Iraq and Everywhere Like Such As

My professor asked me to explain my data analysis out loud. In my own words. Notes right in front of me.

I froze.

That moment sent me back to my classroom with a question I couldn't shake — how many of my students are submitting work they couldn't explain out loud if someone asked? So I added one element to a summative assessment I'd never tried before. An oral defense.

What happened next reminded me of a Miss Teen USA moment from 2007 that the internet has never forgotten. Multiple times. Except my students had weeks to prepare.

This episode is about the one moment AI cannot swim for you. The live defense of your own ideas. What the drift looks like when it has nowhere left to hide. And twelve students who put their peer audience's phones down.

Through the Undertow. Episode 3: The Iraq and Everywhere Like Such As.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:27

When I think about something I tried for the first time this year, a move inspired by something that happened in one of my doctoral classes, I keep coming back to a Mist Teen USA moment. Now my professor took each of us into a one-on-one discussion about a data set that he had given and asked us to explain our analysis aloud, in our own words, no jargon. And he asked follow-up questions to our answers. I froze. Notes right in front of me froze anyway. So after that conversation, I went and found data that I actually knew, a survey I'd run a couple of years earlier asking teachers about their AI usage and how they felt about it, and pulled that up. I wrote my own questions using my professors as a template, and I answered them aloud. To an empty room, my cichlids in the aquarium were the only witnesses, and they were critiquing me. So it seemed. So I went back to my classroom and I tried something I'd never tried before. Which brings me to Caitlin Upton. Specifically, sore cited because of my muscle memory. Caitlin Upton, Miss Teen South Carolina 2007. I found her on Wikipedia. Don't at me. You know the rules. Wikipedia is a launching pad, not a landing pad. But the footnotes check out. Look it up. Anyway, it went viral before viral was really a thing. She was asked a question on stage at a national pageant, and here's what came out. I personally believe that US Americans are unable to do so because some people out there in our nation don't have maps. And uh I believe that our uh education, like such as um South Africa and um the Iraq, and everywhere like such as fluent, confident, completely empty. She performed the shape of an answer without having an answer. That's what I watched happen in my own classroom when I added one new element to the summative assessment. Not once, but multiple times. Except my students had weeks to prepare. Welcome to Through the Undertow. I'm Danine Fry. This episode is about the one moment AI cannot swim for you, the live defense of your own knowledge and what happens when students who have been drifting all year suddenly have to swim. Now, I want to back up before we get to the oral defense moment because the oral defense didn't happen in a vacuum. I've been watching something build for a while. Student presentations were good, genuinely creative in some cases, but something was off and I couldn't quite name it at first. Then I started seeing the tells. And here's the thing: the tell wasn't new. Before generative AI, students who chose the path of least resistance would copy and paste text onto crowded slides and read directly off the projector screen. The slide was the script. Everyone could see it, nobody pretended otherwise. Now the slides are cleaner, more polished, sometimes genuinely well designed. But the reading didn't stop, it just moved. Off the projector slide and onto a Chromebook screen or a printed dock held just below the sight line. A little more effort, same drift. The presentation got better looking. The understanding didn't. Students reading, not presenting, reading, eyes down, script in hand or on screen, reciting words in a careful monotone of someone navigating an unfamiliar road in the dark, not their words, words they were meeting for the first time in front of a live audience. Some groups didn't even introduce themselves, didn't greet the room, just launched into the project and stepped back. Let the audio play, let the video run, let the AI-generated content do the presenting while they stood next to it like a museum docent who hadn't read the placard. And then I looked closely at the rubric scores, the content category. Mostly academically strong. The information was there, organized, coherent, sometimes genuinely impressive. The citations and research category inconsistent, sometimes weak, sometimes missing entirely, sometimes generated by a citation engine like EasyBib or MyPib, take your pick, which pull from metadata and frequently frequently get the author wrong, the publisher wrong, the format wrong. Perfectly confident, frequently inaccurate. And when I flag it, the response is always the same. That's what EasyBib gave me, is if I should call the company and complain. But anyway, the presentation category was poor because you can't present what you don't own. In that pattern, strong content, weak citations, poor presentation. I've seen it enough to know exactly what it means. The content was generated. The citations were an afterthought or an AI hallucination. And the presentation was poor because the student hadn't spent enough time with the material to speak about it naturally. That student at least knew the material. He or she had done the work, just also done everyone else's too. Now the workhorse isn't a student, it's a chat bot. And unlike the overachieving high schooler who resented doing everything and would absolutely tell me after class, ChatGPT never complains. It never burns out, it never snitches, and never once understands what it's producing. AI had become the primary team member. The one who built the slides, wrote the script, generated the speaker notes, and did the majority of the intellectual heavy lifting, except none of it was intellectual and none of it was heavy. It was just fast. And the students who showed up to present the work they've never left fingerprints on. So I added one element, one small move. An oral defense. A few minutes at the end of the presentation where a classmate asks you questions about your own work. No script, no AI, just you and what you actually know. So here's how the oral defense worked. Each presenting student was paired with a classmate, one-to-one. That classmate wrote two oral defense questions based on the presenting student's topic. Everyone in the room had read the same text, so the questions weren't coming from nowhere. They were entered into a Google form, and I graded them before the presentations to make sure the questions actually required thinking, not just yes or no answers, and I printed them on slips of paper. The presenting student didn't see the questions in advance. The questions were asked orally, student to student, face to face, no paper required. Think of it like an on-stage question portion of Miss Teen USA, except the topic is their own research and there's no crown at the end. Simple. One small move. The first couple of groups were fine. They always are. Students who volunteer to go first have usually done the work. Then we got deeper into the presentations, and that's when things got interesting. Panic. The kind that passes between students without a word, just eyeballs finding eyeballs, silently asking the same question. Do you know this? Because I don't. Let me set the scene. Presenting groups were gathered in the front corner of the room. Laptop, speakers, projector. Some didn't even greet the audience before launching in. Just press play. Project on the screen. Go. And then the oral defense question arrived. The questions arrived and something shifted in the room. I watched it happen in real time. A student receiving a question about his or her presentation going somewhere far beyond their eyes. Not shy, not nervous exactly, just not there. The words of the question landing without connecting to anything underneath. And then the answer. Fluent, confident, word salad. The Iraqin everywhere like such as. But here's what actually happened across the room. More than half of the answering students needed to be handed the slip of paper to read the question for themselves, just to give themselves time to formulate even a loose response. And some of the students asking the questions, questions that they had supposedly written themselves, stumbled over their own words, mispronounced them, read haltingly through vocabulary that should have been theirs. When an answering student struggled to understand the question, the asking student couldn't rephrase it, couldn't find another way in, just repeated the same words slightly louder. And when both parties reached an impasse, questioner unable to rephrase, an answerer unable to respond, the questioner simply handed the slip of paper across. Here, read it yourself, figure it out. A piece of paper passing between two students who between them couldn't explain a question that one of them had supposedly written. Students were encouraged to ask follow-up questions. A follow-up would show that the questioner had actually listened to the answer, that they were present in the exchange, not just executing a requirement. Very few did. Most seemed visibly relieved when their question questioning obligation was over. Both sides of the exchange just wanted to complete the transaction. Does that sound familiar? You can't stumble over your own words. If you stumble, they were never yours. One group huddled back into their corner, the presenting corner, Chromebook open, projector still running, around the slip of paper like it was a life raft, reading the question together, trying to crowdsource an answer to a question about their own work. I'm gonna describe what I saw in general terms because the specific students involved have enough going on without becoming podcast content. And then the one I can't stop thinking about. A student being puppeted, group mate leaning in, whispering the answer, the student repeating it louder, a human autocomplete, standing in front of the room, performing understanding they didn't have, fed word by word by someone standing just beside them. I want to pause here and say something honest. This was painful to watch. Not because I was angry, because I understood exactly what I was seeing. These aren't bad kids, they're not lazy kids. They're kids who had been offered an effortless current and had taken it all the way to this moment where the current ran out and they had to swim and they didn't know how. And then there were the dozen, about a dozen students across a few classes who, when the question arrived, were ready. Not because they'd seen the questions in advance, because they knew their material. They had wrestled with it, left fingerprints on it, and made it theirs. They were ready. That's what learning looks like when it's working. I'd almost forgotten how it feels to watch it happen. The oral defense didn't create those students, they were already there. It just made them more visible. Now I want to be honest with you about something. I had thought I'd solved it. A year ago, I started moving away from written essays, partly because I couldn't determine with certainty whether a student had written something, not when they could prompt AI to write an essay at a high school level, complete with deliberate mistakes. The output was calibrated to sound like a 16-year-old who was trying but not quite there. The forgery possibilities had gotten way too good. So I moved towards performative assessments, presentations, Socratic seminars, debates, creative summatives, things that required a body in the room, a voice and a face, things that AI couldn't attend. I was wrong. Not entirely, but wrong enough. Because AI followed me. It generated the scripts, it wrote the speakers' notes, it built the slides, and students showed up to perform work they'd never left fingerprints on, reading from a Chromebook screen instead of a crowded slide, which looked like progress, but it wasn't. The content was still stellar, the performance was still poor. The gap had moved, but it hadn't closed. And before you say it, yes, I know. Go back to paper and pencil. Do everything in class under direct supervision, no devices, no problem. Except that's not how it works anymore. A student who wants to use AI will use AI. They'll pull it up on their phones, they'll generate the output at home, print it out, and walk it in. Smartwatch is on their wrists, AI glasses on their face. There's no classroom controlled enough to stop a determined student. And honestly, I'm not interested in running where one where I'm the warden. That's not teaching. The gap doesn't close when you take away the technology. The gap closes when the work requires thinking that no technology can do for them. Which is what I'm still trying to figure out how to design. So I went further and I added the oral defense. Peer-written questions, not teacher-written, because teacher-written questions can be anticipated. And entered into the Google form, graded for rigor, harder to generate your way out of. And it worked mostly for now. Here's what three episodes of this podcast have taught me about my own thinking. Essays weren't AI proof. Performative assessments aren't entirely AI proof. The oral defense is the closest I found to a moment where the drift can't survive. But I said that about Google Docs in 2015, and I said that about performative assessments last year. You know what this is? It's whack-a-mole. I close one gap and another one opens. I move to Google Docs and they find a workaround. I move to performative assessments, AI follows me there. I add the oral defense and I'm already watching to see where they go next. The moles are faster than they used to be, and they have an accelerant now. But I'm still playing. So I'll be honest. I'm watching to see how students find the workaround for this one. Not with dread, but with genuine curiosity. Because they will find it, they always do. And when they do, it'll tell me something important about where the next gap is. And then I'll close that one too. And that's not a failure of pedagogy. That's just what this negotiation looks like. It didn't start with AI, and it won't end with whatever comes after AI. It started with the Bailey Bow Uggs in January of 2015, and it'll keep going long after whatever's replacing the Boston clog by then. So I want to end with the dozen. The about 12 students, and I'm keeping the head count vague on purpose, across a few classes who, when the oral defense question arrived, were ready. Not because they saw it coming, but because they mastered their understanding. They had wrestled with the content and synthesized it. They left fingerprints on it and made it theirs. They were magical. They were dynamic and engaged, looking at the audience instead of a screen, talking to the room instead of reciting at it. And the room responded, leaning in, phones down, actually watching, because something real was happening, and everyone in that room could feel the difference between that and what had come before. I've been teaching long enough to know that feeling. The moment a classroom stops being a transaction and becomes something else, something alive. It doesn't happen every day. Some weeks it doesn't happen at all, but when it does, you remember why you're in the room. The oral defense didn't create those students. They were already there. It just made them more visible. And that's the whole job, isn't it? Not to manufacture understanding, not to AI proof every assignment until the joy is gone. Just to design the moment where the students who have been swimming all along finally get to show it. The drift was already happening. The accelerant arrived, the whack a mole game got faster, and somewhere in the middle of it twelve kids gave such fulsome answers that their peer audience put their phones down and looked up. That is still possible. I watched it happen. Through the undertow, new episodes every two weeks. Find us wherever you get your podcasts. And if this episode meant something to you, send it to one teacher who needs to hear it. That's how this spreads. Not an algorithm, word of mouth. The old fashioned kind. See you in the water.