- cross-posted to:
- hackernews@lemmy.bestiver.se
- cross-posted to:
- hackernews@lemmy.bestiver.se
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NGL, it’s really f*cking depressing when you give students 30m to create something of their own imagination, and they do it in the first minute with chatGPT and spend the other 29m playing games the phone and asking to “go to the bathroom” whenever they notice someone in the hallway.
The excuses you hear when you do something so oppressive as to request they keep their phones in their own backpacks for the duration of the task.
I was uninterested in school because nothing was ever done to make me interested, even at home.
Later in life I was diagnosed with ADHD and now I’m a software developer. Sadly school isn’t for everybody and I just thought I was stupid and lazy, it turns out I was fine I just needed the right help.
Edit: Votes don’t matter but I’d love to know the reasoning for the 5 downvotes on this. Like why don’t you put across your opposition.
The “evan at home” part is 100% more important than the school part. Making sure your kid gets educated at school is a parent’s job.
100%, but sadly many people, myself included didn’t get that and actively grew up in terrible environments.
I guess that’s what happens when you mum is 18 when you’re born. You’re being raised by a kid that didn’t make the best choices and the cycle continues. Although I don’t and won’t have children.
This is why school should be empowered to do more as that place is literally the only place you’re learning how to be a person and get ready for life.
I saw my dad beat my mum up. Been in the house when he tried to drive the car into the house but got stuck in the privits.
I’ve seen my mum attack my dad with a frying pan and witness my tea be dunked on her head. Or my dad go to prison for drunk driving.
Spent my entire pre high school childhood sat in the back of a car as my mum would berate the different men in her life, to her best friend.
Spent the following years seeing my mum psychologically bully my dad and he would be sat down stairs crying at night.
Is it little wonder that when people grow up like this and with ADHD that they might be hard to reach in school and that they are withdrawn.
I want to say that life’s hard and I don’t blame my family for the shit I grew up because they were young and not ready for life themselves as they had shit lives too. We were fed, went on holidays, and were richer than most of my council estate (I grew up there too) friends, but we didn’t get stability, love, or encouragement which is sad.
Like this is the tip of the iceberg of what shit I’ve seen growing up or some of the fucked up shit they dragged me into, being the eldest. I have two younger brothers and we are all fucked up in different ways but I’m by far the worst (as society would say) in every metric like wages, progress in life etc.
Edit: Looking introspectively I am thinking I’ve got unresolved issues for all this shit to just come out my finger tips on Lemmy 😂
Edit: Reflecting on this a little more, it’s annoying when people like dude I replied to say it’s the parents job. Like no shit dude, but what do you do when the parent fails the child, just leave it at that and say to the kid sorry mate, but it’s your mums fault but good luck in life. It’s the same kind of thing where people say the parents should feed the child so the school doesn’t have to, this just leaves hungry fucking kids.
You, uh, might want to talk to someone a little more qualified than anonymous people on Lemmy.
Yeah I’m not really here for therapy, just needed to get that out I guess.
Clearly I do need to talk to someone, but that’s a scary thing and not cheap.
You are correct on both accounts.
Sending you good vibes and money for therapy (only half of the last sentence is true).
Good vibes is what makes life bearable so I appreciate those my friend.
I had great, loving parents who tried their best to get me interested in my education. It didn’t matter. ADHD meant I was never going to be a good student.
Well it’s not like you had a choice in the matter and that’s why they don’t care how interested you are. You and the rest of your batch just need to sit still for an hour and a half until you get a break walking to the next boredom session.
I find it quite incredible that I spent 14 years of 40 hours weeks listening to people talk about stuff I did not care about under the assumption that if I didn’t I’d end up homeless so they never tried to make me care.
Fortunately we had a computer at home to learn about the stuff I actually cared about.
I find it crushing that they’re still making students sit and listen about this boring useless shit when they can just ask their phones about whatever they’d be trying to do if they weren’t listening to a course plan from the 1800s about completely obsolete and irrelevant things.
How can this incredibly important phase of life be so hopelessly poisoned by school for absolutely no reasons at all.
Sometimes the process of answering the question is more important than having the answer. For example if AGI is writing your essay from first draft on you will never learn how to communicate a concept from beginning to end without assistance which will make it harder for you to think.
Sure but that was not anywhere near the bulk of my time spent in school. Most of my actual learning occurred after school on the internet. School mostly made me accept that my most useful hours of my life would be consumed, and largely wasted, by external forces which I would have little to no control over and even less chances to escape from.
I like to keep a positive mindset on things and although I believe I was failed by the education system, ADHD wasn’t as known back then so to them I was just an easily distracted comedian with no desire to learn, except in maths I would ask for homework as I was alright and it was relaxing and I suppose subconsciously I didn’t feel like a failure here. Again they didn’t really help me nurture that desire.
What I like to keep positive about is that the teacher is powerless to do anything and they just need to teach the most about of people as possible without letting the disruptive kids take time away from the ones who are better at school.
My issue is with the education system for the masses and cynic in me doesn’t believe that systems wants everybody to reach their potential, it’s just to get you used to routine and to allow your parents to be slaves to capitalism. If it was about potential then teachers would be paid more and we would have class sizes similar to private schools (those where you pay obscene amounts) where the teacher can individualise the education.
Chris Crawford was talking about this problem in 1992 and we still haven’t learned anything
The Dragon Speech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBrj4S24074
I couldn’t find a transcription, and it covers a lot more than education, but it’s a good speech. The relevant part starts at ~12:45
Thanks I’ll check that out
For me it is
“Do schools kill creativity? | Sir Ken Robinson | TED”
which is the first result if you search youtube for “ted talk education”
He doesn’t really have a solution of mass manufactured education but he does highlight the problem real good
Actually, someone made a drawing version of this talk and it’s really good
awesome, I’ll check that out
Ngl. I bought a signal jammer for my wife to use in her classroom (after all, it said “for educational purposes only”) and the kids could never figure out why the signal sucked so bad in her classroom during class times. She never got caught using it and never had to worry about them being on their phones.
If there was an emergency, people would just call the front office and they could always reach her on the land line in the classroom.
(after all, it said “for educational purposes only”)
The FCC hates this one simple trick
Violating federal laws is awesome, everyone should do it.
If it’s good enough for the President! /s
“Removed by mod” haha
Fuck YES (says a middle school teacher)
One proposed Florida law I actually agree with is: phones off during school - all of school, including between classes and recess. Possible exception for lunchtime. Definite exception for when the teacher is specifically using the phones as a fully engaged teaching tool, which should be no more than 20% of overall classroom time, but definitely could be used as a way to “grab attention.”
I get wanting to be able to track little Ginny and make sure she got to school O.K. and know when to go meet the bus to pick her up.
There should definitely be “Cybersafety” education in our schools, and the phone as a teaching tool definitely makes sense there.
Having AI write the first draft of your assignment can be a good lesson too, but the remaining 28 minutes should be spent understanding and refining what the AI has given you.
Can’t you just make them turn off the computers/phones and do it by hand?
This gives me flashbacks. I had to take Java exams with pen and paper. They took 6+ hours. The reason? Not enough computers for everyone and our teacher wasn’t willing to make 2 different exams, like every other fucking teacher does.
When I need them to, I do, but then suddenly everyone starts needing to go to the bathroom way more frequently.
I can’t imagine dealing with a room full of kids, especially ones with phone addictions.
Well it’s better than them throwing things at each other like we used to do, I suppose.
If your school is not supporting teachers with a cell phone policy you should try to find another place to teach and tell them exactly why when you leave.
Edit: this is also something your union should be pushing for. I’m surprised parents haven’t demanded it.
I don’t care that much. I live on an island and most of my “students” are actually just tourists pretending they’re there for educational purposes.
It’s really fucking depressing
Well yes, and it’s a tourism based economy, which means I usually don’t have to deal with any particular group for longer than a few weeks. Some groups are loads of fun and don’t have any problems with their phones. It usually just depends on which part of wherever they’re coming from, and how life is like for them back home.
You gave them a task, they used their imagination to apply it, in a different way than you expected, by using a new tool which is a non traditional method you asked for but the task still got completed. They still loosely completed the task 30 times ahead of schedule by using their imagination on how to constructively solve your problem, utilizing a tool in their imaginary bag.
I don’t think it’s wrecking the system as long as the LLMs could be trained and ensure strict accuracy (yes I know they can be inaccurate but again so is any tool in its infancy), the system fails people everyday as a whole. I think it’s changing the traditional paradigm. Maybe for the better, maybe not. Time will tell. I think ChatGPT is a tool in its infancy. It’s changing the way minds think fundamentally like for isntance critical thinking skills decline by relying on “AI” but it frees up the mind to grow in other ways to adjust to the new paradigm.
I think the true point here is fear from breaking traditional values. Humans have never accelerated faster with current technology thats with or without LLM usage.
Holy fuck, we are so cooked.
This is such a concavebrained take. The point of exercises handed out in schools isn’t the accomplishment of the set tasks; it’s that students internalise the processes necessary to do the task themselves and thereby learn those skills.
Thus, giving away a task to a LLM is only “using their imagination on how to constructively solve [the] problem, utilising a tool in their imaginary bag” in the same way that bullying a nerd into doing the work for them used to be.
I think it’s changing the traditional paradigm. Maybe for the better, maybe not. Time will tell. I think ChatGPT is a tool in its infancy. It’s changing the way minds think fundamentally like for isntance critical thinking skills decline by relying on “AI” but it frees up the mind to grow in other ways to adjust to the new paradigm.
This is so obviously for the worse. Losing the ability to think critically isn’t “freeing up the mind to grow in other ways:” basic critical thought is a foundational prerequisite to fully developing as a person capable of participating in society in the current age in much the same way as basic literacy is. It’s limiting the mind from growing in any meaningful way.
And don’t get it twisted, you’re just saying this shit to be contrarian. I doubt you actually believe this development could be a good thing. Like come the fuck on, let’s say in ten years’ time you get into some kinda accident and need surgery. There is no way you’d would want your surgeon to be someone who ‘did’ most of their assessments in med school with a fucking chatbot. Who are you kidding???
You’re not wrong, but the difference is that they came up with a creative solution to avoid the task, not a creative solution to engage the task. If I ask them follow up questions to explain their thoughts and reasoning behind their own work, I get deer in the headlights.
Now, I think the tide is rising with AI and it’s sink or swim if you’re a teacher, so it’s better to just learn what AI is and how to leverage it no matter what people think of it, or if I’m even getting paid for my effort.
A different approach I’m considering is embracing AI for teenage groups and changing the format of the course entirely so there’s more interaction (incorporating AI) than production. I’ll be the first at my school to do it, but I’m also the only person there who could tell you what the fediverse is.
Now I get that 100 percent. Avoiding the task makes total sense, especially coming from students of all ages. I absolutely think critical thinking skills are foundational to understanding and knowledge and need to be practiced, learned so much more than they are.
I think rather than free range use of LLMs or any other tool there needs to be some guidance. I don’t think clogging the system with dumb laws will do it, and I certainly don’t have all the answers. But with the usage of GPT if it can be made explicitly accurate within reason, one can gain knowledge at an accelerated rate due to the speed it can process vast data.
Its awesome to see teachers, educators trying to evolve and improve the learning experience which we desperately need. So thanks for putting in the extra effort whether your rewarded or not financially. The real people the got failed, or generally care thank you for your efforts!
Thanks. It’s motivating to hear that.
Educators are the future for us all. Knowledge and how to apply it is everything even more so the faster humanity accelerates.
I think it sucks your care and compassion isn’t financially rewarded from a school level but the effort, care, and value of going the extra mile always gets noticed/remembered and should be rightfully encouraged and appreciated. Respect.
*We all know these hellion kids are a handful to deal with 😂
Is there not a way to plan the assignment so that it’s not doable in 1m with ChatGPT?
• Require students to cite their sources
• Require students to show their working
• Ask students questions related to the process of a given task during class
• For things like media analysis, require them to do it with a pencil and paper without the use of computers where possible
• Treat the use of LLMs as an act of academic plagiarism
All of these are things that schools should already be doing holy shit
Yes, this absolutely. It should have always been like this but there is no other option now with AI.
Only thing I disagree with is using LLMs - if anything they should make that mandatory now because it’s going to be totally integrated in the future and they’re going to need to get used to using it. BUT grading should be 1000% more stringent on getting facts right and specifically looking for things that LLMs get wrong.
AND all that to say - using your list and other methods to show student knowledge/undertanding should avoid any possibility of being able to complete a task with AI alone.
It’s possible, but it takes time and effort to prepare, and I’m not getting paid at home, so I’m reluctant to do it.
You could offer the students a choice: no AI and a 5 slide presentation, or allow AI but with a 15 slide presentation, then let them decide. AI makes work more efficient for us, so if we can be 3x more productive, I should expect 3x more product.
I taught an ESL group once. One of the girls, around 15-17, plastered a bunch of ChatGPT text on the slide and sat the whole period on her phone. When it was her group’s turn, she quickly realized the position she put herself in as she was now in at the front of the class trying to sound out a wall of high-level English words she’d never heard before. I gave her the standard score because, even though she failed the task, she tried really hard to read out all those difficult words and I thought that was probably more work than anyone else had done.
I gave her the standard score because, even though she failed the task, she tried really hard to read out all those difficult words and I thought that was probably more work than anyone else had done.
That is a tragic indictment on the state of your class. You are failing your students by refusing to give them failing marks for this shit.
I think she learned the lesson on her own on that one. No need to rub salt on the wound.
Furthermore, at their level, they already assume that they’re hopeless. I don’t want to reinforce that idea and discourage them from reproaching the subject later on. We’re talking about a lower vs mid elementary proficiency rating here, so no one’s life is changing.
I don’t understand how you are not paid for planning time. Without providing that the school just makes their teachers glorified babysitters.
Yep. I totally agree. Hopefully I’ll find a school that does pay me for planning time eventually,
Because school is boring, that’s why.
Most people don’t need to learn beyond the fourth grade, especially because calculators and now GPT exist for instant answers.
And I say this as someone who wasted his time all the way up to a Master’s degree just to show society I too followed the beaten path. It’s time I’ll never get back.
Good god, if you went through an entire education and don’t realize how fucked of a take that is I don’t know what to say. Go try again at a different school maybe?
It’s not a take, it’s how children (and adults, frankly) feel about school. It’s not great at making you a capable adult.
Do you know how useful my two diplomas were to get a job? Nothing. Zero. Zilch. None of the theories I learned were useful, neither on the job nor for their own sake.
As for middle school, exactly what did you learn that you think is so useful for daily life? I’d happily replace learning “how to discover x in n dimensions” with basic financial literacy, for example.
The latter years of the school system are quite literally a waste of time. The useful stuff you learn before high school.
As for middle school, exactly what did you learn that you think is so useful for daily life?
Off the top of my head: basic biology so I’m not dumb enough to be antivax. History subjects that require more than elementary maturity so maybe we can avoid another Holocaust. Enough physics, ecology and chemistry that I can comprehend how climate change is happening. How basic statistics work so I’m not completely lost when someone throws around misleading data.
None of that is automatic from a 4th grade education and is crucial to be a functioning citizen. Learning to take unquestioned GPT answers is not a substitute for actually learning any of those.
You either went to a painfully bad pipeline of schools or were too dumb to recognize the important parts.
Holy shit, thank you, finally someone in this thread is still living in the same reality as I am.
I’ve been to 7 different schools and the answer is horrible pipe lines. But the true answer isn’t so black and white. It’d largely dependant on area, class, state and local Govts. School fails people everyday, the govt and its systems fail people everyday, medical fails people everyday etc. Systems are not perfect they just allowed humans to organize. Subsequently also disorganize too by adding too many layers.
You’re right, I was too hyperbolic when I said 4th grade was enough. Biology was indeed useful and so was history. Likewise, learning a second language from 5th grade was crucial for the conversation we’re having right now.
Still, I’d put the usefulness “cut off” point at 9th grade or so.
On a side note, I know people who did the whole of university with me who today are anti-vaxers. I know IT BSc graduates who think Trump totally isn’t yet another fascist dictator, and I know a doctor who believes name brand ivermectin cures cancer.
Turns out more education isn’t necessarily related to coming out the other side of the pipeline not being any of the things you mentioned. It’s maddening.
It took all of school to help me realize what kind of person I wanted to be, and more importantly, what kind of person I didn’t. It seems it had the same effect for you, albeit a much different outcome. I changed my major two times and was in university a couple years longer than most. It was wasteful for sure, but it directed me down the path that eventually led me to my current career and meeting the wonderful woman who became my wife. My studies don’t really apply to anything I do, but I know they’ve enriched me as a human being.
Just because you didn’t find a use for math in your life doesn’t mean nobody else does either.
Dunno Yeah I disagree with AI. I grew up without phones but they should not be used in schools.
I actually sometimes ask my students to use their phones to produce presentations and such (AI permitted). I just think the rule needs to be no phones in sight otherwise, and the phone stays if you go to the bathroom.
Right on. Your opinion is better than mine. I’m not a school teacher.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say my opinion is better than anyone else’s, it just an experience that suits the context of the life I’m living now. There are definitely schools out there where the learning culture probably couldn’t handle it.
TBH, I’d AI can screw up the education system so fast then it is the fault in the education system. AI is bad, but our education system is not good either.
This 100%.
The education system was not OK, and has not been for a while. Its main goal is limiting liability, not educating kids.
I will take limiting liability and running with it. Not just the schools, but the kids and parents too no one wants to be responsible and step up to fix the problem.
One of my professors had an AI policy. Using AI for an outline or to find resources was okay, as long as it was cited with the exact prompt used. I think having rules for how to use AI on her assignments actually cut down on use compared to professors who outright banned it.
Sounds kinda similar to how Wikipedia was approached by instructors. I remember an English teacher proudly proclaiming she had participated in a “Kill Wikipedia” seminar at a convention. Just a few years later, they’re instructing students on how to properly use Wikipedia as a starting point and not a primary source.
I’m literally teaching a course to teachers on how to use AI in the classroom so that the students don’t use it as their magical answer dispenser.
What are the headline recommendations?
I had the class build a database of ideas, but one I really liked went like this:
You put a bunch of quiz questions into an AI song generator. The students listen to the song and try to provide the answers afterward.
You can make it really stupid and funny if you want.
Another would be to have AI produce a “podcast” about some topic, maybe Elvis interviewing Churchill about who Darwin was. Tell it to use some key points you want the students to take note of, then let them hear it and talk about it afterward.
Sounds like very inventive ways to include AI in teaching and make it fun and interactive.
How are you modifying what you teach? Wikipedia reduced the focus on learning facts, what does AI remove from the syllabus? What areas should be strengthened to leverage AI?
Well in my case, I leverage AI to extract specifics in long texts, such as level-appropriate vocabulary and collocations related to the topic. I can do this with YouTube video transcripts, for example,then use a different tool to quickly spit out learners definitions of all the words extracted, example sentences with fill-in-the blanks (emphasis on the topic of the lesson), and whatnot. I have to verify that the definitions and example sentences are suitable, then I slap everything together in a handout template I have in Affinity Publisher, along with some topic-related discussion questions. The students watch the video, and then I give them the handout afterwards.
That’s just one example.
I know of a company producing experimental AI tests, that basically put you in a D&D role playing scenario. It shows a scenario on screen, narrates a situation, then asks you to respond. Based on your response it’ll take you in one direction or another, the whole time grading your skills behind the scene. The students don’t even know they’re being tested. At the end, it prints out a score, but it feels more like the end of a video game match than a test.
I think that’s cool af.
We are certainly entering the young lady’s illustrated primer stage of education.
A physics accurate D&D where you play as macgyver could be really cool.
Is it really screwing up the education system, or is it just revealing how screwed up it already was?
Came here to say that. If AI has the leeway to affect things in a negative way, then we’re not focusing on the right things to begin with. If kids are graded sometimes for the amount of (not necessarily coherent and sound) text they’re able to spit out, this is what you get.
Not US but I still remember printing off a full page of text, teacher looked at it for less than 5 seconds before giving it a tick. This is all meaningless, no one is reading it, no one cares, nothing matters.
I’ve definitely never only read halfway through a long comment and still upvoted
I would have thought marking coursework has a higher standard than upvoting a lemmy post, but turns out it’s the other way around
I’m not talking about the US specifically either. It’s a global problem.
The corrupt cheapskates trying to nickel and dime every ISD in the country to bankruptcy absolutely fell over one another at the opportunity to fire staff and replace them with Clippy.
Twenty years ago, state officials were all fawning over the idea of turning every university in the country into a pile subscription based Udemy online courses. Ten years ago, letting Pearson hijack the lesson plan of every classroom in the country was the dream. This has been a long time coming.
ISD
Imperial Star Destroyer?
Independent School District.
Although, given how my Houston ISD is being run after being hijacked by the state government…
Well, here’s how you figure that out - think about it with your brain. Should children and young adults be given materials and assignments that require them to use thinking and develop their brains, or should they be given machines to do their thinking for them so that it’s easier to complete schoolwork?
One route develops valuable brain skills that can be useful for life, and the other teaches dependency on fancy machines to accomplish the same.
- Teachers are overworked, underpaid, some still using course work that hasn’t been updated in years despite what the field has advanced
- Students go into college due to the social expectation, some even unsure of what to get into as a career or even a class
- Exceeding above the course requirements does nothing for your GPA, an A that got a “110%” and an A that got 90% are the same.
- Students failing or passing still rack up debt for this social expectation
- Teachers still failing to pay bills for this social need
Yeah AI is the fault here, its not the system at large been fucked over since Reagan.
Well yeah the education system is the burning tire fire and AI is tech bros pouring gasoline all over it
A fitting description, a big tire fire won’t really change with the addition of gasoline, burning rubber has a lot of energy to release.
Exactly
I teach at a community college. I see a lot of AI nonsense in my assignments.
So much so that I’m considering blue book exams for the fall.
For anyone who is also not from the US:
A blue book exam is a type of test administered at many post-secondary schools in the United States. Blue book exams typically include one or more essays or short-answer questions. Sometimes the instructor will provide students with a list of possible essay topics prior to the test itself and will then choose one or let the student choose from two or more topics that appear on the test.
EDIT, as an extra to solve the mystery:
Butler University in Indianapolis was the first to introduce exam blue books, which first appeared in the late 1920s.[1] They were given a blue color because Butler’s school colors are blue and white; therefore they were named “blue books”.
Importantly it is hand written, no computers.
Biggest issue is that kids’ handwriting often sucks. That’s not a new problem but it’s a problem with handwritten work.
Give them typewriters
There is test-taking software that locks out all other functions during the essay-writing period. Obviously, damn near anything is hackable, but it’s non-trivial, unlike asking ChatGPT to write your essay for you in the style of a B+ high student. There is some concern about students who learn differently or compose less efficiently, but as father to such a student, I’m still getting to the point where I’m not sure what’s left to do other than sandbox “exploitable” graded work in a controlled environment.
I love this idea.
Speaking from a life of dyspraxia - no, not everyone with sucky handwriting is lazy, many of us would spend 95% of our capacity on making the writing legible and be challenged to learn the actual topic as a result.
I can get the essay done in time or it can be easy to read it cannot be both
This is why we have accommodations offices at colleges.
No problem giving an alternative for those who need it.
In the 1980s that wasn’t really a thing. Besides, it taught me a valuable skill: I partnered with someone who was good at taking notes and I was good at paying attention without taking any notes - she, too, had a problem understanding what she was writing down while writing it down, but took beautiful copies of the lecture. So, afterwards we’d get together and I’d explain her notes to her - which helped me to cement the concepts in my head, at least long enough to get through the exam, and she got her notes explained.
keep at it. it is worth the pain.
Man, the US has a handwriting problem. It sucks sooo much. In other countries it seems to be only doctors, but in the US? Fucking everyone.
I have a friend who has taught Online university writing for the past 10 years. Her students are now just about 100% using AI - her goal isn’t to get them to stop, it’s to get them to recognize what garbage writing is and how to fix it so it isn’t garbage anymore.
her goal isn’t to get them to stop, it’s to get them to recognize what garbage writing is and how to fix it so it isn’t garbage anymore.
Sadly, that may be the best we can hope for.
I teach Philosophy.
I need them to think for themselves, which just isn’t happening if they turn in work that isn’t theirs.
So, I’m pretty harsh on anyone using AI. Even if it’s for a discussion post, I’m reporting it to the Academic Integrity office.
Fair distinction. Arguably, writing isn’t about thinking.
It’s breathtaking how quickly the President of the United States and his good South African buddy can topple a superpower.
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That’s going to be great fun when the AI bubble pops and the subscription prices go up exponentially.
On the other hand, there have been other opinions about education that say it should be about making or researching something. Give a student a goal and let them figure it out using chatbots or whatever.
That sounds like a way to make a generation of students wholly reliant on AI, much to Altman’s delight. People are going to still need to know how to do stuff in the future and not just how to request the answers to things from somewhere else.
(Disclaimer: this is not a fully formed counter-argument to your statement, merely my thought-vomit).
As a kid growing up in the 90’s you wouldn’t believe the amount of times my parents and teachers vehemently insisted to me that I MUST do dictionary lookup drills because there’s no way I would just always have access to an electronic dictionary in my pocket. I was also told that I absolutely HAD to be fast at paper-based multiplication and long division. It’s not like I would just carry a calculator around with me everywhere I go, that would be insane!
Knowing how to use a physical dictionary or do basic math in your head is absolutely still a good idea, your phone battery can die, your network connection can fail, and doing challenging things with your brain is good for your long term brain health anyway especially while it’s still developing.
Maybe, but are there other things we can focus on? For example, as an ESL teacher, why do my newcomers only get a word to word paper dictionary on end of grade exams? I’m pretty sure the state of North Carolina just hates children? There’s literally no reason for this. Give them a digital dictionary.
Is it a time problem?
Paper is a renewable resource, rare metals used in computers aren’t, and the contents of the dictionary will be the same either way
That’s really not true. Paper production takes a lot of (often non-renewable) energy, ink usually consists of non-renewable chemicals, paper is often harvested from nonrenewable destruction of forests (especially in the US with Trump’s plans to cut down national forests), paper production belches a lot of pollution into the air and pollutes a lot of water, etc.
The energy can be obtained from renewable sources any time we decide to quit fucking around and make it happen, wood pulp can be replaced with hemp far more easily than that and requires less chemical treatment in the process. There are no similar options for mitigating the negative impact of mining or making our supply of those metals any bigger.
Yes but the process of obtaining the information is significantly more difficult. We can, you know, reuse the same 20 translation devices for years, and all kids have a laptop… I feel like you’re focused on the wrong thing.
In what universe is an electronic device being handled by children going to last 20 years? Not ours
No, it’s only more difficult for those without the skills to use the Index or Table of Contents in a book. Which is not really much of a difficult skill to learn. You pretty much need to know about alphabetical order and how one is at the front and the other is at the end of the book.
If students did useful things, self directed things, were allowed to discover and create, can you imagine how ducking crazy that would be ? Imagine if we didn’t largely waste the bulk of everyone’s youth on boring 1800s style lecturing toiling in mass education factories ?
I guess everyone just gets a completely different education then…? The education system might have its issues, but providing a baseline bulk level of education to the entire population is not exactly straightforward.
Why is a baseline bulk level of education the goal? People are different, people live in a society where they can ask others for help. People don’t retain most of what has been crammed into their heads, and the fact that they were threatened with social exclusion if they didn’t cram it in gives many of them an unhealthy attitude towards knowledge that will take them decades to unlearn. Many subjects are propagandistic or taught in a way that makes them irrelevant for the rest of one’s life.
People learn how the mitochondria work but not how to recognize a stroke. How to write a formal proof about triangular equalities but not how to untangle a legal document. How to recognize a baroque painting but not how to make art you enjoy. How to compete at sports but not how to listen to what your body needs. How to memorize what an authority says but not how to pick apart lies.
So sure, let everyone follow a completely different education. Let them learn things at their own individual pace, let them focus on the things they care about and let them use their own interest as a guide. Maybe some will be functionally illiterate, but that is already the case.
Well, pre-recorded video should have LONG ago replaced in person lectures. And we could have had symbolic programs handles all exercises, exams, quiz most of the formulaic interactions that teachers use to bulk up their courses.
All those freed teaching hours could be pooled together to create the video content and refine it more and more.
Instead we’ve got teacher giving the same lecture 6 times a week. Exhausting and unnecessary. Their efforts would be much better spent with rapid one on one tutoring of only those who need help.
And that was all BEFORE we had AI to offload most of the mundane tasks.
One of my family members participated in one such project, she wrote scenarios for a number of video lectures for schoolkids. It was bad, it was really fucking bad, and I could write an essay explaining why it was so, there’s a wide variety of reasons ranging across the technical, legal, administrative, etc. Just one example: you’re making a lecture about art? Yeah, go contact the copyright holders if they would be merciful enough to allow us to use the artwork in the video.
And your idea that the default approach should be that kids have no interaction with their teachers is honestly horrifying.
I work in industrial bureaucratic institution and yes, I wouldn’t expect any kind of good results or quality for a very long time if they suddenly pivoted to creative video making.
But we know it’s very possible, if you look at crash course or khan academt and the like, to have something not as tedious as book reading or sterile whiteboard live lectures.
Going to have generations of people unable to think analytically or creatively, and just as bad, entering fields that require a real detailed knowledge of the subject and they don’t. Going to see a lot of fuck ups in engineering, medicine, etc because of people faking it.
I am having flashbacks to the scene in Idiocracy where the doctor is talking about his wife.
She’s a pilot now.
…or will be in 480 years.
Why do you need to learn reams of facts when you can get an answer in the fraction of a second ? Seems pointless anyway.
Unpopular opinion:
I am a public school teacher and I support public schools, but there have been a lot of issues with our education system for a long time. Talk to any kid with ADHD who had to sit through 12 years, and they are indicative of a larger problem. Our idea of school now is as a place that teaches kids to behave and mostly follow rote instruction. Wouldn’t it be so much better if we were teaching kids to be creative thinkers, work well in groups, problem solve, and think critically about the information they’re getting? We know that’s what school should be, but maybe now we will be forced to go there. Yes, there will be issues like learned helplessness and certain skills being difficult to teach, but it’s kind of exciting too.
Though it’s also possible that public schools will close and only the wealthy kids will be well-educated… can we not, please?
only the wealthy kids will be well-educated
You could argue we’re already way too far down this road. Quality of education is very dependent on location. Some of it is rich districts but also richer states. Whatever level of granularity you want, there’s always sone more willing or more able to spend money on better educating their children.
For all its faults, Department of Education was at least trying to set minimum standards for those areas unwilling to invest in a good education system and minimum investments for those unable. We desperately needed to raise this bar, not remove it
Anyhow my kids school leaned into ai a bit and taught the kids some valuable lessons about how it works, where it helps, and especially its limitations. There’s nothing wrong with ai as a tool, as by long as you don’t treat it as a magical thing that can think for you
There is plenty wrong with generative AI as a tool if you think of it in those terms.
I would say that if the depth of analysis is limited to “AI” or “genAI” then use of it in schools is overwhelmingly bad. If that’s the limit of our ability to frame the issue, then banning AI would appear inevitable, and any graded assignment that might encourage AI use should be banned.
But if you want to break things down, you can find specific tools (i.e., calculators, grammar checkers) that could be labeled as AI or specific uses of genAI (i.e., brainstorming) that have use. And it is this latter approach – clearly identifying positive uses – that is difficult for students, media writers, and apparently policy makers to do.
Man, I am 38. When I was in highschool I was in an alternative curriculum Math program called IMP, and it is/was literally what your talking about.
Instead of memorizing equations we were instead given a hypothetical situation and learned to solve it socratically both through conversations as a class with the teacher, and in small groups to try and figure out how to solve it. It made me love math so much I almost made it my life, it was literally everything I needed as a severely ADHD teen. Everything was a puzzle to be solved, and when you solved it you gained not just knowledge, but the perspective to know where the knowledge applies.
OpenSciEd is a model that teaches science like that. There’s been a ton of pushback from conservatives.
This is me with coding. Learn the rules. See a problem. Code a solution.
I wouldn’t call it unpopular because how the education system works in America and several other countries has been a very obvious problem for decades. What we should be teaching is more barometer question
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barometer_question
The student admitted that he knew the expected “conventional” answer, but was fed up with the professor’s "teaching him how to think … rather than teaching him the structure of the subject.
“Though it’s also possible that public schools will close and only the wealthy kids will be well-educated… can we not, please?”
Trump and Republicans would like nothing more than to turn this country into another Russia where your kids have to pay through the nose go abroad to get a decent education.
As someone with adhd the public school system was hell. My local community college had a program where you could get your ged and learn a trade so I left my junior year to do that instead. I really wish the public school system was better but sadly people just don’t care enough.
I work with special needs kids in a school district and the amount of access kids with even mild symptoms is atrocious. It’s a huge problem.
Do you mind clarifying what you mean is a problem? Are you saying kids with mild symptoms aren’t getting access? Or there are far too many kids accessing the special needs services than can be accommodated?
The cynical view of America’s educational system—that it is merely a means by which privileged co-eds can make the right connections, build “social capital,” and get laid—is obviously on full display here.
Cynical? I call that realistic. That’s what privileged co-eds have been using it for the past 100 years.
more like 200
deleted by creator
Wait wait, can this be where we get “a load of Bologna (baloney)” from? Or is that because no one knows what’s actually in bologna…
Imagine paying tens of thousands of dollars (probably of their parents saved money) to go to university and have a chatbot do the whole thing for you.
These kids are going to get spit out into a world where they will have no practical knowledge and no ability to critically think or adapt.
This was true before AI, it’s just going to be 10x worse with AI
Do you really think schools teach critical thinking and practical knowledge? State mandated education is geared to produce people who are smart enough to run the system and stupid enough not to question it. The fact that this dullard factory is being distrupted by what is essentially an electronic parrot speaks volumes about the whole charade.
I’m not talking about state mandated education. Nobody is required to attend university.
If you go to a college worth attending, they will teach you critical thinking skills as part of the course requirements.
Regardless, the situation with generative AI is not helping in that regard.
I’m thinking the only way people will be able to do schoolwork without cheating now is going to be to make them sit in a monitored room and finish it there.
How is this kind of testing relevant anymore? Isn’t it creating an unrealistic situation, given the brave new world of AI everywhere?
Because it test what you actually retained, not what you can convince an AI to tell you.
But what good is that if AI can do it anyway?
That is the crux of the issue.
Years ago the same thing was said about calculators, then graphing calculators. I had to drop a stat class and take it again later because the dinosaur didn’t want me to use a graphing calculator. I have ADD (undiagnosed at the time) and the calculator was a big win for me.
Naturally they were all full of shit.
But this? This is different. AI is currently as good as a graphing calculator for some engineering tasks, horrible for some others, excellent at still others. It will get better over time. And what happens when it’s awesome at everything?
What is the use of being the smartest human when you’re easily outclassed by a machine?
If we get fully automated yadda yadda, do many of us turn into mush-brained idiots who sit around posting all day? Everyone retires and builds Adirondack chairs and sips mint juleps and whatever? (That would be pretty sweet. But how to get there without mass starvation and unrest?)
Alternately, do we have to do a Butlerian Jihad to get rid of it, and threaten execution to anyone who tries to bring it back… only to ensure we have capitalism and poverty forever?
These are the questions. You have to zoom out to see them.
Because if you don’t know how to tell when the AI succeeded, you can’t use it.
To know when it succeeded, you must know the topic.
The calculator is predictable and verifiable. LLM is not
I’m not sure what you’re implying. I’ve used it to solve problems that would’ve taken days to figure out on my own, and my solutions might not have been as good.
I can tell whether it succeeded because its solutions either work, or they don’t. The problems I’m using it on have that property.
The problem is offloading critical thinking to a blackbox of questionably motivated design. Did you use it to solve problems or did you use it to find a sufficient approximation of a solution? If you can’t deduce why the given solution works then it is literally unknowable if your problem is solved, you’re just putting faith in an algorithm.
There are also political reasons we’ll never get luxury gay space communism from it. General Ai is the wet dream of every authoritarian: an unverifiable, omnipresent, first line source of truth that will shift the narrative to whatever you need.
The brain is a muscle and critical thinking is trained through practice; not thinking will never be a shortcut for thinking.
That says more about you.
There are a lot of cases where you can not know if it worked unless you have expertise.
This still seems too simplistic. You say you can’t know whether it’s right unless you know the topic, but that’s not a binary condition. I don’t think anyone “knows” a complex topic to its absolute limits. That would mean they had learned everything about it that could be learned, and there would be no possibility of there being anything else in the universe for them to learn about it.
An LLM can help fill in gaps, and you can use what you already know as well as credible resources (e g., textbooks) to vet its answer, just as you would use the same knowledge to vet your own theories. You can verify its work the same way you’d verify your own. The value is that it may add information or some part of a solution that you wouldn’t have. The risk is that it misunderstands something, but that risk exists for your own theories as well.
This approach requires skepticism. The risk would be that the person using it isn’t sufficiently skeptical, which is the same problem as relying too much on their own opinions or those of another person.
For example, someone studying statistics for the first time would want to vet any non-trivial answer against the textbook or the professor rather than assuming the answer is correct. Answer comes from themself, the student in the next row, or an LLM, doesn’t matter.
but what good is that if AI can do it anyway?
It can’t. It just fucking can’t. We’re all pretending it does, but it fundamentally can’t.
Creative thinking is still a long way beyond reasoning as well. We’re not close yet.
It’s already capable of doing a lot, and there is reason to expect it will get better over time. If we stick our fingers in our ears and pretend that’s not possible, we will not be prepared.
If you read, it’s capable of very little under the surface of what it is.
Show me one that is well studied, like clinical trial levels, then we’ll talk.
We’re decades away at this point.
My overall point of it’s just as meaningless to talk about now as it was in the 90s. Because we can’t convince of what a functioning product will be, never mind it’s context I’m a greater society. When we have it, we can discuss it then as we have something tangible to discuss. But where we’ll be in decades is hard to regulate now.
It can and it has done creative mathematical proof work. Nothing spectacular, but at least on par with a mathematics grad student.
Specialized AI like that is not what most people know as AI. Most people reffer to it as LLMs.
Specialized AI, like that showcased, is still decades away from generalized creative thinking. You can’t ask it to do a science experiment with in a class because it just can’t. It’s only built for math proof.
Again, my argument is that it won’t never exist.
Just that it’s so far off it’d be like trying to regulate smart phone laws in the 90s. We would have only had pipe dreams as to what the tech could be, never mind its broader social context.
So tall to me when it can, in the case of this thread, clinically validated ways of teaching. We’re still decades from that.
The faulty logic was supported by a previous study from 2019
This directly applies to the human journalist, studies on other models 6 years ago are pretty much irrelevant and this one apparently tested very small distilled ones that you can run on consumer hardware at home (Llama3 8B lol).
Anyway this study seems trash if their conclusion is that small and fine-tuned models (user compliance includes not suspecting intentionally wrong prompts) failing to account for human misdirection somehow means “no evidence of formal reasoning”. Which means using formal logic and formal operations and not reasoning in general, we use informal reasoning for the vast majority of what we do daily and we also rely on “sophisticated pattern matching” lmao, it’s called cognitive heuristics. Kahneman won the Nobel prize for recognizing type 1 and type 2 thinking in humans.
Why don’t you go repeat the experiment yourself on huggingface (accounts are free, over ten models to test, actually many are the same ones the study used) and see what actually happens? Try it on model chains that have a reasoning model like R1 and Qwant and just see for yourself and report back. It would be intellectually honest to verify things since we’re talking about critical thinking in here.
Oh add a control group here, a comparison with average human performance to see what the really funny but hidden part is. Pro-tip: CS STEMlords catastrophically suck when larping being cognitive scientists.
So you say I should be intellectually honest by doing the experiment myself, then say that my experiment is going to be shit anyways? Sure… That’s also intellectually honest.
Here’s the thing.
My education is in physics, not CS. I know enough to know what I try isn’t going to be really valid.
But unless you have peer reviewed searches to show otherwise, because I would take your home grown experiment to be as valid as mine.
And here’s experimental verification that humans lack formal reasoning when sentences don’t precisely spell it out for them: all the models they tested except chatGPT4 and o1 variants are from 27B and below, all the way to Phi-3 which is an SLM, a small language model with only 3.8B parameters. ChatGPT4 has 1.8T parameters.
1.8 trillion > 3.8 billion
ChatGPT4’s performance difference (accuracy drop) with regular benchmarks was a whooping -0.3 versus Mistral 7B -9.2 drop.
Yes there were massive differences. No, they didn’t show significance because they barely did any real stats. The models I suggested you try for yourself are not included in the test and the ones they did use are known to have significant limitations. Intellectual honesty would require reading the actual “study” though instead of doubling down.
Maybe consider the possibility that a. STEMlords in general may know how to do benchmarks but not cognitive testing type testing or how to use statistical methods from that field b. this study being an example of a few “I’m just messing around trying to confuse LLMs with sneaky prompts instead of doing real research because I need a publication without work” type of study, equivalent to students making chatGPT do their homework c. 3.8B models = the size in bytes is between 1.8 and 2.2 gigabytes d. not that “peer review” is required for criticism lol but uh, that’s a preprint on arxiv, the “study” itself hasn’t been peer reviewed or properly published anywhere (how many months are there between October 2024 to May 2025?) e. showing some qualitative difference between quantitatively different things without showing p and using weights is garbage statistics f. you can try the experiment yourself because the models I suggested have visible Chain of Thought and you’ll see if and over what they get confused about g. when there are graded performance differences with several models reliably not getting confused at least more than half the time but you say “fundamentally can’t reason” you may be fundamentally misunderstanding what the word means
Need more clarifications instead of reading the study or performing basic fun experiments? At least be intellectually curious or something.
If you want to compare a calculator to an LLM, you could at least reasonably expect the calculator result to be accurate.
It often is. I’ve got a lot of use out of it.
What do you think testing is for? It’s to show what you know/have learned
Education and learning are two different things. School tests are to repeat back what has been educated to you. Meaningful learning tends to be internally motivated and AI is unlikely to fulfill that aspect.
This is the purpose of essay questions.
I really hope I’m dead before we have androids.
Yes and no. Remember that rich kids could always hire ghost writers. ChatGPT made that available to the masses, but that particular problem goes back centuries.
What we have seen is that the curriculum is often decided by a distant committee who actually doesn’t understand life on the ground. In reality, there are easy ways for teachers to undercut the utility of ChatGPT, if they have the freedom to make changes. But that depends on teachers having control and the time to make changes to how they teach.
Honest question: how do we measure critical thinking and creativity in students?
If we’re going to claim that education is being destroyed (and show we’re better than our great^n grandparents complaining about the printing press), I think we should try to have actual data instead of these think-pieces and anecdata from teachers. Every other technology that the kids were using had think-pieces and anecdata.
As far as I can tell, the strongest data is wrt literacy and numeracy, and both of those are dropping linearly with previous downward trends from before AI, am I wrong? We’re also still seeing kids from lockdown, which seems like a much more obvious ‘oh that’s a problem’ than the AI stuff.
Honest question: how do we measure critical thinking and creativity in students?
The only serious method of evaluating critical thinking and creativity is through peer evaluation. But that’s a subjective scale thick with implicit bias, not a clean and logical discrete answer. It’s also not something you can really see in the moment, because true creativity and critical thinking will inevitably produce heterodox views and beliefs.
Only by individuals challenging and outperforming the status quo to you see the fruits of a critical and creative labor force. In the moment, these folks just look like they’re outliers who haven’t absorbed the received orthodoxy. And a lot of them are. You’ll get your share of Elizabeth Holmes-es and Sam Altmans alongside your Vincent Van Goghs and Nikolai Teslas.
I think we should try to have actual data instead of these think-pieces and anecdata from teachers.
I agree that we’re flush with think-pieces. Incidentally, the NYT Op-Ed section has doubled in size over the last few years.
But that’s sort of the rub. You can’t get a well-defined answer to the question “Is Our Children Creative-ing?” because we only properly know it by the fruits of the system. Comically easy to walk into a school with a creative writing course and scream about how this or that student is doing creativity wrong. Comically easy to claim a school is Marxist or Fascist or too Pro/Anti-Religion or too banal and mainstream by singling out a few anecdotes in order to curtail the whole system.
The fundamental argument is that this kind of liberal arts education is wasteful. The output isn’t steady and measureable. The quality of the work isn’t easily defined as above or below the median. It doesn’t yield real consistent tangible economic value. So we need to abolish it in order to become more efficient.
And that’s what we’re creating. A society that is laser-focused on making economic numbers go up, without stopping to ask whether a larger GDP actually benefits anyone living in the country where all this fiscal labor is performed.
I think it’s fine for this to be poorly defined; what I want is something aligned with reality beyond op-eds. Qualitative evidence isn’t bad; but I think it needs to be aggregated instead of anecdoted. Humans are real bad at judging how the kids are doing (complaints like the OP are older than liberal education, no?); I don’t want to continue the pattern. A bunch of old people worrying too much about students not reading shakespear in classes is how we got the cancel culture moral panic - I’d rather learn from that mistake.
A handful of thoughts: There are longitudinal studies that interview kids at intervals; are any of these getting real weird swings? Some kids have AI earlier; are they much different from similar peers without? Where’s the broad interviews/story collection from the kids? Are they worried? How would they describe their use and their peers use of AI?
A bunch of old people worrying too much about students not reading shakespear in classes is how we got the cancel culture moral panic - I’d rather learn from that mistake.
The “old people complaining about Shakespeare” was the thin end of the wedge intended to defund and dismantle public education. But the leverage comes from large groups of people who are sold the notion that children are just born dumb or smart and education has no material benefit.
A lot of this isn’t about teaching styles. It’s about public funding of education and the neo-confederate dream of a return to ethnic segregation.
There are longitudinal studies that interview kids at intervals; are any of these getting real weird swings?
A lot of these studies come out of public sector federal and state education departments that have been targeted by anti-public education lobbying groups. So what used to be a wealth of public research into the benefits of education has dried up significantly over the last generation.
What we get instead is a profit-motivated push for standardized testing, lionized by firms that directly benefit from public sector purchasing of test prep and testing services. And these tend to come via private think-tanks with ties back to firms invested in bulk privatization of education. So good luck in your research, but be careful when you see something from CATO or The Gates Foundation, particularly in light of the fact that more reliable and objective data has been deliberately purged from public records.
When I asked him why he had gone through so much trouble to get to an Ivy League university only to off-load all of the learning to a robot, he said, “It’s the best place to meet your co-founder and your wife.”
Yikes.
Where are these kids getting these ideas?
That only works if you’re already fantastically wealthy.
Jfc.
