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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

#471
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see it more like calculators. Using a calculator isn't inherently good or bad in itself. If you're using a calculator to fake learning the intuitions and mechanics of division on your math homework then that's bad - regardless of how many other good use cases for calculators can be talked about in a separate context.

Calculators have a smaller CO2 foot print

It's an important discussion, as are many other tangents, but it's not really related to what the post was discussing as problematic.

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

#472

Let's dig deeper. Level 0: this is bad. Level -1: The teaching methods need to change. Level -2: It's a glimpse into all of our future, not just children. Level -3: Who controls the AI controls the world.

>Who controls the AI controls the world. Is this any different than the previous tech booms (or any industrial revolution for that matter). The US developed and exported almost all of the consumer (Google, Microsoft, Facebook) and infrastructural software (IP, Verisign, Linux). The US domination through software is so normalized that the limit of these imports by highly sovereign countries are seen as dangerous or in…

The US exported Linux? Linus Torvalds is Finnish and made it in Finland though?

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

#473
post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Restaurants is a few places where a tablet is a godsend. Children aren't always involved in adults conversations, so they get (obviously) bored at the table. A tablet guarantees some time off to the parents. Now obviously is a problem if you go to the restaurant often, in our case it's once every few months and having them watching a movie makes going to the restaurant possible again (we waited 6 years before we coul…

>Restaurants is a few places where a tablet is a godsend. Children aren't always involved in adults conversations, so they get (obviously) bored at the table. A tablet guarantees some time off to the parents. as a fellow restaurant patron : I don't care that your kid is bored or if you can't afford a baby-sitter -- what I do care about is listening to the latest baby shark or whatever other youtube-brainrot-babysitte…

Children don't get the tablet immediately, they eat without the tablet and get it when they are done, so there is plenty of time to chat, with opportunities for talking with the adult.

That being said, everything you say makes sense, but the reality is if you don't get a break every couple of months for a few hours, the parents don't perform, so from my perspective they (and myself) get a pass for the tablet.

As for the volume, they can lower it? I'm very careful making sure the volume is low, but I guess some people aren't careful.

This also assumes the children don't spend time with the parents. The parents could be spending many hours with the children so whatever happens at the restaurant is very small in the big picture.

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

#474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope you'll manage to turn that around. My five year old (nearly six) is allowed one episode of something suitable after school, and in the weekends after his swimming lessons something longer. I suspect we've lucked out with him in this regard though. He's currently rewatching Netflix' Hilda (which is really excellent, but typically for children maybe two years older), and he is simply engrossed. It's a struggle t…

Try and dig a bit outside netflix; there are plenty of excellent old Dutch (or failing that, German) children's shows.

There are some (Alfred J. Kwak, obviously, which he very much enjoyed), but it's too soon for foreign language productions without dubs, and what quality Dutch stuff does exist is often hard to find. Often you'll be relegated to watching these on YouTube, cut up in several parts, placed there by novice 'archivists'. There one day, gone another.

I'd pay for a service which simply allowed me to stream anything broadcast in the Netherlands, but no such thing exists. Old stuff is too hard to licence, so they don't bother. Some pirate stuff exists, but it's harder than it should be.

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

#475
post #402
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…

Depends on where you are. Some places have adopted fad curriculum for reading that results in illiteracy. https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/

Oh wow this is on the dot - this is something my sister has spoken to. The switch from phonics to (some other way of teaching reading by essentially guessing based on word shape that I can't recall the name of). It seems similar to common core math (not sure if that was just a New York thing) where no one thinks it's a good idea at first glance but it becomes standardized in schools still.

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

#476

I think one thing few are willing to admit is that a large blame for this can be placed on disinterested parents. Parents that believe it is solely the school/teacher's job to educate their child. When kids are at home, parents should be involved in the learning process. You don't have to be a helicopter and monitor everything, but you should take interest in the work your child is doing. If you check in at least onc…

The post looks like a result of ego defence mechanisms in action. “I keep giving crack cocaine and Xanax to my sister, and it made me realize the next generation is cooked!” Such a bizarre conclusion.

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

#477
post #159

I'm close to someone who teaches at a university, and they're making heavy use of in-room essays written in blue books. This ensures that the work is purely the students, but I think it also has the side-effect that the grader is also working manually. I kinda think maybe at earlier levels, most homework should be moved into the classroom and done on paper anyway? What's the point of homework if they're not going to…

> I'm close to someone who teaches at a university, and they're making heavy use of in-room essays written in blue books. This ensures that the work is purely the students, but I think it also has the side-effect that the grader is also working manually.

Sometimes the best way to prove authenticity is through inefficiency. It's a foundational principle of cryptography.

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

#478
post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

// a large blame for this can be placed on disinterested parents // Is this really something to which we need to attribute blame? I mean, after I learned how to program, I never again sat down and did 100 computations by hand. But I never felt a need to feel culpable or blame my parents. LLMs happened. They are not going away. There is not an employer on the planet who would prefer their employees to do 1/10th the wo…

By your own wording, before you learned programming, you learned to compute by hand. Then programming served as a way of automating what you already knew, but you learned it first, and that's the key issue. Don't skip the foundational learning step. LLMs are just today's flavor of automation. We've automated tasks in the past, and we will automate tasks in the future. Automation happened and will continue to happen r…

Back at the beginning of the 20th century, you had to learn both Latin and Greek to qualify for Harvard or Yale. Because they were foundational. How could you learn the classics without being able to read them? If all you ever read were translations of them, you miss out on so much...

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

#479
post #172

When I was in elementary school, my teachers told me it was very important to memorize multiplication tables because I wouldn't always have a calculator in my pocket. We know how that turned out. I asked an LLM the first example question (convert 3 minutes to seconds), and it provided not just the answer, but that there are 60 seconds per minutes, so that's 3 * 60 = 180. I don't think an 11 year old is harmed by that…

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

#480

Why does this 6th grader have math homework? Finns have less time in school every day and they still do better than Americans.

I believe the PISA comparison in this context is flawed. To compare any statistics, we must control for other variables, otherwise any conclusion about causal effects and relationships could be deeply wrong. In the education context, the most important variables are the economic background of the households, the active involvement of the parents in the education of the children, the amount of time spending on the sub…

Why would you argue like this?

You shift blame to the social issues, but that doesn't make any of that better. I mean, if the US has social problems that pull down the PISA scores, wouldn't the low score be justified then?

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