thing is that I’m back.
You wouldn’t think that at age 60 that I had anything to prove. But I do–to myself. When I left Pierre Moran 10 years ago I was at the top of my game. I was the best teacher I had ever been. Everything was rolling in the right direction and it’s never been the same since. I want to see if I can get back to that level of expertise and skill and I want to do more. I want to be the example that other people follow. With that in mind I came up with a crazy idea to create a fictional school within a school a superhero school if you will and the students in my classes will be superheroes in training. Using ChatGPT to provide graphics and Canva to provide the ability to present, I’m going to introduce my students a new way of immersing in a fictional world while learning math at the same time. I’m not sure it’s ever been done before but I’m going to do it. Here’s my first presentation.
I know, it’s incredibly controversial. My artist friends have been up in arms for a few years now over AI. It’s robbing them of their livelihoods, and they are right to worry so.
Confession: I stopped drawing two years ago because of it. I’m truly a frustrated artist. I knew a long time ago that I would never be as good as I wanted to be. I saw the writing on the wall that it would quickly surpass anything I could do. And I was right.
I’ve seen the arguments. It takes money out of the hands of artists. There’s no skill to it. If you use it, your ability to do the things that it does will erode. Well, that’s okay. What I’ve discovered so far puts the lie to that. A month of so back, my gaming buddies and I were chatting about its use. I was about to start running a new Star Trek Adventures game, we were starting all new characters. Just for fun, I thought, let’s see what 1966 Charlton Heston would look like in a Star Trek Uniform. I have to tell you, it didn’t do a bad job. Now, was this something I was likely to commission from an artist friend. No. No way ever.
Now, I quickly discovered that ChatGPT does not like to do the correct insignia on its Star Trek renderings, so I used my skills with Photoshop to Clone tool away the patch on his shirt and replace it with a photograph of the actual command insignia. Since I didn’t ask for a background I was free to place him wherever I wanted him.
I put him in front of a control console on my starship, the USS Nautilus, and interior set that I paid a whole lot for. Now, I don’t want to hang this photo up. I just needed it for NPC reference in a game. And if ChatGPT can give it to me and I can complete it in 15 minutes, then sign me up.
I used it to create backgrounds for my two Bill Krause-designed Challenger-class starships. This is also something I would never pay anyone to do. And I paid $400 for my two digital models, thank you very much.
USS Nautilus approaches a tropical planet
So, yeah, while I’m using it for art, I am still paying artists for their work, but where else am I going to find a thousand backgrounds to put my ships on to my specifications?
The real kicker though, came when I was in a professional development meeting on June 6. We were learning how to make our home pages in Canvas and I asked the tech person how to word wrap around my photo image in my introduction. She quickly said, “Canvas doesn’t do that. But we can have ChatGPT write the HTML code for doing it and use its HTML editor to make that happen. And we did just that. Everyone, I have no intention of learning how to code HTML. This was a great tool to use and it never even occurred to me to use it for anything but playing around with photos and Star Trek stuff.
Then when someone suggested writing test questions with it, I had to admit, I didn’t know it could do that. But oh, yes. Here’s what I gave it:
Write a multiple choice question using Indiana Academic Standard 7.RP.2 with a Star Trek Original Series theme.
ChatGPT said:
Sure! Here’s a multiple choice question aligned with Indiana Academic Standard 7.RP.2 (Recognize and represent proportional relationships between quantities), with a Star Trek: The Original Series theme:
Indiana Academic Standard 7.RP.2 – Multiple Choice Question Theme: Star Trek – The Original Series
While exploring a distant planet, Captain Kirk notes that the amount of dilithium crystals mined is proportional to the time spent mining. In one mission, 15 kilograms of dilithium were mined in 3 hours.
If the crew continues mining at the same rate, how many kilograms of dilithium can they expect to mine in 8 hours?
A) 35 kg B) 40 kg C) 45 kg D) 50 kg
Correct Answer: B) 40 kg (Explanation: 15 kg / 3 hr = 5 kg/hr. 5 kg/hr × 8 hr = 40 kg)
Now, I don’t know about you, but my day is made. BUT–Is Captain Kirk really the right one to note the speed at which dilithium crystals are being mined? No. That’s where my brain kicks in. No, it would be Scotty. So, I will make the adustment.
While exploring a distant planet, Chief Engineer Scott notes that the amount of dilithium crystals mined is proportional to the time spent mining. In one mission, 15 kilograms of dilithium were mined in 3 hours.
If the crew continues mining at the same rate, how many kilograms of dilithium can they expect to mine in 8 hours?
A) 35 kg B) 40 kg C) 45 kg D) 50 kg
Now I have a decent question, and it took a fraction of the time it would have taken me to come up with something similar.
So, will my art skills atrophe? I don’t honestly care. I’m not doing this for money anymore. I’m more interested in making my workflow more efficient. My other skills, like using Photoshop, are getting a real workout. Especially when I want to see what Alan Rickman would look like as a Vulcan doctor. I fixed the insignia, the eyebrows, and I placed him in another set that I paid to have designed.
I know, all of my artist friends are dead set against it. I don’t blame any of you. But how AI is going to help me is immeasurable. I don’t care about six-fingered hands. What I do care about are things like I did yesterday. “Write a diagnostic multiple choice quiz with four questions from each of the five domains of the 6th grade Indiana math standards.”
Done.
I looked it over and it was solid work. If there were any poorly worded questions or questions that didn’t measure what I wanted to know, I could tweak them, but I didn’t need to.
“Write the quiz in Spanish.”
Done.
Then ChatGPT asked me if I wanted a printable PDF or if I wanted it in digital format. I chose digital format. Then I asked to make it for Canvas. It not only put the quizzes into digital format, but also gave me step-by-step instructions on how to upload it directly into my Canvas course.
So, in less than ten minutes, I had quizzes in Engish and Spanish uploaded into Canvas and ready to be assigned. Care to guess how long all of that would have taken me to do manually? Especially the translation? Hours.
Now, the debate can begin. Is it fair to rely on AI to do our jobs? Of course not. But I am a trained professional wth 38 years of classroom experience. I know good questions from bad ones. I also know if something is built to tell me what I need to know or not. I don’t rely on AI to do everything. I am going to use it to do the grunt work that I could pay an assistant to do.
I used it recently to write Ebay descriptions for comics and action figures that I put up to sell. I had to be very descriptive in my prompts. And I am going to say this, and you can argue with me all day long. It is an art form (and maybe a science) to construct a prompt to make the AI do what you want it to do. I have had many false starts because I wasn’t precise enough in my language when creating prompts. I’ve gotten a lot better at it now that I understand what it does and does not do well.
Does anyone remember the episode of Star Trek The Next Generation where Geordi gets tired of Data beating all the Sherlock Holmes mysteries on the holodeck and instructs the computer to create a unique Sherlock Holmes mystery with an adversary who is capable of defeating Data? This is how we got the Moriarty villain. You have to choose your words carefully.
But that’s not the only time that we’ve seen how AI works in our popular culture. When Tony Stark interacts wtih Jarvis or Friday in all the Iron Man and Avengers movies, that’s exactly what he’s doing. I recently had that same experience.
I started working on Heroes of STEAM again recently and uploaded the rules into ChatGPT. It gave me feedback on the gamel and how it was appropriate for the audience. I had the AI create two characters using my ruleset, and then had it simulated a battle between the two characters. It gave me a readout of the mock battle, all the moves, the damage done and the damage mitigated, and told me who the winner was. It even asked me if I wanted it to give the characters names. They weren’t bad, to be fair. I did note that it wasn’t having the characters move on the map at all. They just stod next to each other and slugged it out. I then added the strategy of moving to a distance where the character’s best attack would work. That generated an entirely different result. Then I had it create five characters and did a free-for-all fight. Last one standing wins. I ran that simulation ten times and found that the character whose main trait was mobility, the ability to dodge and move, was winning nearly every time. I asked ChatGPT how I could modify the stat to even things out a bit, and it gave me a potential solution. I made that change and reran the simulation ten times again. It changed, but now favored a different attribute.
I did this back-and-forth for about three hours, running hundreds of simulated battles using my rules. And now Heroes of STEAM is a much better product. The time and effort that it would have required to playtest hundreds of games was reduced to about 1% of what it would have been.
People can argue against AI all day long, but I’m going to tell you this; I’m not going back. It’s a whole new world now. It’s scary, but there’s no way this tool is going back in the box.
I remember when the first computer gradebook was released and my mentor teacher urged me to use it. It took me far longer to input the grades than it took me to calculate them mentally from my hand-written gradebook. I told him then that when the technology saves me time, I will start using it.
Today, I saw yet another reference to the original Nightwing costume as “Disco Nightwing.”
Goodness. Here it is, drawn by George Perez, in all its original 1984 glory:
Now, for anyone even vaguely familiar with this character, one has to remember that Dick Grayson, formerly Robin the Boy Wonder, grew up and became Nightwing in Tales of the Teen Titans #44.
He is paying homage to his circus roots. That collar does not fold over like John Travolta’s. It sticks up like a circus performer’s costume, and not coincidentally, the other circus performer-turned superhero from DC Comics is Deadman.
As you can see, Deadman has a raised collar, and yet no one suggests that he’s “Disco.” This is just one of those things that drives me nuts.
A little over ten years ago, when I was turning 50, I was teaching a one-semester elective class called Math Problem Solving. I was basically free to do anything I wanted within teaching the Indiana Academic Standards for 7th grade. And the main standard that I focused on was a big one.
“7.C.6: Use proportional relationships to solve ratio and percent problems with multiple operations (e.g. simple interest, tax, markups, markdowns, gratuities, conversions within and across measurement systems, and percent increase and decrease).”
Considering there’s another math standard for simply adding integers, this one was simply immense and covered a wide variety of problems to solve. So, we did a little trip down memory lane. I wanted to explore what was then 50 years ago, the year 1964. With a little Google-Fu, I pulled up some fun and relatable items besides myself that made their first appearance that year: The Ford Mustang, GI Joe, Rankin/Bass’s Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, the James Bond movie, Goldfinger, and much more. We looked at McDonald’s price boards from that year and calculated the rate of inflation to present day. Then we compared it to prices of other things like gasoline, bread, ground beef, and milk. We looked at wages, home prices car prices, everything we could find data for. And we compared. Oh, did we compare. We talked about the differences in the rates of inflation for different items and we theorized the reasons behind them.
Then, for a final project on the unit, I posed to my students a question: If you could go back in time to 1964, with a large American Tourister Bob Hope suitcase full of clothes and $50,000 in 1964 cash, and could spend a week there, what would you do, and what would you bring back to the present with you if you were limited to what could be contained in your suitcase?
One of the first students to hear the directions blurted out, “I want to go to Disney World.” I said, “Sorry, you can’t.” When they asked why not, I knew I had them hooked. I told them they’d have to look it up. They quickly discovered that Disney World didn’t open until 1971! They went wild over this project. Many of them bought stocks and some bought rare comic books, baseball cards, and various other money-making items. This was to be expected. Many of them had seen Back to the Future II. But the ones who hit me right in the feelings were the ones who wanted to go see The Beatles in concert; I had them find where the Fab Four were playing the day they were leaving (exactly 50 years ago the day the received the assignment); it was the ones who wanted to visit the grandparents who died before they were born. I had them ask their parents where they lived at the time. And my goodness, some wanted to save Martin Luther King, Jr. I asked them to find out where he was speaking that day. This was one time that iPads and the Internet won the day.
The breadth of this writing project stunned me. I had never seen imagination sparked like this in a math class. Sure, I expected them to find things that would secure them financially for the future, but to read about their additional adventures seeking rare experiences just restored my faith in the power of children, even adolescents. It showed me their character. And it showed me just what could be done when a teacher isn’t bound by covering a specific standard on a particular page in a lock-stepped curriculum.
I’m in a semi-darkened theater in Battle Creek, Michigan on Christmas Eve, 1978. I’m with my brother, my sister, my mother, my stepfather, and his three kids. We’ve ridden in the bed of a pickup truck with a cap on it, huddled together in blankets to get us all to the movies. We have popcorn and drinks, and in my hands I have a movie program, the first I’ve ever seen. I’ve been reading about the new actor Warner Brothers has found to play Superman, and I’ve seen him in previews for the past two weeks. He looks like the real deal in the program. As I peruse the actors’ biographies, I’m up to Glen Ford, when the lights go down. I get goosebumps. After the bit with the kid reading a copy of Action Comics I hear the low rolling bass. Dum de da dum dum. Da da da da dum de da dum dum…then a burst of blue light fires the credits right at my eyes!
Two hours later, I walk out of the theater in a daze, past the ten-foot wide crystalline Superman The Movie logo sign. I have just seen the greatest movie in all of my fourteen years. Over the next several months, I see the movie four times. I see it with my dad, and with one of my best friends, Ken. We travel to Traverse City on a night when he has keyboard lessons, and after we see the movie, we spend the whole trip home in his mom’s Lincoln Continental, with our hands outstretched in front of us, imagining the flight along the road in pursuit of an XK 101 nuclear missile.
I had been on the road to weeding out my comic book collection by trading them in two for one at the local flea market, but all of that’s over with. I am buying everything I see with Superman in it. I find a new Superman series called DC Comics Presents, with art by Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez, featuring Superman and the Flash in its first two issues. I’m reading Starlog Magazine at a basketball game with Superman on the cover. This obsession lasts through spring and into summer. I have Superman The Movie bubblegum cards. I have the Superman soundtrack by John Williams on vinyl. While I listen to it, I sort out the cards in story-sequential order and match the music to the scene. I painstakingly record the soundtrack on my cassette recorder so that I can play it while I’m riding my bike on my paper route. I carry the cassette recorder in my paper bag, hands outstretched in front of me as I ride. It’s an endless summer before high school begins and I have to put away childish things…
There have been many live-action iterations of the Man of Steel since 1978, and whenever the newest one emerges, someone asks me what I think of the new Superman. My answer is always the same:
“It’s not for me.”
Now, I don’t mean to come down on anyone else’s opinion, or disparage anyone’s favorite Superman, but I mean what I say literally. It’s not made for me. Superman The Movie ignited my imagination and came to me at a time when I needed it. Was it perfect? Oh, no. I didn’t like the icy version of Krypton or Marlon Brando as Jor-El. But I was well-read enough to have seen multiple versions of Superman’s origin, even then, and I knew that changes came over time. The character had been around for 40 years at that point, and if in this version, Ma Kent survives to see him become Superman without him ever becoming Superboy first, so be it. My dad was less forgiving. He ranted and raved about the effects not being good enough and that Christopher Reeve was too scrawny. But I knew where his complaints were coming from. It wasn’t for him. His Superman came in the form of George Reeves in “Adventures of Superman,” the TV series that began in 1951, when my father was eight years old. I realized then that nothing is ever going to be more perfect than the cultural icons of your youth, and by the time Christopher Reeve was playing Superman for the last time in 1987’s Superman IV The Quest for Peace, I was graduating from college, and I knew my adult years would alter my perception of what was clearly a character intended for a more youthful audience.
There have been dozens of versions of Superman in animation, television and movies since then, and none of them will ever match up for me. But that’s okay. I’m 60 years old now, and though Superman The Movie is 46 years old, I still enjoy my annual viewing. Every variation, every version seems to find its fans, and boy, they don’t hesitate to let you know that your choice is the wrong one if it differs with theirs. The good news is that I have my version, and no one can take it from me.
