By Jim Shimabukuro
Editor
It was the first day of instruction, and Keani and Ilima were among the twenty-or-so students who were slowly entering the college classroom, plopping into empty tablet-arm chairs, and lifting laptops out of their backpacks. They chose seats in the center of the room.
The English 100 Prof was writing the day’s assignment on the blackboard: “Think of something you feel is beautiful that others might consider not worth a second look.”
At exactly the hour mark, the Prof turned, looked at the class, gestured to the blackboard, and slowly walked to the back of the desk at the front of the room, and sat on the edge, scanning the students’ faces.
A student in the front center of the room asked, without raising his arm, “You want us to answer that?”
The Prof looked at him expectantly.
The student asked, “In writing or orally?”
The Prof spoke for the first time, “Orally,” and smiled.
The girl on his right answered, “The sun disappearing in the ocean at Kaena Point.”
The Prof, without looking at her, looked at other faces in the class.
Ilima responded, looking at the girl, “I think that’s beautiful, too.”
The girl who mentioned the sunset smiled.
A guy in the back of the room looked at the Prof, but when the Prof didn’t meet his eyes and continued to scan the class, he looked at the class and questioned, “But that doesn’t count because it’s something we all feel is beautiful?”
Students turned to see what the Prof would say, but when he didn’t meet their eyes and continued to scan the students’ faces as though he were just as clueless as they were, they began to scan their classmates’ faces to see if anyone would respond.
Keani finally said, “Yeah, it doesn’t count.” Then he said to the class, “What about riding a horse along an isolated shoreline on the Big Island just as the sun was beginning to rise?”
The girl who mentioned the sunset said, “That might count because it’s something that most of us never did.”
No one looked at the Prof for confirmation or rejection because they knew he would simply look back at the class as if tossing the unasked question back at them.
Ilima looked at the class and then back at Keani, and said, “We haven’t done that, but it’s still something that we might all consider beautiful.”
At that point, Keani started typing a question on his laptop, saying, “Let’s see what ChatGPT has to say.”
The Prof picked up his laptop from the desktop, opened it, and started typing, too, following Keani’s lead. The other students, too, did the same.
Keani said, “I asked ChatGPT for an example of something that is beautiful to a person but probably not beautiful to anyone else.”
A girl behind him asked, “What did it say?”
Keani replied, “‘A rusted hinge holding a worn wooden gate on an old wooden fence.'”
The girl replied, “But how can that be beautiful?”
A student next to her asked, “Who decides what’s beautiful?”
Students, including the Prof, asked ChatGPT that question.
Keani said, “Looks as though there’s no clear answer. So I guess we do, as individuals.”
Many classmates nodded, some to Keani, others to classmates, and still others to themselves.
Ilima looked at the Prof for confirmation and asked, “Is that right? We decide on our own?”
The Prof scanned the faces in the class then asked, to everyone and no one in particular, “What do you think?”
Everyone nodded.
A student in the back of the room asked, “So I can write about the old rusty Ford pickup on my grandfather’s farm in the valley? The doors don’t close all the way, the fenders are about to fall off, the springs in the seat poke our okole, and it’s hard to start.”
The class laughed, and Ilima said, “It’s hard to think that anyone would think that’s beautiful.”
The others laughed and nodded, and Keani asked the student, “Why is it beautiful to you?”
The student looked sheepish and answered, “Well, because, when I was twelve, tūtū taught me how to drive that standard-shift truck on the dirt roads on the farm. And ’til this day, when I look at it, sitting on the edge of the field with weeds growing up around it, I remember feeling so proud driving it on the bumpy dirt road.”
Everyone smiled, looking inward, including the Prof.
The Prof then stood, walked around to the front of the desk, and said, to the class, “For the rest of the session, compose a draft on this topic,” gesturing to the blackboard, “and post it in our class workspace in the discussion titled ‘My Beauty.'”
[End]
Epilogue: This article was inspired by a chat, Supplement to “A Rusty Old Ford Truck: Toward a Swarm Model for ‘Teaching,’” that I had with ChatGPT a few days earlier. I’ve provided the entire transcript to explain how the idea of swarm learning evolved and to demonstrate how chatbots can function as a collaborator in generating ideas. -js
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