Re: incentives being weird in higher education: we once overheard the director of the CS department respond to complaints about the program not being a good fit for industry by saying, "our job is to create researchers." I recall something like 7% of students going on into research, meaning that they weren't even trying to meet the needs of 93% of their students.
Show HN: I made a cheap alternative to college-level math & physics tutoring
61–70 of 209 posts
Re: Show HN: I made a cheap alternative to college-level math & physics tutoring
#62> Help resources become inefficient - because so much material is restricted, and so much time is spent on delivering live lectures, there’d often be 40 students competing for help from 2 TAs in a 2-hour Office Hours I had the exact opposite problem when I was both a TA and later a professor. I would beg and plead for my students to come to office hours. "It's free one on one tutoring from the guy who writes the test…
Re: Show HN: I made a cheap alternative to college-level math & physics tutoring
#63Re: Show HN: I made a cheap alternative to college-level math & physics tutoring
#64Are you trying to create a tutoring version of fiverr/upwork? If so, the economics doesn't seem to work. I think you are saying that you'll create a product, charge $10/wk to customers and, through volume, give the tutor approx. $100/hr. Fair enough, but I think you're overestimating how well tutoring scales - which is not well at all. If I'm a tutor, and I want to break even with my in-person rate, I need to satisfy…
I think the roles of teacher and tutor are being confused in the "scale up" approach. Teachers have presentations that allow a large number of people to cover the material, with specific goals, verified by observing the class through testing.
A tutor covers the same ground, but in a much different manner. The tutor has an audience of one, and the goal is to fix errors in the student's understanding.
Only in a student that is ignoring the teacher will the tutor be the teacher. For every other student, the tutor assesses what the student's strengths are and what the student's weaknesses are, even if the student misreports their weaknesses.
Then the tutoring session provides explanation, guidance, and drills to fix the weaknesses. Often a weakness in solving one problem exposes underlying weaknesses, when that happens the session shifts till the underlying weakness is addressed, after which the session resumes on the upper level problem where it paused.
The rest of the tutoring is giving the student ample work which is completed under supervision, until the student builds skill. Good problem generation is often overlooked. Good problems rarely are the same problem with different numbers, good problems challenge the student to use the tools in a variety of different scenarios and problem formats. Eventually the student will tell you they understand it, and their work will support their claims.
So, watching someone else being tutored is like taking a bespoke suit and putting it on someone else. Yes, it might be wearable under some circumstances, but it's not going to properly fit the person the suit (or tutoring) was tailored to fit.
Re: Show HN: I made a cheap alternative to college-level math & physics tutoring
#65Re: Show HN: I made a cheap alternative to college-level math & physics tutoring
#66> Help resources become inefficient - because so much material is restricted, and so much time is spent on delivering live lectures, there’d often be 40 students competing for help from 2 TAs in a 2-hour Office Hours I had the exact opposite problem when I was both a TA and later a professor. I would beg and plead for my students to come to office hours. "It's free one on one tutoring from the guy who writes the test…
Not to say anything about you, but when I was learning physics, either I thought the professor was really good in which case I would usually understand the material just from lecture, or the professor was not good, in which case going to office hours wouldn't help and I would seek other resources, like YouTube videos from other teachers. A resource like OP's that could provide a different perspective and learning sty…
I actually deliberately varied my teaching style during office hours to account for just this. I got great feedback from the few students who actually came. But by the end, I just felt all the extra effort I was putting in to be a good teacher wasn't worth the psychic damage I took from bad students.
All this to say, being a good teacher, or trying to be a good teacher, in a university setting is extremely unrewarding. Your department chair and peers just want you to publish, and the good students just don't make up for the hoards of unappreciative and entitled students who have all the tools in the world to make your life hell.
Re: Show HN: I made a cheap alternative to college-level math & physics tutoring
#67I am 53 and cramming while relearning linear algebra, statistics, and calculus, after a 30 year break from college, in preparation for my first semester at GA Tech's online MS CS program in the fall. I love this! But...before I check it out, I'm going to be surprised if it competes with the already-incredible free help i've gotten from chatgpt-3.5. Recently I asked it the following (where it made a mistake that confu…
I wish there was a Discord community of people who are teaching themselves Mathematics with the help of books, videos, etc.
It's not strictly mathematics, but obviously there are a number of mathematics courses in the cirriculum.
Re: Show HN: I made a cheap alternative to college-level math & physics tutoring
#68Re: Show HN: I made a cheap alternative to college-level math & physics tutoring
#69Re: Show HN: I made a cheap alternative to college-level math & physics tutoring
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yup, ChatGPT is not just a parrot but a master troll. It's purposely designed to give you a convincing answer, but there's nothing to ensure that it will be correct. And it will promptly say "actually I can't answer that question" when you ask it something it doesn't like for 'ethical' reasons, but it won't do that in any other circumstance; instead, it will just make stuff up. You have to explicitly say "please don'…
Try ChatGPT4. It's obvious that almost no one in this thread has. It still screws up, but unlike 3.5 it sometimes catches unreasonable answers and corrects itself. Case in point: the other day I asked it for the gain of a helical antenna with certain dimensions. It said "150 dBi," then said, basically, "Wait, no, that's nuts," and used a different approach to get the right answer. Parrots don't do that. If yours does…