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I Quit Teaching Because of ChatGPT
- kibwen 2y agoAs long as LLM companies can hang on for another 15 years or so, there will be an entire generation of humans who will be as utterly incapable of living without LLMs in the same way that most people in developed countries are incapable of growing their own food. Intellectual lock-in will be their moat.
- adamc 2y agoYou can already see it in people who cannot navigate their automobile without google maps or some equivalent.
- kennethrc 2y agoDefine "cannot navigate"? I've been driving for decades, but where I live traffic is everywhere so I don't go more than a few miles without using Waze and its real-time traffic monitoring.
- mrbungie 2y agoPeople who can't guide themselves without relying entirely on the app. Normally, I just glance at what action I should take next (i.e. continue straight for 2km and then take a left turn at X) and then follow the road signs to do so. But I've noticed some Uber drivers and other people who keep their eyes almost permanently at the app for locating themselves, even when there's a clear GPS or network disconnection, like in an underground pass. This often results in wasted time when the app doesn’t catch up with reality, and the driver misses a turn.
- Version467 2y agoI can confidently say that a car would be useless to me without gps. I can navigate the small town (10k people) I grew up in, but that’s it. I wouldn’t try to navigate the city I live in now (~350k people) in a car, beyond the street I live on. If I had to and knew gps was broken (hypothetically), then I’d try to reschedule, instead of attempting to navigate with signs and a paper map. I could probably work with printed turn by turn instructions, but that’s about it. And I think that probably comes close to what the other post had in mind with „cannot navigate“
- kingofthehill98 2y agoThat's unfathomable to me. I live in a 1kk metropolitan area and I can go basically anywhere without a navigation system, in fact I'll only pull the GPS if I'm going to some remote neighborhood. P.S: I was born here and lived here all my life.
- SoftTalker 2y agoGPS is super-convenient when you're in an unfamiliar area. I sometimes catch myself thinking how did we ever get along without it. But we did. You just looked at a map before you set off, noted street names and turns, and paid attention. You would do the same thing and manage pretty well if you had to.
- adamc 2y agoOf course it's convenient. But I learned to drive before we had it, and learned to find my way around without it. Maps helped, but you can do a lot with logic and by understanding direction.
- nicolas_t 2y agoYou don't ever walk in your city without gps? Wouldn't you know the streets after a while?
- vel0city 2y agoLots of people don't live in walkable cities. There's no realistic way they'd get to where they're going by walking. They might walk their neighborhood and know that, but these days lots of people don't even bother walking around their neighborhood. So they'll end up driving everywhere they go. Work, groceries, restaurants, etc. Always driving. Many won't go down paths that weren't previously suggested by their GPS. And often those destinations aren't designed to be walkable either. Massive parking lots separating the various storefronts. Corporate campuses completely surrounded by a sea of parking lots and garages. Nowhere to walk. That said, there's still exploring possible in a car-centric place. I tend to take alternate paths to get places, purposefully "get lost" driving around, and explore places I've never been before. But that has costs and lots of people don't bother doing that.
- adamc 2y agoFind your way around an unfamiliar city or area without google maps or similar.
- malfist 2y agoI don't really see that as a bad thing. Einstein famously didn't memorize phone numbers because you could look it up in book. Quick external lookups are a huge productivity boost since you don't have to spend all the time memorizing something.
- bamboozled 2y agoIt's not a bad thing so long as GPS works forever, I also think driving is much more enjoyable when you don't need to be thinking about GPS, it's nice to just focus on where you're going. I have an awesome sense of direction which I attribute to almost never using navigation apps unless I'm really worried about traffic, and even then, I can usually find a less crowded non-recommended router, because I know my way around.
- kevlened 2y agoThis is true to a point. You can get huge performance gains using L1 cache rather than accessing network storage.
- malfist 2y agoI like your analogy. I agree. This doesn't fit all cases, and it really depends on how often and how long it takes you to look something up. Memorizing directions though? Nah. Takes a while to memorize and is quick to lookup and not used frequently. Knowing basic syntax for a programming language? That needs to be in RAM.
- rectang 2y agoA conversation between Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson from A Study in Scarlet, by Arthur Conan Doyle: > That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled round the sun appeared to be to me such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it. > "You appear to be astonished," he said, smiling at my expression of surprise. "Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it." > "To forget it!" > "You see," he explained, "I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose..." > "But the Solar System!" I protested. > "What the deuce is it to me?" he interrupted impatiently; "you say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work."
- Workaccount2 2y agoI think what is more readily apparent is that younger folks cannot reverse their car without looking at the camera. Older folks still turn around and look.
- kennethrc 2y agoNah, this "older folk" loves my cameras and it's an excellent enhancement
- scblock 2y agoI wish I had a camera in my Jeep. As I get older it gets harder to just turn around, and new cars have pretty bad sight lines. I think this is just using the tools available to you.
- SoftTalker 2y ago> new cars have pretty bad sight lines This is really a big part of the reason for them. Newer cars are all aerodynamically contoured and this results in a high rear deck and a shallow angle on the rear window. It's much harder to see behind the car. I still turn my head and also use the wing mirrors to reverse. It's habit and I find it easier than looking at a screen.
- umbra07 2y agoWhat is this based off of? Most young people (who have a car) have an old car, without backup cameras.
- vel0city 2y agoBackup cameras were mandated in the US in 2018 and were already getting to be pretty popular on even midrange trim vehicles by that time. Every six year old car has a backup camera, and a large percentage of 7–10-year-old cars do as well.
- vel0city 2y agoI cannot reverse my car without looking at the camera but that's because cars these days are so high off the ground, the rear windows are so tiny, and the pillars are so huge that I can't see much turning around. Someone about four feet tall can easily walk past the rear of my car and aside from the half second of them in the side mirrors (which I can't see if I'm looking backwards anyways) there's no way I'd be able to see them looking backwards. But the ultra-wide angle camera mounted low on the gate I'd see them easily. Plus, with the position of the camera at the end of the vehicle and its FOV, there are angles I wouldn't possibly be able to see with a car parked on either side of me. Coupled with radar sensors able to detect cross traffic before its even possibly visible in that situation the sensors greatly enhance by ability to see the situation than if I was entirely relying on turning around. I do turn around while reversing, but more of just a double check of the overall scene. Same with double checking side mirrors while reversing. But a large amount of what I'm looking at is the screen.
- golergka 2y ago8 billion people growing their own food wouldn't be able to live in our planet even if they had all the necessary skills. Industrial agriculture and related technologies have radically increased the amount of food we can grow compared to individual small farmers.
- atwrk 2y agoBoth of these points can be true at the same time (and IMO are). Tech changes society, but society should also reflect on these changes - and decide whether this is the direction we want to go, the tradeoff we want to have.
- ghusto 2y ago> 8 billion people growing their own food wouldn't be able to live in our planet even if they had all the necessary skills In the way we currently live, no they wouldn't. But it sounds like you're saying "wouldn't be able to", full stop, which I don't believe is true. There is no reason that all 8 billion people (with the "necessary skills") couldn't grow their own food, theoretically. It would require the west giving up the way we live, but it's worth noting that this doesn't make it impossible.
- golergka 2y agoWell, if by "the way we live" you mean "not having widespread malnutrition problems and hunger periodically killing significant parts of the population", then sure thing.
- MisterBastahrd 2y agoSooner or later, think tanks are going to start coming up with price charts showing how much your bills would be with and without crypto and AI. And that's going to be a huge political hot potato for these companies to manage. I hope they're ready to invest in massive solar farms.
- djcooley 2y agoThis is terrifying. Our ability to think has been our biggest differentiator as a species. LLMs threaten this, and I'll die on that hill.
- golergka 2y agoWhat's your opinion on calculators? Update: I meant to compare calculators to something like a slide ruler for logarithms. I'm not from US and I tend to forget that some people use calculators to take 20% of 500.
- Workaccount2 2y agoA more apt comparison might be asking the abacus what it thinks of the calculator.
- m4tthumphrey 2y agoDoes calculating numbers based on concrete rules require "thinking" in the same way OP talks about? I think not.
- foobazgt 2y agoYou don't allow students to use calculators for operations they haven't personally mastered. If you don't learn how to add two numbers on your own, the rest of your learning is in serious jeopardy. This is the author's lament. These students are skipping over personal mastery.
- helboi4 2y agoI will occasionally do long multiplication in my minds eye just to make sure I can lol. Anything more complicated than that, most people will not be doing anyway. University students however, almost universally do need to write sometimes. Similarly if I had decided to do something maths heavy at uni I would be expected to be able to do some pretty complex maths without a calculator first, even if I don't need to do that all the time. It's pretty standard that higher education requires a level of intellectual rigour that is totally unecessary for day to day life. In the case of ChatGPT, it's allowing people to completely bypass that process even in those settings. Meaning you NEVER learn to do it, not just that you don't do it day to day.
- fulafel 2y agoMaybe in the future the "alien intelligences" for next generations will be people who had classic educations before social media and LLMs.
- gorbachev 2y agoBut think of 8 billion people paying $40 / month to OpenAI. Put yourself on the OpenAI IPO waiting list right now! /s
- bamboozled 2y agoI find Claude to be better...
- azhenley 2y agoI just went back to teaching! I’m hopeful that AI makes the classroom experience better for both students and instructors.
- beej71 2y agoIt's upheaval, but it's good overall, I think. I'm enjoying figuring out where students should and shouldn't use AI, and also--holy crap--ChatGPT can write quiz questions like nobody's business. :) I also use it for coming up with ideas for class, and asking it to challenge my knowledge on a topic. (Just be sure to verify all its claims!) Still trying to figure out how to convince students that the act of writing is so valuable to them that they really should do it. Something that kinda works on college students is the idea that anything easily done with AI will pay no money. So they'd better get their asses in gear and do the hard work if they want to pay off that enormous loan. This quarter I'm having them do some low-risk (i.e. hard to be wrong, not graded on style) short writing assignments. I'm hoping that it's easier for them to write the low-risk thing than is it to try to come up with a good prompt. Also I've asked them for their personal opinion of the topics explicitly which might make them a little less comfortable to ask an AI to speak on their behalf. With AI, though, I think we're going to have to start small and really work people back up to writing bigger essays. If you just jump in, they'll just punt to AI. And nothing takes the wind out of my sails faster than someone telling me I have to grade a bunch of shit written by ChatGPT.
- Der_Einzige 2y ago[flagged]
- realce 2y agoWith this progress, what will be the point of being in any upper percentile at all? Everyone will be in it if they have access to the LLM wizard. We're outsourcing our sovereignty to a machine blob in a black box, the blob will do the thinking for all of those children. edit: for the authoritarian tyrants that they are (mass reflexive downvotes) Your response is to rely on opaque knowledge agents produced by the largest and shadiest corporations that humanity has ever known. Your lack of paranoia is a severe vulnerability. Good luck.
- ahmeneeroe-v2 2y ago>what will be the point of being in any upper percentile at all Not the OP, but throughout human history, being in the upper percentile for intelligence has been an advantage. The safe bet is that LLMs won't change that. >opaque knowledge agents By definition this true for every knowledge agent in history. If Person A is ignorant and Person B offers to teach them, there is always (by definition) an asymmetry. Aristotle was an opaque knowledge agent to Alexander.
- teaearlgraycold 2y agoIt won’t be a competitive advantage against other humans. But it will improve our species’ ability to communicate and learn.
- awesomeMilou 2y ago> Everyone will be in it if they have access to the LLM wizard. You're arguing that everyone might be good at sports if they had a personal trainer. How is this not a good thing? If you take these models only by the base value they provide, you might be able to eliminate private tutoring from the equation and make performance of students more comparable. I am far from happy that these models originate from shady for-profit corporations with dubious incentives, but a state actor could just as well train a model for support in education. > Your response is to rely on opaque knowledge agents produced by the largest and shadiest corporations that humanity has ever known. This is ironic. My teachers organized a big week about the importance of the personal carbon footprint when I was still in high school (~2015). The personal carbon footprint is criticized for shifting blame for climate change to personal consumer behavior, rather than corporations and was subject of a big advertising campaign from BP [0]. I think you overestimate the average teacher in terms of their ability to think critically and overall skill in their respective subjects. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_footprint#Shifting_responsibility_from_corporations_to_individuals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_footprint#Shifting_resp...
- acbart 2y agoI wonder what can be done. It's terrifying to realize how dependent students are going to become on these tools. Too many people are just not willing to live with the discomfort that comes with learning something difficult, when the alternative is so readily accessible. Short term gain over long term gain, exemplified.
- pton_xd 2y agoI like the use of the word discomfort here. It does take an acceptance of some level of discomfort to engage with material you don't yet understand. Similar to how you experience some physical discomfort / strain when pushing your limits exercising. As you engage with discomfort your tolerance builds and what was once a difficult exercise becomes routine. The reward is worth the effort but I worry what the future looks like with many just opting out.
- windexh8er 2y ago> I like the use of the word discomfort here. It really is spot on. I've been reading "The Coddling of the American Mind" [0] by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt. The book's precipice feeds directly into this idea and has been a fun read thus far. It seems that LLMs will feed negatively into that "coddling", described in the book, in a very negative way as they are providing discomfort avoidance. [0] https://www.thecoddling.com/ https://www.thecoddling.com/
- beej71 2y agoIndeed. I tell my students it's supposed to be a workout. It's the workout that makes the learning happen.
- Ekaros 2y agoI'm starting to think that maybe we need to start failing students again. However brutal and harmful it seems. And go back to in person examinations. Suck for those with issues with them, but we don't need to limit time too much.
- smokel 2y agoThe real problem seems to be with the testing and grading system, and the fact that some people game them to receive some title or other credentials. If one is really interested in learning to write well, or to understand what good writing is, then this particular teacher might still have liked their job. That approach probably doesn't make much money though.
- doctorpangloss 2y agoI don't know. When have you heard a single student or educator in a class suggest, "All submitted papers should be available to be read by everyone in the class"? Think deeply about the impacts of that. Other than a creative writing class, I can't recall a single time when I could read someone else's papers without their express permission. I'm bringing this up because you're talking about a tired trope, that making money or credentials are the conspiratorial force deciding everything you don't like in education, inspecific to writing and thus not really engaging with the article; when really, there are much simpler and more toxic aspects of writing education that educators could reverse in an afternoon.
- smokel 2y agoI'm not sure I understand your argument, except for the needless stab. All Master's thesis papers at my university were publicly available at the library, apart from some that did theirs at a company which did not allow this. Do you suggest that group reading would be a better approach for grading texts?
- SoftTalker 2y agoIn 10th grade English, once a week we as a class reviewed one student's writing (without being told who the student was). By the end of the year everyone had a "peer review" of his or her writing at least once.
- vonunov 2y ago>Think deeply about the impacts of that I gave it a shot, but I wasn't able to get very deep about it in the first place. I couldn't even begin to come up with any ideas of what could really go wrong if everyone's papers could be freely read by the rest of the class. I couldn't read someone else's papers either, but this was generally because there was no motivation to go to the trouble of gaining access to them, not because it would have been wholly unacceptable. Maybe I'm just tired, but I think I'm not really grasping how this whole thing follows from / connects to the parent, or within itself; you might have to spoonfeed or state the seemingly obvious or something
- FrustratedMonky 2y agoIs this all bad? The conversational model of learning, the dialectic, can be better for learning than just reading walls of text. Instant access to a lot of information, in a more conversational model. I've found it to be more natural. Are we reaching the stage where every kid has a "Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" from the Diamond Age? That would be a good thing.
- deegles 2y agoIf they can solve the hallucination problem, sure. Otherwise we're going to have a lot of people who "know" things about the world that are simply made up.
- teaearlgraycold 2y agoThat is and always has been the status quo. The question is if proportionally more or less is made up now. People may be able to learn more true facts thanks to LLMs.
- deegles 2y agoI think "LLMs hallucinate facts less often than people" is a strong stance to take at the moment.
- FrustratedMonky 2y agoWas going to say it was getting better. But all the articles I could find said GPT-4o was worse than previous versions.
- whiplash451 2y agoI feel for the author, being a part-time teacher myself and seeing the impact of ChatGPT first-hand. However, I think there is a viable alternative: 1. Spend the beginning of the year/semester showing the potentially disastrous effects of GenAI (e.g. through various exercises involving GenAI) 2. Once students have been "vaccined" against ChatGPT, assume they will still cheat and switch to a type of teaching that leaves little room for cheating with ChatGPT, e.g. long in-person sessions where students write in classroom. Then grade their production (i.e. don't leave room for them to update after class). The world is changing fast and brutally, but teachers are the head of the spear against mass enshitification.
- beej71 2y agoI ask my college students how much they would pay someone to solve a problem with ChatGPT. They say "zero". Then I tell them that's how much they'll get paid for doing it. They ask, "Then why are we solving this problem for class?" And then we can get into the reasons they're really here. It's not a bad discussion to have.
- whiplash451 2y agoSuper interesting technique!
- tonetegeatinst 2y agoI don't trust LLM's to create novel ideas, and I'd never copy paste any AI output. Would I rework the output or maby use certain through processes, maby. But I'm not trusting an AI blindly, its a statistical capture of its training data not a magic wand. That said, most professors still force students to write code on paper with no autocorrect, google, or even access to the reference documentation which seems counter productive. I remember when people were calling auto completing text editors cheating, yet despite how much we accept auto complete or how many professional developers use AI tools, were still forcing college students to use pen and paper and trying to memorize syntax and all the functions of a library, all because professors can't be decent enough to even allow access to notes or the basic language or library docs. The AI or the documentation isn't going to solve your problems. Its enabling you to not memorize an entire language that you might not even work with in your career. Do I think their is people who can and will misuse the technology, yep you bet ya. But we need to stop forcing people to suffer due to the people who disregard the rules. You can also tell a major difference between someone who just uses AI to write the essay or paper, and someone who uses it to develop better ideas or arguments and develop multiple ways of phrasing something. LLM's are nothing new, just like how computer vision has been good for a long time.(see opencv, YOLO, and DARKNET)
- SoftTalker 2y agoI'm probably in a small minority but I don't use auto-completion in code editors. I dislike it, and find it disrupts my thinking.
- beej71 2y agoI'm also in that minority. And I think there's something to be said for memorizing that stuff instead of letting autocomplete always handle it. I think it might improve your mental tapestry you draw on to solve problems. It might be slower and better to not autocomplete everything. ChatGPT says that autocomplete is better. :) :) :)
- vel0city 2y agoI agree with this. I'll use AI as a starting point to begin to understand a new topic or help flesh out definitions of things, but it's a starting point of knowledge not the final destination. Kind of like looking up something in an encyclopedia or Wikipedia; I'm using it for a quick essence of the knowledge, so I know more of what to dig into later.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- baggy_trough 2y agoThe students use AI to complete assignments; the teachers use AI to create and grade them. It's a giant self-licking ice cream cone.
- adamc 2y agoI read this and it struck a chord. A decade or more ago, a friend of mine teaching English in a major state university told me that he was getting lots of students who couldn't seem to read a novel. They could read the words on the page, but they couldn't focus enough to really understand it. My experience is that writing things out always improves my understanding of the subject. It's similar to forcing yourself to write a proof in mathematics, to verify your understanding. The formalism is hugely helpful. If the result of chatgpt is even more kids skating through life without really picking up these skills... it may have tragic consequences. Learning to think well is the single most important thing I got from education. I would argue that improvements in human thinking -- via philosophy, logic, mathematics, the scientific method, and yes, literacy -- have made a huge difference in human lives over the past few thousand years. Not that chatgpt would be the root cause. Chatgpt would just be a symptom of a much bigger problem.
- lucianbr 2y ago> If the result of chatgpt is even more kids skating through life without really picking up these skills... it may have tragic consequences. Learning to think well is the single most important thing I got from education. Do teachers have no role here? "If many kids make a certain choice, there will be big trouble". Maybe teach them to do better? Is the role of educator reduced to giving assignements and grading them in a mindless way? Seems like this would be exactly the point. After all, without schools, people learned less. So now we have schools, and people learn more. We didn't just lament "well if people don't learn, we're all screwed". We did something about it. Is this AI thing really beyond any solution? What has been tried so far?
- adamc 2y agoMost teachers have large classes. Their ability to monitor each kid and prevent them from using chatgpt or similar tools may be limited. I come from a family with many teachers. The harsh reality is that teachers can provide a conducive environment, but they just don't have enough time per kid to make nearly the impact that people expect, which is why your home environment is so critical. Teachers don't really teach. They create an environment to help you teach yourself. They can provide lessons, but you always have to do the work of internalizing it. Watching youtube videos is not the same as struggling to write programs. Etc.
- mjevans 2y agoIMO most of the reason this teacher quit is students using ChatGPT to get around the puffery and wasteful production assigned. It is important to have the skills to be able to do that kind of task, and transforming information rather than just transcribing it is a key way of training our biological supercomputers. However I can't recall even one example of that being the case when I was in school at any level. I think if it ever did happen it was as an accidental side effect rather than an intended part of the process. It would be much harder for such generative tools to regurgitate accurate content for novel things. As an example, a report about what the student was presently working on or had just completed in labs, or a design for something they'd like to do. Maybe a focus on the hypothesis or 'request for funding' for a project would better model real world writing and have sufficient local focus to require human writing.
- SoftTalker 2y ago> I think if it ever did happen it was as an accidental side effect rather than an intended part of the process. It's a side-effect but it's not accidental. The objective of most school work (below PhD-level research) is knowledge mastery and skill development. This comes from repeated "practice" assignments. Look at any code you wrote as an undergrad compared to what you write today. You weren't inventing anything new, and you will probably laugh at your coding style and quality, but that puffy and wasteful production was what developed the skills to think and the mastery of the information and techniques necessary to move on to solving novel problems and perhaps creating new approaches.
- mjevans 2y agoThe rote repetition for math is more obvious. Drilling in the repeated proof that yes, this is how things proceeded from start to finish and it is known. However at least my History classes wanted to instill trivia, rather than a general overview and mastery of the general course of events and knowledge. Precise dates and figures, rather than knowing what to lookup if I ever did need __specific__ data. Which is exactly what I'd want to do if I did have a need for that data, to make sure I had the correct date, spelling, and maybe refresh my context years or decades later.
- lucianbr 2y ago> I noted where arguments were unsound. I pointed to weaknesses such as stylistic quirks that I knew to be common to ChatGPT (I noticed a sudden surge of phrases such as “delves into”). That is, I found myself spending more time giving feedback to AI than to my students. > So I quit. This strikes me as a non-sequitur. Her students were making a certain class of mistakes, so... she quit? Don't students always make mistakes of one kind or another? Teach them to do better, in this case by not using AI, or revising manually the AI output, or some other way. Isn't that the job?
- righthand 2y agoYeah it seems like they quit to make a point but the point is lost on me unless the point is that they can write an article about how they quit.
- raphael_kimmig 2y agoCan’t you empathise? The thought of having to grade and give advice on AI generated content makes me want to run away and live in a remote forest.
- lucianbr 2y agoWell I am not very good at empathy, indeed. Sorry. But really. Teachers have complained about stupid or uninterested kids for ever. This does not make schools pointless. I am not good at teaching, but some people are, and manage to do it despite some setbacks. Is this AI thing really insurmontable? Did she at least attempt to fix the problem, before quitting? Feels to me like "we've tried nothing, and we're all out of ideas".
- SoftTalker 2y agoHe did those things. He said his students recognized the flaws and hazards of relying on AI. But they used it anyway.
- christkv 2y agoCorporate writing (web-sites, marketing, internal hr emails) before LLM's might as well have been written by an LLM for its predictable platitudes, word usage and patterns.
- gmaster1440 2y agoI imagine it's difficult to be a good teacher and find effective ways to encourage students to rigorously think about things they care about in spite of the discomfort it might cause. I also believe increasingly capable and sophisticated AI systems will play a formative role in transforming education, not as the current chatbots that are disrupting education as mentioned in the article, but as active participants in the reimagined classrooms of the future. The transition will probably be rough, but it has the potential to bring about a better future and more fruitful learning and writing.
- light_triad 2y ago> With the easy temptation of AI, many—possibly most—of my students were no longer willing to push through discomfort. There's been an important shift in education in the last 20 years: a push for lessons to be short, entertaining and unchallenging. When students struggle with tasks, in many cases they are just told not to do them. LLMs are the next wave of this shift - what could be awesome tools for research and writing will become a crutch. It's not so much an issue with LLMs as it is a shunning of any discomfort while learning in favour of amusement and enjoyment.
- throwawayffffas 2y ago> There's been an important shift in education in the last 20 years: a push for lessons to be short, entertaining and unchallenging. When students struggle with tasks, in many cases they are just told not to do them. I was in school 20 years ago. That is not my recollection. Lessons were long, focused and challenging if you engaged.
- thfuran 2y agoThat's what they said.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- righthand 2y agoThis kind of thing is going to be the split between the technically inclined and the non-technically inclined. Those that believe thinking and understanding is too hard or that school is not cool or whatever will have technology to slide by on. They will be apart of the non-technical society and they will languish there. Comfortable in their lower pay and social media and grocery store tomatoes. Truly one of the herd of corporate loyalty. Fine, I say, we can’t elevate everyone. It’s just a bit amusing though that for a long time the youth was smarter than the previous generation due to embrace of tech. Now the youth is going to be more and more clever and not necessarily more intelligent instead because that is what is valued, taking a shortcut that technology enables. Oddly it might end up being a rift between the lower class and the middle class. Or perhaps more of a reshuffling as those who are willing to put in the efforts to understand will be apart of the techno-literate class and those who “dont care” will be apart of the “dont care” class. Digital welfare for the non-nerdy.
- windexh8er 2y agoMy concern is the assessment divide. In the district I live I happen to be on a parent board that's providing input to the leadership with respect to technology. Privacy and security are a huge component of LLMs currently, but beyond that I think the biggest area of interest is the assessment divide. Currently the district is looking at it through the lens of having students still "test" in traditional ways so that if, and when, assessment doesn't align with daily work they can start to understand where this divide exists. I really like the Ted Chiang quote from the article: "Using ChatGPT to complete assignments is like bringing a forklift into the weight room; you will never improve your cognitive fitness that way". I can already see this divide in some of the surrounding friend-circle wherein a lot of young (under the age of 12) are leveraging LLMs very heavily to direct them. I fear that these kids will lose the confidence, at a very early age, to even start something. It's widely discussed how getting started in projects is often the most cumbersome in a task timeline, and so without making things uncomfortable for this young generation to work at this skill I feel as though we're going to see the start of a significantly handicapped generation because they will over-rely on these tools. And, really, this is just one of many issues of over-reliance. > Now the youth is going to be more and more clever and not necessarily more intelligent instead because that is what is valued, taking a shortcut that technology enables. I 100% agree with this. A lot of students will fool their parents, and even a number of educators by leveraging this new "cleverness". But it's going to hit a dead end as soon as they're forced to do. I also think you're right in that this may become a class divide that further segments the population and also provides facilities for unfortunate control over the lower class through trained and targeted LLM responses.
- MarcScott 2y agoI'm thinking of going back into teaching because of ChatGPT. I created an entire scheme of work for my wife today, including all the lesson plans, and next I'll work on some student resources and quizzes. It took about thirty minutes. She'll need to check them over to make sure they're okay, but still a massive time saver. I've taken photos of my son's revision activities and had ChatGPT mark them. It's surprisingly accurate given his awful handwriting. Report writing becomes a thing of the past, as I can upload a CSV of grades along with a sentence or two of description, and have it generate unique reports for each student. This would all allow me to do what I used to love. I can just spend my time with students in the classroom, engaging them, teaching them, discussing with them. I won't be bringing home mounds of paperwork, that eats into my evenings and weekends. I'll go into work each day feeling fresh and ready to actually educate kids. ChatGPT takes away the busy work from both teachers and students.
- righthand 2y agoWhen I “scan for correctness” a code change (ex code review), I do my best to look for code correctness. Often that change has to go through product review for visual correctness. A lot of my scanning is brief and determining logic with the variables I know. However I often exclude the cases that have already been tested through e2e and unit tests. These tests are valuable to ensure regressions don’t occur. Please tell me what validation and regression testing can you guarantee by having an LLM generate a lesson plan? Why is it important to have your own unique generated lesson plan, even if that lesson plan is just a common template with synonyms swapped out? You’ve eliminated a bunch of extra work for yourself but have no long standing regression check from the output of this generator. These “actually LLMs are great for X topic” comments are just here for evangelism then? What do students gain from having you generate partially random lesson plans? Please don’t tell me “time savings”.
- SoftTalker 2y agoWhy would anyone pay you to be a teacher when they could just use ChatGPT directly. Prompt it to develop a lesson plan to learn whatever, create the learning materials, and then evaluate their mastery of it. And be endlessly available, nights and weekends, for further discussion and help with any difficulties?
- banku_brougham 2y agoIt bodes ill. The hand of fate doth steer our course, As wisdom wanes to machines' force. A hollow voice, devoid of soul, Whispers false, yet takes its toll. Oracles warned of knowledge lost— Now we reap the bitter cost.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 2y ago> The best educators will adapt to AI. In some ways, the changes will be positive. Teachers must move away from mechanical activities or assigning simple summaries. So much of education always comes down to efficiency, scale, and standardization. The best way to teach or test someone is by having a one-on-one conversation with them, coincidentally the least standardized. The most scalable and standardized way to do it is to publish some material and then asynchronously collect answers to a predefined set of multiple choice questions. It seems like everything you can fake or cheat on is a byproduct of choosing to be further along the efficiency/standardization/mechanization scale. Which is a byproduct of many many systemic factors, not least of which is funding. It's frustrating as hell that so many of our teaching problems have obvious answers that are in many ways better for the students anyways, but those answers just aren't systemically or economically feasible. Maybe they'll have to become more viable as our current, ultra-mechanical system breaks.
- gigatree 2y ago> It's frustrating as hell that so many of our teaching problems have obvious answers that are in many ways better for the students anyways, but those answers just aren't systemically or economically feasible. Maybe they'll have to become more viable as our current, ultra-mechanical system breaks. I think it’s a lie that they aren’t feasible, just like it’s a lie that sustainable, small-scale agriculture isn’t feasible. It’s more that the powerful are only interested in developing centralized systems because those are the ones they can control and profit from. You can’t indoctrinate without a standardized education system, you can’t price-fix without a monopoly/oligopoly, you can’t brainwash an entire population unless everyone’s watching the same thing controlled by the same entity. That said, it’s true that decentralized, sustainable systems aren’t feasible so long as there are people on earth vying for power over others.
- gigatree 2y ago> However, these types of comparative analyses failed because most of my students were not developed enough as writers to analyze the subtleties of meaning or evaluate style. “It makes my writing look fancy,” one PhD student protested when I pointed to weaknesses in AI-revised text. IMO teachers, and academia specifically, are to blame for what AI is doing to students because they’re the ones that have defined good writing as “fancy writing”. The hardest part of learning to be a good writer has been undoing all the years of style over substance engrained in high school and college. If we’re taught to write like robots, is it any surprise we just have robots write for us given the opportunity? And is it any surprise we don’t see the point of learning to write if robots seemingly do it so much better?
- baudpunk 2y agoI'm excited for these kids, to be honest. My experience in the education system in the 90's was a goddamn nightmare. I didn't make it to the 9th grade. It just wasn't designed for someone with my ADHD and chaotic situation at home. I didn't care about most of the subjects they were teaching me, and I would get beaten regularly for doing poorly. I get hyper focused on things I care about, and that system provided very few things that I cared about. Today, I'm a senior DevOps engineer. Guess what I do care about? And it's not just that I only care about computers. I became an autodidact after I left school, and learned about the things that interested me, and only those things. I still got a great education and know a lot of things that provide value to society, and enrich others. It was just that the education system packaged my value as a human being into one big bundle that was graded in aggregate. I have high hopes that our world's societies can have such an amazing tool as their disposal that kids don't feel like they have to cram the entirety of human existence into their brains for 12/16/18/20 years or suffer the consequences of a failed life; that they can be productive through a creative use of the tools at their disposal, and feel accomplished even if their brains don't work the same way as others'. Not to mention the social benefits of having nearly instantaneous fact checking available, and building their opinions around it. Then, they can also be good people instead of allowing lazy idiot talking heads convince them that their situation is an immalleable doom spiral, locking them into a ecosystem of fear and idolatry that's only return is manifest destiny.
- ChrisArchitect 2y agoRelated: The Elite College Students Who Can't Read Books https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41707605 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41707605
- AndyNemmity 2y agoTechnology has always brought fear of dumbing us down, but it rarely does. When the internet came along, people worried we'd stop remembering things. When Google Maps appeared, people thought we'd forget how to read maps. Wait... I'm not sure anyone can read a map... maybe you're right.
- Eumenes 2y agoA friend of mine teaches an intro to web development course - its a 2 day thing, usually over the weekend at a co-working place that does events, and the stories he tells me are insane. These are mostly college graduates and white collar professionals who want to learn some code. They are often perplexed by the idea of a file and folders. Right clicking something is novel for some. He gives all the instructions ahead of time so they can get started right away. That first day is almost exclusively helping people get the "dev environment" setup. Its just a folder on their desktop with some html, css, and js files.
- mike_hearn 2y agoYeah this is now a common story, also for undergrads who may only use an actual computer (for anything) for the first time when they get to university. Science classes have to start by teaching the basics of desktop computing. Funnily enough, I don't remember anyone predicting this outcome when smartphones and tablets came out. It may not matter though. Desktop OS's aren't so different. Files, folders, windows, right clicking, it can all be learned pretty quickly. Compared to the rest of learning software development it's a nice gentle learning curve.
- indigo0086 2y agoWould he have this problem with smaller classrooms of kids that elect to be in the class rather than having an academic obligation to. There will be always kids who skate by, it just seems like a is exposing that there is a limitation of choices for students in higher education.
- JasserInicide 2y agoSolution: Go back to in-person pen/paper tests while having those bags you put your phones into that you get back at the end of the test.
- Balgair 2y agoI want to point out here: These are PhD students that the author is talking about. Granted, it seems like the class is a bit of a 'BS' requirement from the department. Like Ethics classes and HR trainings, i.e. a class that isn't on your quals and has no affect on graduation. Still, these aren't middle schoolers. They are all 'big kids' when it comes to intellectual attainment. They're past the pre-med and pre-law maddness, they are in academia by choice over money (the author mentions comp-sci students), and they are even bothering to attend this class at all and not just go with a 'Gentleman's A'. And even these folks, even when confronted, Just. Do. Not. Care. I get the author's point of view, and agree with their decision to quit. But, as LLMs get better here in the next 5 years ... yeah, the class is pointless. Hell, the research is probably pointless too, and the students know it. The truth of the pointlessness is very debatable, once the students get out and past the grad school blues. I'd love to know what the students are thinking about the class and about it all too. They're the ones being trained on this, afterall, and they clearly do not see any point to it. I mean, it just feels like the students are some of those Imperial Chinese bureaucracy applicants, sitting alone in those open air cubicles, all next to thousands of others, and trying to make the absolute perfect calligraphic strokes, one chance only, or their entire village's hopes and dreams fall to dust. And no one gives a rat's ass that the words they are writing are saying 'Time is short, dance in the flowers, laugh, run, play, the universe has spared us a precious few'.