My little sister's use of ChatGPT for homework is heartbreaking

What is the point of homework? It's supposed to be self-directed learning and reinforcement.

But what is homework really? It's often confusing. It's time-consuming; you already spent 8 hours at school, and now you're spending more hours "at school" at home. If you can't get it, you have to hope your family members will help you (many can't or won't or simply aren't there, for many reasons). It takes a whole day (or more) to get the school's feedback and help (if it's available). And it's never fun.

Growing up, it took me countless hours to work through 10 math problems, because I had a learning disability. I find processing abstract non-visual information very hard. It made it worse that I had no practical problems to work through, no visual or audible feedback, no different ways to look at the problem. The school didn't care and the homework didn't change just for me. My parents sat with me for hours but my brain just wouldn't work.

For years I was given 1-on-1 tutoring, where the tutor struggled to get me to focus and try to solve the simplest things. At 15, I learned programming and developed computer programs in order to try to figure out the problems and answer them (if I could figure out how it worked in code, that would explain it enough that I could understand). It took longer, but I could actually understand them if I gave myself a different way of looking at and solving the problem. And for some reason, I, a child, was the person who had to figure out my own learning models and alternatives; the god damn "professionals" would be fine with me banging my head against a wall and failing.

ChatGPT isn't the problem. Homework is just stupid. This rote abstract learning model applied uniformly to everyone is stupid. The giant amount of time needed after already spending all day at school is stupid. The things we are forced to learn at school, which we promptly forget, are stupid. Young people's education itself is stupid.

Here I am, a 40 year old man, forgotten almost everything I learned in school. Yet I make a good salary, I can take care of myself. And I don't solve math problems manually, I ask a computer to solve them for me. Because why the hell would I do an error-prone human task manually when a machine will do it right? In fact, I am learning math right now, because I am building a shed and other wood projects. I've learned more about geometry and trig in the past 2 weeks than in the past 40 years, because I have a real-world thing that I can understand, and something fun to work on that makes me proud when I finish it. It's self-directed, and I'm using a ton of resources on the internet to figure it out, but I'm doing it. It's sinking in. If I had that as a kid, I'd be a damn math genius by now.

If you are expected to perform without assistance, then the instructor is failing to meet the needs of the students and doing them a disservice. If the goal is to get the students to exercise, an e-bike may well be the best tool to allow a student to get from a lower point to a higher point. A student who cannot do an hour of sustained running but can do an hour of sustained assisted cycling can have those assistances removed over time, enabling longer endurance while still maintaining the hour of time will have made significant strides in health.

I doubt you could run a marathon today, unprompted. You would start by going shorter distances, working your way up.

This is not the same as ChatGPT doing the work.

> Same goes with the math/english/science class - if teacher tells you to do the homework yourself, you should do it yourself, not to ask friend/parent/ChatGPT to do it for you.

An instructor who forbids assistance is an instructor who deludes themself about their performance when they were a student. Not all learn to fish the same way, and being shown how in a different way can mean all the difference.

This is not the same as ChatGPT doing the work.

> Outside of class context, people are free to do whatever - ride bikes, cars, ask ChatGPT for questions, ask your friend to write birthday cards for you, copy most of the presentation you gave at work from vendor's whitepaper, etc.. No one will complain.

I don't know what work you do but that would be seen as lazy at my workplace and frowned upon.

There is a difference between seeking assistance ("Explain this in shorter terms") vs. absolve oneself of the burden of work ("take these points and turn them into paragraphs"). If OP's sister was asking questions ("Explain this poem") and then working from that to something that was her own work, that would be one thing. The fact that she is simply copying verbatim from the machine, thoughtless and without considering the meaning -- that's what is upsetting here.

I don't know in the US, but in my part of the world, teachers have always assumed that anything that isn't done in person in front of an examiner has not value because students do cheat or get help. Maybe you would get a bit of extra-credits for the homework and that's it.

And for high-stake competitive exams, it's 100% in-person.

Typewriters weren't able to do much else. At least, not the ones you could easily get.

Aired 1993, February 25:

https://youtu.be/nN9wNvEnn-Q?si=eqUWiZTxYach3db-&t=975