- 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
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 regularly advocate for banning phones from schools but people here in Lemmy (same on Reddit years ago) completely lose their shit with that idea, start talking how that’ll leave them defenseless in an emergency, how it is torture, how they absolutely can’t live without them
Not thirty years ago nobody had cellphones in school, they barely existed, and everything was fine, everyone was fine without and with cellphones I see so much shit going on. Yes, it’s the Future, kids need cellphones, but they also need to learn to be without cellphone, and they need to learn responsible use.
I worked in a school in Asia that actually banned students from bringing their phones to school. One year there was an earthquake in the morning that caused all the trains to stop for half a day while they checked the rails. We were all on our way to the school, got stranded, and some had to walk for hours to get back home. The school got a few calls from parents and the policy was changed the very next week. Now students can bring their phones, but they need to be turned in at the front office when they arrive.
One girl forgot to do it once, so she put her phone her locker. Another earthquake set off the warning alarm system and her phone went off in the hallway. Later that day I saw her getting lectured hard by the staff and the poor thing was in tears. She was actually a good student, so it was weird seeing her in that scenario.
Anyway, I wouldn’t mind the idea of students handing in phones at the front desk, but I was allowed to pack a cd player, a Nokia, and a variety of other devices around my school as a kid. I don’t really see smartphones as being much different, so I don’t mind them being around just so long as students are using them in their own time.
honestly a few years ago I didn’t agree with it, but now things are enshittifying so much that it really seems to be the better option now. it’ll unfortunately bar even those from using their phones who would use it for other things than mindless scrolling, using ai chatbots and playing microtransaction and ad filled games, but for the whole class and the whole generation it would be better in the end.
To me the point is a simple question: why are you at school?
Unless the class is explicitly to teach you how to use your phone responsibly, nobody should have a phone in school. Any arguments I’ve heard against that always boil down to “but I wannah doom scroohooollll” or some variation of that
Outright banning them from schools is wrong imo, but if I had to put my phone in a locked box every class, I would’ve lived. I just think banning them outright is bad for needing to contact parents, especially for kids like me who had after school activities often.
My only issue I had with HS teachers were the ones who bitched about people having headphones/earbuds in during class. Obviously I don’t have them in during instruction or group work as that would be disrespectful, but if you’re not at the front of the room talking and we’re doing individual work, I want to have my earbuds in. I had a study block teacher who was so fucking anal about phones and earbuds, when it is literally a fucking break class to do whatever the fuck you want/need to do.
I just really like having music or background noise while doing work.
EDIT: God this blew up.
Well first off, I DEFINITELY remember not being able to contact my parents while at elementary school because they had out state phone numbers, so unless they were at home, I literally couldn’t contact them. Furthermore, if teachers get angry at kids simply going to the bathroom, you think they’re going to let us ask them to call our parents? Hell no.
Also, how is putting earbuds in while someone ISN’T teaching disrespectful? If you’re not lecturing at the moment, then I’m putting my earbuds in. I don’t always need them to get work done, but I prefer to. It’s especially great if the class is being noisy, as I can put my music on to drown out the outside conversations. There are 30+ year old people who didn’t have phones growing up that like to play music while working.
Please remember, most of those who oppose the introduction of phones to schools are part of the gen who decided to introduce them to us and bought the damn phones for the kids.
My only issue I had with HS teachers were the ones who bitched about people having headphones/earbuds in during class. Obviously I don’t have them in during instruction or group work as that would be disrespectful, but if you’re not at the front of the room talking and we’re doing individual work, I want to have my earbuds in. I had a study block teacher who was so fucking anal about phones and earbuds, when it is literally a fucking break class to do whatever the fuck you want/need to do.
I actually agree with this. If I have kids doing individual work in my class, I could care less if they’re using their phones or have headphones in as long as 1) they’re working, and 2) they’re willing to put it aside when I need their attention again. I’m actually much more productive with music on, so who am I to judge?
who am I to judge?
You’re the teacher?
I know that kids may want / like to do something their way, but how about you learn it the normal way too? You can do your home work at home with music, I did that too, that’s fine, but in class you pay attention
Again, if they’re doing individual work with headphones in, and they’re clearly being productive, I don’t see a problem with it. If they’re doing it while I’m actively trying to teach, that would be a problem.
Many middle schoolers I work with have an ear bud in at all times, and as an ESL teacher my population of kids really needs to practice processing spoken English without that as a distraction. Hell, that applies to every kid… This isn’t an issue of somebody listening to music in the hallway or while studying, this is during class, during lecture, during group work, while writing essays, while reading…
I just think banning them outright is bad for needing to contact parents, especially for kids like me who had after school activities often.
Ok, well that’s completely ridiculous.
Look, 25 years ago nobody had cell phones in school. Kids had just as many after school activities, this wasn’t a problem. It was sometimes inconvenient, but not a problem. It’s also worth remembering, many rooms in every high school have phones, you’ll be able to use one if you need to.
I get wanting to have your phone throughout the day, I do. But on the other hand… no.
Survivorship bias and privilege. We never had phones in our classrooms.
many rooms in every high school have phones
You mean like landlines teachers had at their desks?
I suppose that’s fair.
I’m kind of amazed with reading this, really.
No, kids don’t need phones. Do you think that after school activities didn’t exist thirty years ago? They did and omg, nobody had cell phones so yeah, so ma y kids disappeared and died because of that and of course nothing like that happened because you plan that stuff ahead and worst case, a student can ask the teacher or some central ooi t where all cellphones are kept to make a quick important call.
Same thing also goes for head sets. How the heck do you think we did that thirty years ago? Hint: we simply didn’t because it wasn’t a thing, it didn’t exist. Walkmans barely came into existence and you could wear one outside class, all fine, but I side classes you’re there to learn, not to listen to your favorite music or podcast or influencers.
Id I’d have to allow headsets in class I’d refuse to teach. I’m not there to dick around or wsste my time, I’m there to teach and you’re there to learn, not to play or dick around
I mean, you could probably solve this shit by restricting the types of phones used to dumb phones. Phones only capable of texting and calls. Perhaps some basic access to school websites and Wikipedia too. Everything else default blacklisted.
That is just no phones with extra steps
Just leave the damn thing in a special storage at the start of your school day, or in your locker. During lunch you pick it up, and when you leave you take it with you
I mean, I was in high school when the cell phones were largely flip phones and that one nokia brick that could probably survive being run over by a tank and at that point the rule was “nobody gives a shit if it’s in your pocket/in your bag and on silent, but if I see it or if it’s making loud disruptive noises from wherever you’ve got it it’s going in my desk until the bell rings”. That still seems a reasonable middle ground in my opinion. That way, it’s still accessible enough in the event of an actual emergency but not usable otherwise.
Yeah, that was back when a single person had a cell phone it was a wow thing. Now everyone has it, and the addiction and doom scrolling is real. Kids will have a headset in during class.
Nope, all of it, out. Leave it in your locker, store it at a single special place, whatever, but not in class
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.
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.
The “boring useless shit” your talking about is that stuff that teaches people not to repeat dumb ass decisions. The stuff like social studies tells us WHY things are the way they are. The fact that there are people in the US that are cheering for taxation without representation is EXACTLY why we need those boring classes and why you should have to sit through them until you fucking get it. Unfortunately we’ve let too many through under the guise of no one left behind that we’ve crwate a couple of generations of complete and utter morons. Morons that stack with lead poisoned and aging geriatrics with dementia. And now we have Trump. Trump is what you get when you ignore everything else in favor of only those things you find interesting or easy.
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.
Violating federal laws is awesome, everyone should do it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Capitalism went so hard it fucked up its future workforce
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
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.
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.
I can confirm this is not just in the land of burgers. Back in the war from October to December, I fleed to Germany and went to school there, and the stuff I saw where absolutely disgusting: kids were using ipads (ibads) given to them by the school, the computers ran windows on them, and every time even a single task came up, they would directly resort to artificial unintelligence. When the “ceasefire” started and I finally went back to Lebanon, most of the kids were using Artificial unintelligence to write their essays as well. I don’t blame these kids, they don’t know better, they don’t know how artificial unintelligence is trained from the stolen work of the people, they don’t know what non-free software is, and they don’t know how these devices/software are tracking their every move. It’s up to the school’s to teach them such and schools are doing a terrible job both in America and internationally.
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.
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.
It’s breathtaking how quickly the President of the United States and his good South African buddy can topple a superpower.
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.
Unfortunately, I think many kids could easily approach AI the same way older generations thought of math, calculators, and the infamous “you won’t have a calculator with you everywhere.” If I was a kid today and I knew I didn’t have to know everything because I could just look it up, instantly; I too would become quite lazy. Even if the AI now can’t do it, they are smart enough to know AI in 10 years will. I’m not saying this is right, but I see how many kids would end up there.
know AI in 10 years will.
That kind of the main problem: there is no indication that it will. I know one thing: current way LLM works, the chances that the problem of “lying” and “hallucinations”, will even be solved are slim to none. There could be some mechanism that works in tandem with the bullshit generator machine to keep it in check, but it doesn’t exist yet.
So most likely either we will collectively learn this fact and stop relying on this bullshit, which means there is a generation of kids who essentially skipped a learning phase, or we don’t learn this fact, and there will be a society of mindless zombies that are fed lies and random bullshit on a second-to-second basis.
Both cases are bleak, but the second one is nightmarish.It’s all based off of predictions, it has no concept of the physical world or the ability to understand facts. Its goal is to please the user, not parse the entirety of human knowledge and provide an insightful complete thought.
but we already have Fox News
At least fox news is a propaganda machine for the wealthy and evil. As much as they try, they can’t do as much damage as a random generator that pretends that it isn’t.
Student: AI, write my thesis for me!
Prof: AI, was this thesis generated by AI?
AI: yes, of course, you poor human!
Prof: …shrug…
I thought my class to write a standard 5-paragraph essay and made all tests essay questions, written in class by pencil- had to have an opening statement, complete sentences, well organized, and a conclusion…was told I was asking too much for a final day of school and everyone I failed got a C minus.
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.
Jfc.
Y’all are surprised?
More disappointed than surprised but still…
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.
Paper is a renewable resource, rare metals used in computers aren’t, and the contents of the dictionary will be the same either way
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.
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.
In what universe is an electronic device being handled by children going to last 20 years? Not ours
Ah yes, goal misalignment at its finest.
The students need high grades to get a job, so they focus on ensuring that happens (AI use being the easy path).
The teachers have progression targets to meet, so they focus on ensuring this happens (keep the AI vulnerable assessments).
If you want to change a module as a teacher, good luck getting that work loaded when you should be implementing AI in your curriculum ^_^
AI is bullshit and has no place in a school curriculum outside of computer science. Keep that shit away from children if you want them to have any critical thinking skills.
In practice you’re right, and I’m not going to even try to argue the real life consequences AI has caused. However I disagree that AI doesn’t have any place in the education system. Used on the appropriate problems, AI is a tool that makes a few things which were challenging to compute much easier. One example is large AI models folding proteins for medical research. A problem that took a computer a day or more to solve can be solved in hours on the same equipment using AI software. That’s just one application that admittedly isn’t useful to school aged children but it’s still one useful example of AI. There are others. Students should be taught how to use AI properly, and part of that is teaching them what it’s good at and what it’ll never be able to do.
The part I get angry about is disgusting Tech Bro Billionaires trying to shove AI into every piece of software they can. Just like the block chain they’re over promising and there’s a bubble. Unlike block chain technology AI actually has a few useful applications and because of that it’ll take a lot longer that BitCoin to finally level out.
The protein-folding ai is not the same as the generative ai.
It’s really unfortunate that the conversation around AI lumps these different technologies together
Generative ai is a tool that must be used carefully else the kids will take the easy path.
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.
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.
Computers with some encyclopedia, but no GPTs are fine, no?
If a kid can write and train a mini-GPT trainable on that encyclopedia, then maybe they deserve the mark for desperation and ingenuity and being a fucking new Leonardo.
GPTs are fine, if you learn to disrespect their output and fix it before presenting it as your own.
Actually, taught that way, GPT may be a tool for teaching critical thinking - if the professors aren’t too lazy to mark down the garbage output.
Only if the first draft is the student’s own creation otherwise they will never learn how to analyze a work and construct the argument theu want to make beginning to end.
A lot of people “have trouble getting started” - in all kinds of endeavors. Once you get them rolling, they can see the pattern and do it for themselves next time. If the AI glop gets lucky and copied decent argument from beginning to end (something I’ve seen it fail spectacularly at many times), then that can help jumpstart people who are stuck, but only if they can recognize when it’s just a bunch of glop.
Really, if would be better for them to read a bunch of samples for themselves (which is what the AI does) and hopefully they can get the pattern. What I think is a horrible approach is to sit in a lecture hall and listen to a little guy down front drone in a monotone about the theory of what you are supposed to do, then try to synthesize from the fragments of what you understood from that what is expected. Samples to work from are much more efficient.
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.
I wish English teachers did this instead of… Whatever TF they’re doing instead.
This is something they should’ve been doing all along. Long before the invention of LLMs or computers.
This is the inevitable result of “No Child Left Behind” linking school funding to how students performed on standardized tests. American schools haven’t been about education for the last 20+ years. They are about getting as much funding as possible.
American schools haven’t been about education for the last 20+ years. They are about getting as much funding as possible.
Not just American schools, all the way back to Leonardo DaVinci and beyond it has been all about the funding.
