Emmy Galindo
Teaching Teachers: How AI Became Her Greatest Teaching Assistant
The AI graded my first batch of essays completely wrong. Gave a B+ to a paper that was barely coherent and a C to one of the best essays I'd read all semester. I spent four hours fixing the grades manually, which defeated the entire point. Teaching business at UCLA Extension for 19 years, and this was supposed to make my life easier?
Let me back up. 2023 was when the dean started talking about "efficiency improvements." Budget cuts, basically. A colleague mentioned this thing called JobRipper over coffee in the faculty lounge. I was knitting between classes—I always knit, it calms me down—and she said half the faculty had taken some AI job risk assessment. I took it that afternoon on my phone during office hours.
MODERATE risk. AI could grade and generate basic content, but students still needed actual human instructors for mentoring and curriculum design. That was November. I didn't do anything about it until February. Too busy, too many papers to grade, too exhausted.
Finally enrolled in some edX course about AI for educators. The first assignment asked me to use ChatGPT to generate discussion questions. They were terrible. Generic, boring, nothing like what I'd actually ask my students. I almost quit the course. My partner asked why I was annoyed, and I said I was wasting time on tools that didn't work.
But I kept going. Learned how to write better prompts. Started small—used ChatGPT to outline lecture notes, then rewrote them in my own voice. Tried the AI grading thing. Complete disaster, like I said. Scaled back to having AI flag potentially struggling students based on assignment patterns. That actually worked.
Eight months in, I'm using AI for some things. Grading still needs my review, but the flagging system helps me catch students who're falling behind earlier. I added a module on AI in business because students kept asking about it. Got decent reviews, though one student complained the course had "too much tech stuff now."
I don't have superpowers. I have slightly better tools that sometimes work and sometimes create more problems. Last week the AI assistant I set up gave a student wrong information about the final project deadline. I had to send a class-wide correction email.
Still knitting during office hours. Still teaching. The dean hasn't mentioned more cuts lately, so maybe I'm safe for now. Or maybe not. I help younger faculty figure out these tools when they ask, but I'm not out here leading workshops. Just trying to keep my job and serve my students without burning out.