We will remember the year 2023 as the year when teachers had to learn to recognize assignments written by the ChatGPT software. And yet, more than artificial intelligence, it is a biological-natural intelligence that has been responsible for the work of students for a long time: that of their parents, even of their big brothers, big sisters, or private teachers. This discreet (or not) help has long been seasonal, with a peak in June – period of end-of-study dissertations, projects to present at the oral, reading sheets to be returned urgently in the hope to go up a fragile average and the last marks before the class councils. From now on, the helping hand is spread over the whole year, fueled by the anxieties linked to Parcoursup and the school future of the children.
These parental-directed copies, Laurence smells them from a hundred meters away. “It most often concerns document analysis exercises”diagnoses this history-geo teacher in a Parisian high school, who wished to remain anonymous, like the other people interviewed. “The problem is that these homework calls for methods that the parents do not necessarily master; they remained on memories of studies which do not correspond any more to the current criteria. Today, we ask for critical studies, we must reflect on the objectivity of the texts, their complementarity. The parents can’t think of it because they didn’t at the time. » In the absence of formal proof, in class, Laurence takes the risk of formulating “Did you do it alone?” » The correction poses much more acute problems for him: “Parents aren’t happy if they get a bad grade. » Without going so far as to admit being the authors of the assignment, the latter betray themselves when they come to ask him for explanations based on the notation, convinced that they are good at everything…
“There are two types of parents who do their children’s homework: those who write downright for them and those who dictate the answer to them”, theorized Manon, after a first year of teaching in CE2, in an establishment integrated into a priority education network, in the Meuse. Of the former, she recognizes the writing; the others, she grills them with the turns that appear in the copy and that the student almost never uses. On the very day of our discussion, a struggling schoolboy brought him exercises “finish at home”where everything seemed unusually fair. “Before, his parents wrote for him in his notebook. Since I spoke to them about it, they dictate the answers to him. I imagine they do this to hide his difficulties… It doesn’t really work. »
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