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

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

#311

Post by casey2 »

ikiris wrote: post #145
Freak_NL wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a competition. Teach her to use her brain, and hope school will end up being a net positive. You can't fix other parents and their children. It starts now for you by the way. Keep her away from screens for now, and be a good role model when handling devices (and the apps on them). You have ten years to show them what computers can do for you, but also what being the master of your own cognitive skills will g…

Suggest watching the movie gattaca to understand what happens to kids of parents who think like this in an extreme version. The problem is if you ignore the reality of the competition it’s basically setting your kid up to fail due to prisoner dilemma dynamics.

You have already failed your kid if you don't teach them to use their brain. Education is what let's people transcend the rat race of life, acquiring knowledge to use for the rat race isn't education in this sense.

Learn to live on lentils and you will not have to be subservient to the king.

If you want your kids to be subservient to the king then of course they should use ChatGPT, and you should want schools to allow it otherwise we will just have more Asian and Indian students "getting ahead"

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

#312

Post by distances »

LudwigNagasena wrote: post #217
distances wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of guidance does 11 year old need for homework? Me and my siblings were doing all of it independently pretty much from the start, parents were only involved if there was some tough nut that we needed help with.

Guidance not to cheat yourself out of your own future including your job prospects?

Could be useful in this case, but

> does all their school work without any oversight at all

I would definitely expect this to be the norm for 11 year olds, not some case of parental neglect as portrayed here.

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

#313

Post by Pet_Ant »

bestouff wrote: post #256
jjice wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Parents that believe it is solely the school/teacher's job to educate their child. My sister works with kids on their speech at a school and she's said that it's _bad_ how many children can't read or tell you what letter their first name starts with. She says that the teachers are getting flack at parent-teacher meetings because of this, but those are things that their parents teach them! I thought the "kids are il…

I'm rising 3 kids (in France, I don't know if it changes much). We have banned TV, very heavily restricted phones, and we closely follow homework. I'm persuaded it makes a difference wrt parents that don't do that, but somehow isn't a sure fire way of being a "great parent".

I don't know how that helps. Watching TV with my kid has been the best way to teach him I've found. There are great videos and shows that you can watch together and then discuss afterwords. Baking videos. Chemistry. Physics. History. Seeing something on TV is great way to fire up the imagination and inspiration for real world activities.

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

#314

Post by randomcatuser »

i found the same thing with programming... you start using AI and then all of a sudden, you find yourself not writing code you could've written yourself (probably with better organization too...)

Does anyone have strategies for actually thinking while using AI?

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

#315

Post by Balgair »

So, I have little ones too. And AI, to me, ends up being a tool. One that will very much help out.

However, the post brings up a good point: Education isn't cheap.

Looking through the history of pedagogy, 'teaching' has never been easy.

We managed to get around this, somewhat, in the developed world for about 150 years or so. Mostly to keep the factories working cheaply, but we also found out that an educated populace was a heck of a jolt for national security too. Not a bad run at all!

But industrial education still is expensive, about 30% or so of the budget for a US state (very rough % there).

Now, we've got AIs, and the methods we found in industrial education to make it a bit cheaper, well, they don't really work anymore.

There's gonna be this little gap period here with AIs where we have the old methods and new tech, and it's not going to go well. Education of the youth, yeah, that's still going to be a huge thing. But it's going to be a bit more expensive and messy for a while.

Fortunately, we do have AIs to help out with that and run through the processes faster, get to a 'good-ish' state of things again. But things like homework, essays, 500 person freshmen lectures, those little cheats short-cuts, those things aren't going to work anymore (and let's be honest, never really did anyway).

What will work? I don't know yet. But I think it will be even cheaper overall, and will decidedly not look like what we have today. No more prom kings, no more homecomings, no more lectures, no more homework. Things like A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, sure, that's a given. But Starfleet Academy isn't going to be big on sitting down. I think it'll be more like away missions mixed in with some St. John's/Oxbridge approaches. A lot more teachers with a lot more training/AI help, that's for sure. And that's not cheap either.

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

#316

Post by Yoric »

lukeschlather wrote: post #164
Yoric wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have many teachers among my friends. So far, they're mostly powerless. If a student is creative, there is basically nothing that will prevent them from cheating at any homework/exam. My father, who was a math teacher, already faced the problem mid-90s, as cheap mobile phones became available in my country. Things have only gotten worse since then. ChatGPT is only one more brick in the wall.

The problem is tests/quizzes and especially standardized ones. They have never been good teaching tools, and teachers have been railroaded into using them because they provide a blunt way to measure outcomes at a population level. But real teaching is 1:1 and teachers have a lot of power, it's just stuff that doesn't scale and you can't mandate organizationally. But this has mostly always been the case. Trying to mea…

That is true, but the problem shows up even with open-ended tests. In my country, we generally don't use tests/quizzes, and nevertheless, every year, many students attempt to cheat – and some of them undoubtedly get away with it.

Regardless, I agree, attempting to assess the progress of a cheater is a fool's errand.

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

#317

Post by fragmede »

bangaladore wrote: post #305
generalizations wrote: post #205

Using ChatGPT like this is most likely a symptom, not the problem. An 11 year old is naturally a curious creature and if she's turned her brain off to the point of mindlessly solving her homework like this, there's something very wrong with her environment.

Disagree. I'd bet if you asked people if they enjoyed their homework when they were in elementary / middle school most would say no. That's not the problem here. Actual homework will not last in the age of LLMs.

"Here's 5 bullet points, go home and use ChatGPT to generate an essay, then bring that essay to class, and then we'll discuss why it's shit. and then we'll work on corrections during class. Bonus points if I can't tell if you used ChatGPT or not."

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

#318

Post by MichaelZuo »

rcxdude wrote: post #295
MichaelZuo wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who mentioned ‘gpa’?

how else did you intend percentile to be inferred in your comment?

Based on their actual merit?

For example, if someone on HN says ‘a 50th percentile intern’ at a certain company, they probably wouldn’t be suggesting the intern literally has a gpa in the 50th percentile among all the other interns at that company.

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

#319

Post by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF »

dcchambers wrote: post #274
jjice wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Parents that believe it is solely the school/teacher's job to educate their child. My sister works with kids on their speech at a school and she's said that it's _bad_ how many children can't read or tell you what letter their first name starts with. She says that the teachers are getting flack at parent-teacher meetings because of this, but those are things that their parents teach them! I thought the "kids are il…

> My sister works with kids on their speech at a school and she's said that it's _bad_ how many children can't read or tell you what letter their first name starts with This just blows my mind. Literally the first thing I taught my Toddler once he started learning letters was how to spell his own name.

I still remember how to fingerspell my old name, I'm not sure why mom taught me that.

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

#320

Post by [deleted] »

bestouff wrote: post #256
jjice wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Parents that believe it is solely the school/teacher's job to educate their child. My sister works with kids on their speech at a school and she's said that it's _bad_ how many children can't read or tell you what letter their first name starts with. She says that the teachers are getting flack at parent-teacher meetings because of this, but those are things that their parents teach them! I thought the "kids are il…

I'm rising 3 kids (in France, I don't know if it changes much). We have banned TV, very heavily restricted phones, and we closely follow homework. I'm persuaded it makes a difference wrt parents that don't do that, but somehow isn't a sure fire way of being a "great parent".

[deleted]
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