3 ms·

I've done years of private 1:1 teaching and some class teaching though not class lecturing, which is presumably the material you're talking about. > As a forme

by jjani 1y ago

I've done years of private 1:1 teaching and some class teaching though not class lecturing, which is presumably the material you're talking about. > As a former teacher, I know you need to have a good grasp of the material you are using in order to help students understand it. The material should also be in a similarly structured form thoughout a course, which will reinforce the expectations of the students, making their mental load lesser. The only way to do this is to prepare the material yourself. It's absolutely necessary to have a good fundamental understanding of the material yourself. These teachers abusing AI and not even catching these obvious issues, clearly don't have such an understanding - or they're not using any of it, which is effectively the same. In fact, they're likely to have a much worse understanding than your average frontier LLM, especially given this post is about high school level teaching. > The only way to do this is to prepare the material yourself. As brought up in other comments, what is yourself? For decades teachers have been using premade lesson plans, either third-party, school supplied or otherwise obtained, with minor edits. All teachers? Of course not, but it's completely normalized. Are they doing it themselves? If not, then the remainder did it together with Google and Wikipedia. Were they also not doing it themselves? Especially given how awful modern Google is (and the worldwide number of high school teachers using something like Kagi will be <100 people), simply using a frontier model, especially with web search enabled, is simply a better version of doing that, if used in the same way.

tovej 1y ago
If you use a prepared lesson plan it at least has some structure to it that students can learn to expect, and if you search for information from the internet, you are still compiling it yourself, which again means structure, a structure _you_ made using information that _you_ have parsed and decided to include. You will also have sources. None of this will be true for LLM output.
- jjani 1y ago
  It can be just as true for LLM output. One can use LLMs simply in a way to gather information, replacing Google by a much better one, and create lesson plans yourself based on the information provided. Nothing stands in the way of you doing that. Just like the many devs on this website who basically use it as a StackOverflow to ask questions to rather than "give me the full code of the solution" and just blindly copy-pasting that in. LLMs with web search enabled also give sources. There's not much reason to believe LLMs are incapable of outputting a similarly well-structured lesson plan as those provided by third parties. It fits well into what they're capable of. The problem is, again, that the teachers in question clearly don't care about the quality of their teaching in the slightest. Are LLMs a tool that could amplify their awfulness further? Sure, but at the same time they can amplify the goodness of the hopefully larger group of teachers who do care.

by jjani 1y ago

tovej 1y ago

If you use a prepared lesson plan it at least has some structure to it that students can learn to expect, and if you search for information from the internet, you are still compiling it yourself, which again means structure, a structure _you_ made using information that _you_ have parsed and decided to include. You will also have sources. None of this will be true for LLM output.

jjani 1y ago
It can be just as true for LLM output. One can use LLMs simply in a way to gather information, replacing Google by a much better one, and create lesson plans yourself based on the information provided. Nothing stands in the way of you doing that. Just like the many devs on this website who basically use it as a StackOverflow to ask questions to rather than "give me the full code of the solution" and just blindly copy-pasting that in. LLMs with web search enabled also give sources. There's not much reason to believe LLMs are incapable of outputting a similarly well-structured lesson plan as those provided by third parties. It fits well into what they're capable of. The problem is, again, that the teachers in question clearly don't care about the quality of their teaching in the slightest. Are LLMs a tool that could amplify their awfulness further? Sure, but at the same time they can amplify the goodness of the hopefully larger group of teachers who do care.