I'm a high school math and science teacher who uses ChatGPT, and it's made my job much easier

• Shannon Ahern, a high school math and science teacher, was afraid that ChatGPT would take her job.

• But her mind changed after she started using the AI for class prep, which saved her hours of time.

• Here's how Ahern is using ChatGPT to make her job easier, as told to Insider's Aaron Mok.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Shannon Ahern, a 27-year-old high school math and science teacher based in Dublin, Ireland, about how she uses ChatGPT at work. It has been edited for length and clarity.

When I learned about OpenAI's ChatGPT last December, I was frightened.

As a high school math and science teacher, I had a bit of an existential crisis over my job. I pride myself in creating unique resources that play to the interests of my students, so when I saw that ChatGPT can do things like generate a math lesson in seconds, I thought, what am I here for? What's my purpose? What's unique about me if a machine can do this in 30 seconds, and everybody has access to it?

I was intimidated to try it out, but I knew that ChatGPT would only become more popular, and I didn't want to be left behind. After using the chatbot to help with lesson planning and resource creation, I realized that I have nothing to worry about.

When I first used ChatGPT, I treated it as a joke, asking it to write poems about the Pythagorean theorem and a song about math in the style of Taylor Swift. My students said they enjoyed them, which gave me the push I needed to keep testing it.

Since then, I've asked ChatGPT to write lesson plans, generate exercise worksheets, and come up with quiz questions. I even got it generate a "fill in the bank" worksheet by feeding my lecture notes to the bot and telling it to remove keywords, a task that would've taken me ages to do manually. It also developed an interactive game.

As a result, my productivity has gone through the roof.

ChatGPT has saved me hours on manual tasks like lab generation and has significantly cut down my paperwork. Before using the AI, I stayed up late preparing class materials and would show up to class the next day feeling sluggish and tired. Now, I go into work feeling refreshed.