During Community Block on September 17, Latin teacher and crew coach Mr. Richards spoke to the school community about academic integrity, the risks of relying on artificial intelligence and the importance of doing difficult work yourself. Mr. Richards’ speech centered around what he called “Styrofoam weights,” a metaphor he uses regularly with his students. He applied the phrase to his own experience learning Latin. When he was a student in the 1970s, online translations or artificial intelligence were not available, so he had to work through the tedious Latin passages and assignments on his own. According to Mr. Richards, that effort gradually made him a stronger Latin reader and helped him develop his understanding of grammar, vocabulary and rhetoric. While the work was difficult, he argued that struggling through it was necessary to actually learn the material.
Mr. Richards asserts that the metaphor extends beyond Latin to academic work more broadly. He compared certain methods of academic corner-cutting to lifting Styrofoam weights; the work may appear to be getting done, but students are not actually developing the skills that come from it. He applied the same idea to using AI for writing an essay, copying someone else’s answers or looking at a phone during an assessment.
“If you use an online translation,” Mr. Richards said, “then what you’ve done is the intellectual equivalent of lifting styrofoam weights.”
For Mr. Richards, the issue is therefore not limited to whether a student receives an unfair advantage or violates a school rule; it is instead about what repeatedly avoiding the difficult work does to an individual: preventing the development of one’s own analytical and critical thinking skills. In short, Mr. Richards told students that cheating hurts them more in the long term than it could ever help them in the short term.
Another major topic that Mr. Richards touched on was the adverse effects of cheating on the community as a whole. Mr. Richards spoke about how “cheating is corrosive to trust” and can erode the sense of community at Belmont Hill. His point was how cheating inspires feelings of “distrust, … suspicion, resentment, a sense of unfairness, disillusionment, betrayal, anger” among the community, which runs contrary to Belmont Hill’s ethics. If people can’t be trusted to play fair on tests, what else can they not be trusted to do?
Mr. Richards brought up many other topics adjacent to AI throughout his very brief, concise and succinct speech, like how to help friends who might be cheating or the legacy a cheater leaves behind. As Suhas S. Kaniyar ’28 observed, “Mr. Richards emphasized the power of doing something the hard way and what you can learn about yourself by doing that. This was a breath of fresh air from all other AI talks.” The speech really was a “breath of fresh air” compared to the many standard speeches about evil machines stealing our learning that students may have heard throughout the year. There was a distinct, authentic and candid quality to Mr. Richard’s address, whether from his strong stage presence or his impressive recitation from memory. Indeed, it is rather poetic how the most human speech about the dangers of AI could end up being the most memorable (and thus impactful) of the many the school has faced this year.
