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Sort of related... My wife is an educator (public 1st grade teacher in California). We just had the discussion that next year will likely be her last year in t

• tornato7 4y ago
  LLMs have already done wonders for my own learning and I think it will have a huge effect in highschool education and beyond. But below that level, the topics that are being taught are very standardized and have been studied to death, and there already exists a ton of interactive learning tools, toys, projects, and games. Teachers below middle-school level are mostly babysitting and trying to just get kids to learn the rules and pay attention. I am concerned for the education of the next generation of kids. Stories like yours are all too common.
  • operatingthetan 4y ago
    >LLMs have already done wonders for my own learning and I think it will have a huge effect in highschool education and beyond. Can you explain your process for using it? Is it done in a session or do you ask random questions throughout the day? Specific topics or general?
    • NikolaNovak 4y ago
      I'm not the OP but the way chatgpt has enabled my learning last 2 months is: when I study or learn stuff, I have questions. I'm naturally curious and desire to fully understand something, but also a topic may encourage me to explore strange other avenues or branches or topics until I'm satisfied and can return. Reading from books or videos can be frustrating for obvious reasons. When tutored, I need an instructor who is not bound to "lesson one page one, now lesson one page two" blind and sequential approach. Chatgpt has been nothing less than a God send. E.g. I've tried to learn French 5 times over 25 years living in Canada. Always failed. I tried Michel Thomas self study, Berlitz group classroom, duolingo, even private tutor. They were serious efforts, but I hated the language and never felt I am even close to understanding it. Now whenever I have the remotest slightest question or curiosity I ask chatgpt. And then move on with the sequential class satisfied. It's both emotionally satisfying and encouraging, and it allows me to have better understanding of each topic. It's been a genuine force multiplier. Same with music theory (0.1% of piano teachers I've met are remotely capable or willing of answering questions "why". Two of them swore that "music theory" == "learning notation". Etc.) and, though far less, Python.
      • jacobolus 4y ago
        The only problem I have with this is that Chat GPT is entirely happy to make answers up out of whole cloth (including fake citations, etc. if you ask for follow-up), but present them with an air of certainty. It takes carefully tracking down each and every claim, and as often as not they turn out to be somewhere between misleading and outright wrong.
        • NikolaNovak 4y ago
          Right, but the question is : what is the chance / risk / percentage? All the examples of hallucination I see on Internet are... Either controversial or pushy or edgy. When asked a simple question on factual well-covered, non-controversial items, success rate seems very high. Do we have a feel for safe and unsafe areas? Are there type of questions or ways of asking them that will produce high confidence?
• elefanten 4y ago
  I’m only half-joking (maybe barely joking) when I say your comment made me think: “The movement that wants to pause AI development should just tell school boards and DEI activists that AI will allow every child to learn at their own pace. Probably no faster way to put a total ban in motion than an appeal to toxic ‘anti-racism’ activism.”
  • l33t233372 4y ago
    Alternatively, they should just tell school boards and state legislatures that AI will allow children to learn at their own pace. Probably no faster way to put a total ban in motion than an appeal to toxic “anti-wokeism’ activism.
    • deleted 4y ago
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• onos 4y ago
  Access to information has not been the bottleneck in education for some time. As you noted here behavior issues are. —> fail to see how AI will help.
  • tough 4y ago
    Well you could feed an AI system with all videos from school, grades, and all metadata of each student, and have the Ai check for any bad behaviour and try to implement best course of action based on similar past cases It beats a broken human system that barely works at some point, the problem is we unempowered the teachers, let's empower the machines to teach then
• 6438y44y4u 4y ago
  I think you should talk with your wife more to be honest because I think you've missed the key elements of what she was telling you. I live in California myself and have a number of friends who are teachers at various grade levels. Your wife is spot on and AI is the last thing that's going to solve the issue. Children with behavioral problems (hint: 9.5/10 times it's their family's fault but you're not allowed to blame the parent as an educator) aren't going to cooperate with your automated learning. If they were a poorly performing student before, they also probably have a home situation that isn't going to be receptive to whatever pressure you try to apply on them to coerce their children. And even if you could find an angle to apply pressure from, what are you going to do if you discover that the solution is disproportionately necessary for certain minority groups? Now even if your solution works it's dead in the water because it's racist. The teachers aren't leaving because they lack solutions they are leaving because nothing effective is allowed and all the while they get to endure abuse from both parents and students. None of this is going to be solved by making it even easier to ignore school by replacing teachers.
  • Baeocystin 4y ago
    Have many teachers in my family. My only complaint with your statement is that 9.5 out of 10 is way too generous. The level of absolute bare basics decency and behavior is so bad that it's hard to believe.
    • jacobolus 4y ago
      I spend plenty of time around “normal” well-adjusted middle- and upper-middle-class kids, and I’d say kids are inherently little balls of emotion with their own ideas and personalities who haven’t yet developed socially appropriate ways of dealing with frustration. They get into plenty of mischief despite their parents’ best efforts and wide variety of parenting styles. Most families are doing their best, but being human is just hard sometimes.
      • Baeocystin 4y ago
        To be clear, I'm not talking about mischief. I'm talking about assault, battery, serious destruction of property, direct threats to the teachers during class, with less than zero support given to the staff by the administration. To give a specific example, one of my friends used to teach 5th grade. A student got angry with him, and when he turned to address another student, jumped him and literally pulled his arm out of his socket. Not only was the student not expelled, but my friend had to spend months while recovering from surgery refusing to sign papers the administration was pushing on him to make him accept all responsibility. This is not hyperbole in the least, it really happened, and it is way more common than anyone would think.
• xphilter 4y ago
  We need less tech and more humans in education. All the things in your first paragraph are true problems, but the solution is 15 kids per class and discipline in the class room not AI.
• Metacelsus 4y ago
  So, basically the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer.
• everydayentropy 4y ago
  Socialization is far more important than any other skill that a child learns in primary and even secondary education. I don't see ever see the wide adoption of an AI homeschooling solution coming to fruition due to this fact.
  • MichaelZuo 4y ago
    I'd say that even applies to most tertiary (undergrad) education too. Unless the student is committed to becoming a pure math researcher or similar.
  • brightlancer 4y ago
    Eh? Homeschooling is a very social activity. I'd argue it's more pro-social than government schools: homeschooled students are learning/ working in more communal environments (e.g. the family home), they spend far less time on busy work, and they tend to have more free time which is then spent on group extracurricular activities. While many families did jump on homeschooling because of inexpensive computers, online courses and tutors, government schools jumped on online courses, assignments, instructors, etc. even when there is a teacher and two dozen classmates in the room. Government schools are far less pro-social, IME. To whatever extent AI drives down the cost, it will accelerate the movement toward homeschooling, but I don't see it reducing the prosocial aspects of homeschooling, while it likely will in government schools.
    • xedrac 4y ago
      Empirically, home schooled kids are more socially awkward. I have nothing against home schooling, but the kids are definitely more limited in their exposure to different people and situations.
      • gameman144 4y ago
        I've not noticed this personally, and have known loads of homeschooled people. When you say "empirically" though, I'm assuming there some info out there that backs this up? Would love to take a look, as homeschooling is on the table for us.
• germinalphrase 4y ago
  I went on sabbatical last June and have since joined a small tech consultancy (and consider myself retired from teaching after about ten years at the high school level). I have all sorts of strong feelings about this transition, but it was the right choice for my family. I hope your wife is able to come to a good place with it all. To your daydreaming: I believe there will be a roll for AI tools in education, but they will not be replacements for in-person instruction. They will assist teachers in being better educators. Unlike many professions where workers operate in concert with digital tools to unlock value that would be otherwise impossible to achieve, classrooms are essentially analog. The toolset I would like to build would start by mediating instruction with an assessment generation/proctoring tool that builds assessments in real time based on the lesson’s instructional content & conversational cues without significant curation required by the instructor (i.e. the system listens to the lesson as it unfolds and continuously generates/refines appropriate assessment content; the instructor should be able to complete a final curation and distribution of the assessment to students within a typical one to three minute instructional task/conversational break/etc). Right now, we spend billions of dollars on standardized testing (with all the inherent issues of that high stakes, non-longitudinal format), and while the same content is being regularly assessed by classroom instructors, we broadly don’t accept those results as trustworthy. Such a system as I’m considering could inject that trust into classroom assessments, allow for more frequent/high quality/low effort assessments - and provide a beachhead for building additional purpose built assistive tools for instructors. AI would likely provide utility to this tool, but the functional value cannot be separated from the fluid, branching path conversations of high quality in-person instruction.
• bmitc 4y ago
  > is that with the recent explosion of Large Language Models and their inevitable rapid evolution, that to me it's pretty clear education needs to go down the path of AI-based, automatically customized and tuned and guided, computer based education for primary students Do you mind expanding on why that's clear? At even a first pass by ignoring the "AI" part and focusing on the computer-based approach, it is known and has been shown that screens are detrimental to cognitive development. As in detrimental to brain development and processes, not just learning. > We're right around the corner from AI automatically generating highly interactive learning courses for children, that will fundamentally reshape the notion of classroom-based education. How is it going to do this any better than humans? Part of the existing problem is that teachers can teach incorrect information. (I know your wife is a teacher. My mom was a teacher.) With auto-generated learning, what will be the check that the information is correct, following guidelines, not introducing biases and -isms, and not breaking laws and regulations? And I see this approach as doubling down on treating kids as automatons rather than teaching them critical and creative thinking. The problems with education are multifaceted. Teachers are underpaid and overly managed with managed and standardized curriculums. Families do not have the proper support structures. Thus, schools are babysitters and sources of food for many. Social media is amplifying the worst parts of humanity and eating society from the inside out. We have an extremist/terrorist party insistent on not properly finding education and social support structures and destroying human rights. It's unfathomable to me how machine learning based, auto-generated content somehow "solves" education without addressing these problems. I think any parent should immediately withdraw their kid from a school that adopts these "AI". We can already see failures of forced technology in schools, such as PowerPoint and Chromebooks in schools. The myopic forcing of teachers to use PowerPoint was one of the many things that made my mom retire early from teaching.
• jonahrd 4y ago
  I believe this idea somewhat stems from American exceptionalism. Our country is so exceptional that it must require exceptional solutions. There are many countries out there (Finland, France) that don't have this crisis in education and are not grasping for radical solutions. They are just incrementally improving the systems in place. Why would the US need a completely different solution?
  • gameman144 4y ago
    > Why would the US need a completely different solution? One reason is that the US is substantially more ethnically and culturally heterogenous than Finland or France. This means that a one-size-fits-all approach is much more likely to work over there than in the US.
    • bombolo 4y ago
      > One reason is that the US is substantially more ethnically and culturally heterogenous than Finland or France No it isn't… but USA needs to be exceptional so you believe it is :)
      • gameman144 3y ago
        Finland is over 99% ethnically Finnish or Swedish. It's pretty outlandish to say that claims that America is more diverse than that are made solely in pursuit of some exceptionalism.
        • bombolo 3y ago
          So… 2 ethnicities which speak totally different languages… ignoring the sami, the refugees, the immigrants… all of whom have their own language and culture. Compare this with USA where there is 1 language.
          • gameman144 3y ago
            Alright, how about: 87% of residents of Finland are ethnically Finnish and speak Finnish and have Finnish heritage. Conversely, the most common USA racial group is non-Hispanic white (which groups many common languages/cultures, the most frequent of which are German/English/Polish/French). This group which is composed of all those different cultures comprises 60% of the US population. > Compare this with USA where there is 1 language. Nearly a quarter of American households speak a language besides English at home. It's fine to say "there are things we can learn even though we are not as culturally homogeneous". It's fine to argue "cultural homogeneity isn't as big a deal for these things". But it's simply inconsistent with reality to claim that the USA is less ethnically and culturally diverse than Finland.
• schneems 4y ago
  Large language models do are no “A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer” they are stochastic parrots and don’t even parrot facts reliably. I teach 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade kids to code. Mostly code.org does the work of introducing code through play but the value of the teacher is in classroom management. Specific to programming, the value I bring is debugging experience and empathy. Instead of saying “you fix your problem like this” I focus on trying to understand/empathize with why the problem was made to begin with and then using that info to guide them to the correct fix.