This is exactly what I did.
Show HN: I made a cheap alternative to college-level math & physics tutoring
181–190 of 209 posts
Re: Show HN: I made a cheap alternative to college-level math & physics tutoring
#182Good plan,I want to try it Now
Re: Show HN: I made a cheap alternative to college-level math & physics tutoring
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good thing I wasn't teaching physics ;) 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 un…
> the psychic damage I took from bad students. > the hoards of unappreciative and entitled students who have all the tools in the world to make your life hell. Okay, now I'm more curious about your experiences here and need some details. What kind of school were you at? US based? R1? Ivy league? Were you teaching undergrad? Were you tenured? What kinds of classes exactly, undergrad, grad, upper division, etc? Full on…
R1 non-ivy engineering-focused university. I was teaching undergraduate math. Non-tenure track. I taught a lot during grad school[0], and then taught some more as an adjunct professor while I was looking for tenure track jobs. I taught everything from pre-calculus algebra and trigonometry up through undergraduate linear algebra. I taught a couple of 100+ student sections, but the majority of my classes were 20-30 people.
This was a decade ago, so my memory is a little fuzzy, but talking about students this way was pretty common at my university. So much so that a committee was formed to investigate the underlying problems. The committee found a few.
1. The math placement exam was trivially easy to cheat.
2. Students were encouraged to cheat on the math placement exam because the college of engineering only accepted students who placed into calculus or higher in their first semester.
3. The university as a whole scored freakishly high on student entitlement metrics. E.g. lots of kids with wealthy parents who assumed paying for college (as opposed to scholarships or loans) implies they deserve to pass classes with minimal effort.
To address the first two problems we switched to in-person math placement exams with ID checks and negotiated with the college of engineering to see to what degree they could budge on their policies. I suspect the third issue remains a problem.
[0] My university was a bit unusual in that grad students actually taught classes, not just TA'd. Helped keep class sizes down when you had dozens of extra lecturers who worked for peanuts.
Re: Show HN: I made a cheap alternative to college-level math & physics tutoring
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Under what conditions does the sun appear blue?" (correct answer, on Mars) If you want to tilt the conversation towards a string of wrong answers, start off with "What color is the sun?" "Are you sure?" "I saw the sun and it was blue." "Under what conditions does the sun appear blue?" "Does the sun appear blue on Mars?" This had ChatGPT basically telling me that the sun was yellow 100%. Of course it's wrong, on Mars…
>Of course it's wrong, on Mars the sun is blue I’m not an Astrophysicist but already this seems like shaky ground. Apparently at certain times like during sunsets the sun can appear blue on Mars, but it’s not generally true like your comment suggests. Moreover if you ask GPT4 about sunsets on Mars it knows they can look blue. I’m not sure I can conclude much from the examples given.
You don't have to be an Astrophysicist. We have color photographs. Nothing in anyone's model of how things work can refute direct evidence, if evidence and the understanding of the world collide, it is the understanding that gets altered to fit the evidence.
And I'm not astrophysicist either, I'm just playing with a stacked deck, because I have trained my new feed to give me quirky (if not mostly useless) neat bits of information. For example, if anyone writes about Voyager, I'm likely to hear about it in a few days.
"Apparently at certain times, like during sunsets, the sun can appear blue on Mars" - Yes, it can. And my question was "under what conditions can the sun appear blue?" It failed and continued to fail, even in the presence of guiding hints (But what about Mars?)
Perhaps not much can be concluded from the above test, except that ChatGPT can be coaxed into failure modes. We knew that already, the user interface clearly states it can give wrong answers.
What is fascinating to me is how people seem to convince themselves that a device that sometimes gives wrong answers is somehow going to fix it's underlying algorithm which permits wrong answers to somehow always be correct.
GPT-4 is an improvement, but the tools it uses to improve upon the answers are more like patches on top of the original algorithm. For example, as I believe you said, it generates a math program now to double-check math answers. The downsides of this is that it is still at risk of a small chance of generating the wrong program, and a smaller risk of that wrong program agreeing with its prior wrong answer. For a system that makes errors very infrequently, that's an effective way of reducing errors. But for right now, the common man isn't testing ChatGPT for quality, it's finding answers that seem to be good and celebrating. It's like mass confirmation bias. After the hype dies down a bit, we'll likely have a better understanding of what advances in this field we really have.
Re: Show HN: I made a cheap alternative to college-level math & physics tutoring
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
Man you really made me think. If you just blankly asked me what I thought, I would have written your comment verbatim as a fault of the state schooler. I'll be digesting this for a while. I rarely mention it in public, it really meant a lot to me to get someone's thoughts on this, and it was a Moment for me. Cheers.
My description probably painted this type as more assholish than I intended—it’s mostly that they’re willing, even in fairly casual conversation, to really dig into fine points, to play devil’s advocate (maybe without saying that’s what they’re doing), to pursue any little thing that they don’t immediately get or that seems contradictory. Conversationally, they poke, they prod, they chase. I assume this is from being…
On the other hand, a passive student will let you go through an entire proof only to raise his hand when you finish and ask something that implies he did not understand the proof from the start.
Why didn't you say so? You wasted both of our time... I even turned around a few times and asked if everyone was following!
I know it's hard to understand when you don't understand. But I don't know how to deal with this problem and the senior lecturers don't seem to know how to, either...
t. just started lecturing
Re: Show HN: I made a cheap alternative to college-level math & physics tutoring
#186Couple of UX focussed comments: The site was impossible to use on FF mobile without using desktop-view. https://www.explanations.app/dat153qkJtTcHf9Fbm1B/overview , for example has the content frame as a slither on the right. Signing in with Google and getting a different name is disconcerting. It's not clear what a "server" is? I searched "electromagnetic" and "electro-magnetism" but got no results ... "Electricity…
Thank you for the thoughtful comments, I appreciate it. FF mobile: you're correct, this is not mobile responsive yet - I will work on a future version to fix this. >Different names with Google Login Is it that it shows "feynman-mvp" which is different from explanations.app, or is it that your name is shown to be different? >What's a "server" I was trying to re-use the same concept from Discord "servers", a community…
It's very confusing how you use ">"
It is generally used to quote literally a passage from the person your replying, for example you wrote this:
> FF mobile: you're correct, this is not mobile responsive yet
and here, in a new line, people usually respond to what is quoted above ↑
Re: Show HN: I made a cheap alternative to college-level math & physics tutoring
#187I'm going to give this a go, I've been self studying linear algebra, and there are certain questions that I can't seem to find good answers or explanations to online that ChatGPT or Claude cannot answer sufficiently. The one concern I have with this, is the async nature of it. One of the reasons I like using ChatGPT or Claude (or a real human if I can find one) to learn is because I can ask clarifying questions and t…
Ah I see why you'd want realtime interaction. In earlier versions there used to be voice chat, so when the learner-and-teacher happen to both be free, you'd talk in real-time. It was removed to focus on the async video aspect, but hearing what you said puts that back in my radar... When you mention "good prompts", is that in the context of AI, or with asking questions in general? Is it easy/hard to create good prompt…
Appreciate you following up! I plan to sign up over the weekend which is normally when I do my longer blocks of studying and have more questions. I think that what I mean is that sometimes if I ask for an explanation about a topic or question, I don't get the magical answer that answers my question after my initial prompt. That is to say, I typically need to ask 5-6 clarifying questions to an LLM to get the explanation that makes it click for me. This can be by asking for more examples, asking it to clarify certain points, fitting an example to another topic I know, etc... I think that while I was talking about it in the context of LLM tutors, the same logic also applies for human tutors as well. It's very hard for me to precisely formulate a question in one-shot that will get the right answer as you don't know what you don't know. And the reason I'm asking LLMs or a human in general is because I can't find a good explanation on the internet as it's typically something very niche or precise. Which is why I think it's good to have a back and forth.
Re: Show HN: I made a cheap alternative to college-level math & physics tutoring
#188> 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…
I never understood what office hours were for. In college, I felt like it was better to just spend a few hours working on homework problems, how could anyone explain this stuff to me if I couldn't learn it on my own?
I TA'd some classes also (as an undergrad and grad student) and tried to help people with their homework, but in the back of my head I couldn't help but feel that it wasn't the the most effective approach.
I can imagine some things that I don't grock yet (like some computer graphics algorithms that I just cargo cult, or machine learning in general), maybe this is blocking me from learning them, I just need to ask someone who knows it to explain the intuition to me?
Re: Show HN: I made a cheap alternative to college-level math & physics tutoring
#189Earlier 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'…
Thereby passing the Turing Test with flying colors ;)
The Frank Abignail test too
Re: Show HN: I made a cheap alternative to college-level math & physics tutoring
#190I 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…
As someone who has used linear algebra, statistics and calculus as part of my day-to-day work for years, I would be very cautious of relying on ChatGPT as your "tutor". Occasionally I've tried to substitute ChatGPT for the shelf of reference books in my office and nearly always had poor results. The trouble is that the outputs of these models, by their very nature, look convincing . Even as an expert it takes a fair…
ChatGPT hallucinated badly when I was trying to learn about generating functions. It took me a good twenty minutes to figure out that I did understand it and the computer was just making things up. I do not use ChatGPT for learning anymore.