CLEVELAND • Dan Robinson felt a sense of relief as he sat at The Corner Alley in downtown Cleveland on a Monday evening in mid-June.
Robinson was an English professor for over 30 years at Colorado State University. He retired in 2022, but still makes an occasional cameo in academia, such as the one he made here at the week-long 2025 Advanced Placement (AP) English Language and Composition Reading.
He was one of approximately 1,000 educators — most of whom were teachers and some of whom hailed from Colorado — who made the trip to score the annual AP examinations.
And yes, Robinson was comforted to not only have made it through another day at the event, but more so that he no longer has to worry about many of the issues that concern those in education, specifically Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) within the scope of academic writing.
“I absolutely am relieved,” Robinson said. “The people I have talked to here — high school and college English teachers — have all said it has added an extra level of concern and angst, even.”
There is no shortage of issues that teachers face today.
But AI, and whether to embrace or resist its use in the classroom, is a chief concern among teachers these days.
Colleges and universities, as well as high schools, are trying to be proactive and wrap their arms around AI. They have developed task forces, leadership and learning committees, and even AI-based academies for professional development in a relatively short amount of time.
Most Colorado colleges and universities, however, have not adopted concrete and unified overarching policies on AI, although there have been a few to have done so, most notably the Colorado School of Mines.
Colorado State University has interim guidelines on AI, while the University of Colorado Boulder has a decentralized policy currently intact.
Instead, higher-learning institutions and high schools are largely leaving it up to the discretion of teachers to determine the use of AI in their respective classes.
It is an issue that perpetuates opinion on both fronts. Simply put: You’re either on board with AI or not, depending on your ethos and comfort level.
Not surprisingly, AI was a topic of contention for many attending the AP scoring in Cleveland and was a focal point of discussion in many departmental meetings in Colorado as the 2025-2026 school year began.
Pushing back
Chris Varano was one of those Colorado teachers on hand in Cleveland.
Varano teaches AP English in Colorado Springs at Mesa Ridge High School. He said he got into education because a few teachers not only inspired him, but “bolstered” him through what he says was a difficult childhood.
He joined the military in his 20s and was leaning toward teaching theater post-military, but while attending college, he said the “appeal of rhetoric just spoke to (me).”
AI, however, does not resonate with him.
“My issue with introducing it to students is that it becomes a replacement for the fundamental understanding and knowledge that we expect and want students to have,” Varano said. “They are not mature enough to use it as a springboard, the way some educators want us to go with it. I don’t think it is a skill we should be teaching. If it were up to me, we’d go back to pen and paper because there is something magical about that process.”
Don’t laugh; many teachers are going old school.
Earlier this year, The Wall Street Journal reported that Blue Book sales were up around 80% at the University of California, Berkeley, 50% at the University of Florida and over 30% at Texas A&M, over the past two years, to provide a regional look at pushback on AI within the U.S. Blue Books were created in the 1920s and are booklets for handwritten test responses.
This may seem a little counterintuitive to what COVID forced teachers to adopt — more digitalized modalities — to simply hold the semblance of a class. Still, there is a blurred line among many teachers who incorporate writing assignments in their curriculum.
What constitutes learning within a writing curriculum, and where does the use of AI ethically align within it?
Justin Cook was another Colorado AP English teacher in Cleveland. The Douglas County Legend High School instructor sees the issue this way.
“The struggle is the learning,” Cook said. “Without the struggle and frustration, learning isn’t really happening.”
He is quick to point out that AI is an amazing invention, even noting that he used AI to help plan a three-day summer trip to Mount Rushmore with his family.
Still, he contends that AI could strip away students’ abilities to process and think critically.
“AI is a great tool,” Cook said, “I’m only speaking as an English teacher, but it feels to me that those tools shouldn’t really be put into students’ hands when it comes to reading, writing, listening, because these are skills that we develop that require a whole lot of neurological development.”
Embracing AI
Matthew Stilwell has a different perspective on Generative AI.
He did a deep dive in December of 2023 with AI. He has kept digging and has not looked back.
Stilwell has been an English teacher at Front Range Community College in Fort Collins for over 20 years. He also serves as an instructional coach and has helped spearhead the college’s AI Academy, which launched this fall.
The AI Academy was implemented to help further facilitate discourse and as an opportunity for instructors to explore AI tools and redesign assignments.
Stilwell’s thought is that AI and applications such as ChatGPT and Google Gemini are out of the barn; there’s no going back.
“We can’t keep teaching the way that we’ve been teaching for the last 100 years,” Stilwell said. “If the academic essay is still important, we’re going to have to find new ways to engage students in the process of creating that project by using AI tools.”
Stilwell practices what he preaches. He has fully integrated AI into his literature course by creating a personalized GPT called “Literature Companion.” He’s programmed it with the course syllabus, assignment sheets, lecture notes and even some of his catchphrases for his course.
“I call it Matt GPT because I’ve programmed it with guardrails so that it doesn’t write for students,” Stilwell said. “It doesn’t answer questions like, ‘Hey, would you write the weekly journal for me on ‘A Streetcar Named Desire,’ acts one through three?’ I’ve programmed it to say, ‘No, but I can help you come up with ideas.'”
“It’s shown me that we can program these tools with guardrails so that they aren’t strictly cheating tools.”
Not every teacher is as comfortable with AI as Stilwell, but many are warming up to it, or at least they are redesigning their assignments with AI tools in mind.
Anthony Guerriero is one such instructor. He also teaches in Fort Collins at Front Range and was a scorer in this year’s AP English Language and Composition Reading, as he has done for several years.
“I’ve been slowly introducing AI into the classroom,” Guerriero said. “We’ve done simple things like find source material and used it for a few other things. It still has many shortcomings. By no means is it a finished product.”
Guerriero noted that AI has, to a degree, forced him to re-examine some of his assignments and what he ultimately wants them to promote.
“I’m asking students for very specific information and specific ideas,” he said. “While some students have tried to use AI, they have not successfully been able to do it when they’ve done it. I want students to be able to use the technology, and use it to their benefit.”
The mood is a little different in Cleveland at the AP Reading. While participants are uneasy about integrating AI into their classes, several are concerned about simply being replaced by AI at the event.
AI for scoring?
Cleveland is as logical a place as any for the AP English Language and Composition Reading to be staged, offering a centralized location where educators can converge from all pockets within the U.S.
There are teachers who swear by the event and return to it yearly. Some have attended the event for over 30 years and counting.
Still, the event is not for everyone.
It is a grind. Seven consecutive eight-hour days are spent reading and scoring as many essays as one can efficiently handle.
One reader might score just over 40 essays in three hours. Another scorer, standing directly to the left, may have accurately scored over 120 in the same amount of time — all while taking 10- to 15-minute breaks every hour.
But many attendees can see the writing on the wall.
AI is coming to scoring.
The former CSU professor, Robinson, believes the AP English Reading is only four or five years away, if not sooner, from fully integrating AI into the scoring of essays and tests. He says that, right now, having humans as scorers is still cheaper.
Robinson is a story himself. He has authored three novels and, before becoming a teacher, was a firefighter on Hot Shot crews for 14 years in the Pacific Northwest.
While sitting at The Corner Alley, Robinson recalled his thesis study on Neal Cassady of the 1950s Beat Generation.
He remembered an interview with Allen Ginsburg in Boulder, which he recorded and had to rewind and listen to for multiple hours to transcribe.
Robinson next took a look at his discussion, being recorded and transcribed in real-time through an AI recording app.
The irony of the moment was not lost on Robinson. He looked both interested and amazed, but most of all, Robinson was relieved.
