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A high schooler writes about AI tools in the classroom

theatlantic.com

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Re: A high schooler writes about AI tools in the classroom

#191

Post by phoenixhaber »

djoldman wrote: post #146

Unfortunately, this kind of story will continue to be a popular one in newspapers and magazines, garnering lots of clicks. It feeds into the "everything is different now" sort of desperate helplessness people seem primed to adopt with respect to AI sometimes. Obviously the answer to testing and grading is to do it in the classroom. If a computer is required, it can't connect to the internet. Caught with a cellphone,…

I see your blue book exam and number two pencil and I reraise you a micro earbud smart glasses and wifi connection.

Re: A high schooler writes about AI tools in the classroom

#192

Post by Spooky23 »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #92
underlipton wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Same with college; it wasn't exactly networking when someone I knew paid someone to do their homework for them. Right, that's delegating.

I certainly hope that doctors, civil engineers & researchers aren't doing too much delegating in college.

Doctors are already running to ChatGPT. I went to an urgent care the other day and the PA regurgitated what the LLM told me in the waiting room.

Re: A high schooler writes about AI tools in the classroom

#193

Post by Dylan16807 »

godelski wrote: post #154
djoldman wrote: post #146

Unfortunately, this kind of story will continue to be a popular one in newspapers and magazines, garnering lots of clicks. It feeds into the "everything is different now" sort of desperate helplessness people seem primed to adopt with respect to AI sometimes. Obviously the answer to testing and grading is to do it in the classroom. If a computer is required, it can't connect to the internet. Caught with a cellphone,…

Are you suggesting kids spend longer times in school or suggesting kids spend less time on education?

If testing is taking up so much time it can't fit inside schools then my god definitely have them spend less time on education.

In high school, with so many hours of classes per day, homework should be a small part of the day. There's enough time to get the important parts into the actual classroom. If homework is a very large amount of time, then there should be less homework.

Re: A high schooler writes about AI tools in the classroom

#194

Post by Spooky23 »

latchkey wrote: post #72
hrunt wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not what's happening in these schools. Many children have no outside-of-school work -- at all. My two children have had many classes with no homework up through 8th grade. And this is in a highly regarded, very competitive school district. From what I can tell, this is mostly a parent-led thing, well supported by overworked teachers who are more than willing to avoid even more work grading out-of-school assig…

> overworked teachers who are more than willing to avoid even more work grading out-of-school assignments. This seems like where we'd take advantage of AI to grade the assignments. AI could take the first pass and then the teachers can proof it, cutting down the overall time spent.

The parents hate homework because little Johnny has travel baseball and AAU.

My son goes a fancy schmancy school. The average kid is easily working 10-11 hours a day. Football kids start their day at 5:30 AM.

Re: A high schooler writes about AI tools in the classroom

#195

Post by libraryofbabel »

phoenixhaber wrote: post #191
djoldman wrote: post #146

Unfortunately, this kind of story will continue to be a popular one in newspapers and magazines, garnering lots of clicks. It feeds into the "everything is different now" sort of desperate helplessness people seem primed to adopt with respect to AI sometimes. Obviously the answer to testing and grading is to do it in the classroom. If a computer is required, it can't connect to the internet. Caught with a cellphone,…

I see your blue book exam and number two pencil and I reraise you a micro earbud smart glasses and wifi connection.

Raise you a Faraday Cage.

Re: A high schooler writes about AI tools in the classroom

#196

Post by Spooky23 »

OmarAssadi wrote: post #138
Spooky23 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My son’s middle school English teacher comes up with various schemes to make it hard to use AI, or if you do, it makes your ideas better. The magic of AI is it amplifies what’s there. Smart or diligent people get better. Dumb and lazy people kick the can down the road.

Do you happen to have any examples, if you're allowed to share and comfortable doing so? Always found differences in teaching styles and curriculum interesting as is, but I am curious about how others are balancing the new additional challenges of combating LLMs without making the material significantly more difficult to understand.

One example was she asked the kids to pick a variety of alternate ways to tell the story. My son chose to break down a book into a comic with like 10 pages. One kid did a song.

He hit a wall because his aspirations hit the limits of his pencil skills. Enter AI. He used an early Google AI (I think it was called Duet) to generate comic style imagery to put in the comic cells.

Proud dad moment - the teacher loved it. The AI image generator takes the skill barrier out and let him focus on the assignment — telling a 300 page story in a couple of dozen comic cells.

Re: A high schooler writes about AI tools in the classroom

#197

Post by bo1024 »

alphazard wrote: post #171

The lesson here is adapt or die. The things they thought were important or difficult or impressive are no longer any of those things. Regurgitating information on a test or generating prose from the notes you took in class are tasks which are easy to stereotype, and now readily automated. Rather than framing this as destroying education, it should be interpreted as proof that these tasks were always shallow. AI is st…

There's a lot more to adapting than that. "Project-oriented creative work" builds on foundational skills. Basic knowledge, logic, numeracy, etc. That stuff all needs to be developed in the brain before you can use it to do interesting and valuable creative work. A lot of that stuff gets developed by hard work training on exercises that, yep, AI already knows how to do.

Pocket calculators have been available for 50+ years. Would you hire an engineer who couldn't instantly multiply 8 times 7? What about one who couldn't tell you the difference between linear growth and exponential growth? These are examples of skills that need to be learned, even if they're available externally, so that technical and creative work can build on them.

Re: A high schooler writes about AI tools in the classroom

#198

Post by Terr_ »

Telemakhos wrote: post #180
ethbr1 wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No phones in class, at scale and enforced, feels like a last 5 years thing in K-12. And the trend was very much towards increased digital testing, pre-LLM. This is pivoting back to paper-based, but it's going to be as messy and slow of a transition as the no-mobile-device one was. Especially given how much money there is in "AI". And hamfistedly-handed, will likely leave another generation fucked over with regards to…

"No phones" was the rule back in the 2000s, when phones were flip phones or pagers for drug deals. Then helicopter parents demanded to be able to contact their children at any time, including during classes, so phones were allowed. There was the added bonus of "What if there's a shooting? I need to be able to call my kid during a shooting!" Now, phones are not allowed again. The takeaway is that phones should never h…

Right: If parents needed to contact students during class--or vice-versa--there was never[0] any technical barrier to that!

You don't need hundreds of distraction/cheating pocket computers in a giant invisible wireless network for that, a school could easily route the information if the organization chose to do so.

The technology was used as an end-run around an organizational barrier.

Re: A high schooler writes about AI tools in the classroom

#199

Post by Terr_ »

greenspam wrote: post #174

Imagine back in the days when calculators were just invented. An 8 year old kid might have the similar complain: “my classmate finished a 4 digits number multiplication problem in 5 seconds which generally took 1mins.” People might say, in the long term, the kid who cheated would be less proficient in arithmetic, which turned out to be true. But when you think about it, it seems not the end of the world when most hig…

The two situations are not analogous.

The kind of task is not the same. With a calculator, you are delegating a very specific, bounded, and well-defined task. Being unable to approximate non-integer square roots by hand isn't the same as not knowing what square roots mean or when they are applicable. However with LLMs, people are often (trying to) delegate their executive-function and planning.

Another way to tell that the tasks are qualitatively different is to look at what levels/kinds of errors users will tolerate. A company selling calculators that gave subtly but undeniably-wrong answers 5% of the time would rightfully go bankrupt.

If you want to compare LLMs to something of yesteryear, it's closer to hiring someone to do the work for you: That's always been considered cheating, regardless of how cheaply the accomplice works or how badly they screw up.

Re: A high schooler writes about AI tools in the classroom

#200

Post by Waterluvian »

I struggled in high school. I went off my ADHD meds in favour of a social life, a choice I don’t regret. But it made classwork and homework absolute torture. The torture mostly sucked but I did help me grow. I’m convinced I would have cheated if I had access to ChatGPT, and that’s pretty upsetting to think about when thinking about today’s students.b

I hope that how we educate changes, forces by AI, improving in ways that would have helped people like me. I worry that might mean lessened access for all, if it requires the cost to go up.

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