When Students Interview Jay Gatsby
Source: Mike Kentz Substack
Author: Mike Kentz
Original source: https://mikekentz.substack.com/p/when-students-interview-jay-gatsby
Published: 2025-09-08
Source type: essay
Private backup: the full article text is archived in the private repository at archives/articles/mikekentz-substack-com-when-students-interview-jay-gatsby.source.md. It is not published on the public Quartz site.
Summary
Mike Kentz describes a five-day high school English lesson sequence in which students interview a Jay Gatsby character chatbot to deepen literary character analysis. The assignment redesign responds to the unreliability of traditional take-home literary essays in the AI era by shifting assessment toward preparation, live questioning, transcript annotation, and metacognitive reflection. Students treat the chatbot not as a tutor but as an interview subject whose evasions, contradictions, and limitations become evidence for literary analysis and AI literacy. The article frames this as an “AI interactions as tests” model: AI becomes a text or interlocutor through which student understanding can be made visible.
Pull quotes
Students in the analytical seat
“Rather than positioning AI as a learning aid, students approach it as an interview subject with potential blind spots and inconsistencies. This immediately puts students in the analytical driver’s seat.”
Resistant to shortcuts
“While students could theoretically use AI to help generate initial questions, the live interview format and requirement for authentic response to bot answers made the core intellectual work difficult to outsource.”
Critical evaluation
“Students don’t just use AI; they critically evaluate its limitations.”
Big ideas
- AI simulations need clear boundaries for learning
- Voice AI may make learning support easier to access
- Students need to check AI answers against real evidence
- Treating AI like a person can help only when students know it is role-play
Claims
- Take-home essays are no longer reliable evidence by themselves
- AI chat transcripts can make student thinking visible
- Treating AI like a person can help if students know the limits
Key evidence and examples
- Students spend two days preparing open-ended questions about Gatsby’s motivations, contradictions, and unresolved ambiguities.
- The live interview asks students to sustain a 10–14 turn exchange with the character chatbot.
- Students annotate transcripts for deflection, contradiction, limitation, and interpretive failure.
- Assessment includes question preparation, interview transcript, transcript annotation, and reflective essay.
Education relevance
Very high relevance for English/literature instruction, authentic assessment, AI literacy, chatbot-based pedagogy, and alternatives to traditional take-home essays.
Durability note
The Gatsby bot lesson is one classroom design, but the durable pattern is broader: use AI as an object of inquiry so students must question, annotate, and evaluate rather than passively receive help.