4 ms·

> For one thing, my kids were increasingly being asked to "do research" for their school projects. As far as I could tell, this meant just Googling materials, c

> For one thing, my kids were increasingly being asked to "do research" for their school projects. As far as I could tell, this meant just Googling materials, copying and pasting what they found, stealing photos on the internet, and generally neither digesting nor evaluating anything that popped up in search results. The degree to which my children's teachers actively don't care about this is hard to overstate. I was able to trivially catch this by googling phrases from papers my daughter had "written" and when I showed it to her English teacher the response was roughly: "Yeah, it sucks that all kids are doing that these days." Saw the same daughter doing homework by using C-f to search the textbook for keywords in the question and pasting the answer. Sometimes this yielded nonsensical answers because the keywords appeared in multiple places. She got a high A in that class (including perfect scores on the homework).

emmelaich 2y ago
Some teachers are spectacularly ignorant about internet things too; my students were given urls for movie editing on PCs and Macs. For the Mac the link for iMovie was not the Apple store but something like coolapps.ru.cn.cx/blah.
- skissane 2y ago
  > Some teachers are spectacularly ignorant about internet things too Nothing new; I remember when I was in high school, my geography teacher asked me if another student had plagiarised his assignment-she wasn’t sure, so she decided to ask the class “computer whiz”. He’d literally printed out Microsoft Encarta’s article on marijuana, stuck it to a piece of green cardboard, and used a green highlighter to colour in the photo of a marijuana leaf (he’d printed the article in black and white). He didn’t even bother to remove the “Copyright Microsoft Corporation” from the end of it, and yet still she was asking me whether or not it was plagiarised.
- userbinator 2y ago
  That's either ignorant or enlightened, depending on what else they do...
aldanor 2y ago
They say that modern LLMs have reached intelligence of older kids. Perhaps it's the other way around...
- userbinator 2y ago
  That's the same thought I had --- if humans are doing no better than LLMs, it won't be long before they'll be replaced with one. I've seen many similar instances with much older humans (adults), unfortunately.
musicale 2y ago
> asked to "do research" for their school projects What is the educational goal of such an assignment? Certainly researchers and graduate students need to perform literature searches to understand the state of the art (as well as the research frontier) and also to uncover related work (so-called "novelty" being important for publication, etc.) But for most of K-12, isn't the subject matter fairly well established and written up in a more useful, tutorial format, in textbooks? I suppose there could be exceptions, perhaps current events or popular culture, or maybe developments in particularly fast-moving fields. But in this case I think students would be well served by a curated collection of sources rather than being cast off in the deep end without guidance. If the goal is to expose students to primary sources (which can be very interesting) I think a curated collection would also work well. Encyclopedias are great though, for both random and focused reading. Both subject-based and alphabetic organization can be good for browsing and discovery.
- Jap2-0 2y ago
  Sure, the subject matter is in the textbook, but that's not necessarily the only thing being taught—research skills (source evaluation, comparison, synthesis, etc.) also need to (or should) be taught at some point. And teaching material in multiple ways (and having student participation) is beneficial for learning and retention. Now some parts of the case mentioned above obviously aren't great, but there are absolutely good justifications for this from an educational perspective.
  - musicale 2y ago
    As you suggest with source evaluation, there is something to be said for trying to teach some methods of verifying whether something is true (for some definition of "true") including methods for assessing (to some extent) the accuracy of various sources of information, finding information that may have been omitted, identifying underlying assumptions and viewpoints, etc. Unfortunately, as dang has noted, fact checkers tend to find facts that support their position and to ignore or discredit those that do not. It's even a problem for scientists and researchers. I still like the idea of a curated collection of sources.
- 2y ago
iancmceachern 2y ago
This is what most work looks like these days, so it's a good prep for that at least
082349872349872 2y ago
> The degree to which my children's teachers actively don't care about this is hard to overstate. Where are you? In the US, education is "free to play"; to win, you need to pay to live in a good school district. (ancient china worked similarly, if the anecdote about Mencius' mother is to be believed)
- aidenn0 2y ago
  Southern California. I'd estimate the median household income at my kid's elementary school (which is the most local) to be over $200k. The public secondary schools cover the entire area, so are more economically diverse.
  - 082349872349872 2y ago
    People can have many different priorities. In some affluent neighbourhoods, the priority is McMansions and cars; in others, the golf course and its dues; or a marina; or bridle paths[0] and a covered jumping ring.[1] In other neighbourhoods —maybe (perhaps often?) not so affluent— the priority is education, and people tend to move there with either the explicit or implicit idea that in paying a premium for their house, they are helping to guarantee that the parents[2] of their children's likely friends, having paid a similar premium, also value education. Maybe things have changed; I haven't been in the Old Country for a couple of decades, but in the XX the easy way to spot "the good district" was that all the real estate ads (by way of explaining the premium on the ask) explicitly mentioned "${DISTRICT} schools". [0] the least interested person in her children's education I knew was a horsy friend, but even she hoped, that upon finishing their senior year and should they have learned nothing else, her children would be capable of reading and understanding a contract. [1] southern california examples, which may be horribly dated (cf supra): Thousand Oaks, Westwood, Newport Beach, Rancho Mission Viejo [2] I owe the start of my tech career to this correlation in the reverse direction: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40531987 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40531987
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- 2y ago

emmelaich 2y ago

Some teachers are spectacularly ignorant about internet things too; my students were given urls for movie editing on PCs and Macs. For the Mac the link for iMovie was not the Apple store but something like coolapps.ru.cn.cx/blah.

skissane 2y ago
> Some teachers are spectacularly ignorant about internet things too Nothing new; I remember when I was in high school, my geography teacher asked me if another student had plagiarised his assignment-she wasn’t sure, so she decided to ask the class “computer whiz”. He’d literally printed out Microsoft Encarta’s article on marijuana, stuck it to a piece of green cardboard, and used a green highlighter to colour in the photo of a marijuana leaf (he’d printed the article in black and white). He didn’t even bother to remove the “Copyright Microsoft Corporation” from the end of it, and yet still she was asking me whether or not it was plagiarised.
userbinator 2y ago
That's either ignorant or enlightened, depending on what else they do...

aldanor 2y ago

They say that modern LLMs have reached intelligence of older kids. Perhaps it's the other way around...

userbinator 2y ago
That's the same thought I had --- if humans are doing no better than LLMs, it won't be long before they'll be replaced with one. I've seen many similar instances with much older humans (adults), unfortunately.

musicale 2y ago

> asked to "do research" for their school projects What is the educational goal of such an assignment? Certainly researchers and graduate students need to perform literature searches to understand the state of the art (as well as the research frontier) and also to uncover related work (so-called "novelty" being important for publication, etc.) But for most of K-12, isn't the subject matter fairly well established and written up in a more useful, tutorial format, in textbooks? I suppose there could be exceptions, perhaps current events or popular culture, or maybe developments in particularly fast-moving fields. But in this case I think students would be well served by a curated collection of sources rather than being cast off in the deep end without guidance. If the goal is to expose students to primary sources (which can be very interesting) I think a curated collection would also work well. Encyclopedias are great though, for both random and focused reading. Both subject-based and alphabetic organization can be good for browsing and discovery.

Jap2-0 2y ago
Sure, the subject matter is in the textbook, but that's not necessarily the only thing being taught—research skills (source evaluation, comparison, synthesis, etc.) also need to (or should) be taught at some point. And teaching material in multiple ways (and having student participation) is beneficial for learning and retention. Now some parts of the case mentioned above obviously aren't great, but there are absolutely good justifications for this from an educational perspective.
- musicale 2y ago
  As you suggest with source evaluation, there is something to be said for trying to teach some methods of verifying whether something is true (for some definition of "true") including methods for assessing (to some extent) the accuracy of various sources of information, finding information that may have been omitted, identifying underlying assumptions and viewpoints, etc. Unfortunately, as dang has noted, fact checkers tend to find facts that support their position and to ignore or discredit those that do not. It's even a problem for scientists and researchers. I still like the idea of a curated collection of sources.
2y ago

iancmceachern 2y ago

This is what most work looks like these days, so it's a good prep for that at least

082349872349872 2y ago

> The degree to which my children's teachers actively don't care about this is hard to overstate. Where are you? In the US, education is "free to play"; to win, you need to pay to live in a good school district. (ancient china worked similarly, if the anecdote about Mencius' mother is to be believed)

aidenn0 2y ago
Southern California. I'd estimate the median household income at my kid's elementary school (which is the most local) to be over $200k. The public secondary schools cover the entire area, so are more economically diverse.
- 082349872349872 2y ago
  People can have many different priorities. In some affluent neighbourhoods, the priority is McMansions and cars; in others, the golf course and its dues; or a marina; or bridle paths[0] and a covered jumping ring.[1] In other neighbourhoods —maybe (perhaps often?) not so affluent— the priority is education, and people tend to move there with either the explicit or implicit idea that in paying a premium for their house, they are helping to guarantee that the parents[2] of their children's likely friends, having paid a similar premium, also value education. Maybe things have changed; I haven't been in the Old Country for a couple of decades, but in the XX the easy way to spot "the good district" was that all the real estate ads (by way of explaining the premium on the ask) explicitly mentioned "${DISTRICT} schools". [0] the least interested person in her children's education I knew was a horsy friend, but even she hoped, that upon finishing their senior year and should they have learned nothing else, her children would be capable of reading and understanding a contract. [1] southern california examples, which may be horribly dated (cf supra): Thousand Oaks, Westwood, Newport Beach, Rancho Mission Viejo [2] I owe the start of my tech career to this correlation in the reverse direction: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40531987 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40531987
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
2y ago