4 ms·

IMO 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 skil

IMO 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 ago
  The 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.

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 ago
The 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.