“I’m very fond of the take-home essay, as there’s something irreplaceable about the experience of articulating a theory over the course of multiple weeks—doing background research, letting the ideas marinate in one’s subconsciousness, and chiseling away at the draft until every word is perfectly placed.” That’s Tom Kaspers (University of Chicago), expressing a feeling many professors have about teaching in the early days of the AI era. Yet unlike many who have either ignored their students’ AI use on take-home essays, or have eliminated that kind of assignment from their courses, Kaspers “set out to try to save this experience.” In the guest post, below, a follow-up to a piece he wrote for the Boston Globe, he describes how he did it. As he notes, his method won’t work for all kinds of courses, but it may work for some. Writing Together: A Teaching Experiment by Tom Kaspers This past winter, I developed a new kind of essay assignment with my students at the University of Chicago. I was teaching a first-year philosophy class that doubled as an academic writing course; its primary purpose was to teach writing a philosophy essay. I wrote a piece for the Boston Globe on why I felt the need to change up the assignment and on how my students rose to the challenge and responded wonderfully to this little teaching experiment. The reason I felt I couldn’t assign individual essays anymore was that I worried it was no longer an effective way to teach philosophical writing (or even academic writing more generally). We might sometimes forget that philosophical writing belongs to a very peculiar genre, upheld by a myriad of conventions, the bulk of which are unconceptualized. Teaching someone how to write a philosophy essay feels at times like teaching a foreign language. And for some students, you might as well be speaking Latin. The only way they’ll learn is through repeating cycles of writing and revising. But now they can skip that altogether by using tools like ChatGPT as a kind of Google Translate for their philosophical ideas: in go some half-baked philosophical thoughts, out comes a perfectly shaped essay. The only downside is that they’ll never learn to speak the language of philosophy...

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