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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

#251

Post by jeremyjh »

DiscourseFan wrote: post #247
jeremyjh wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So teachers are...proctors? No reason to have every teacher recording their own lectures. One teacher per grade per district? Per state? Outsourced to the lowest bidder who generates it with AI?

Hey now we’re talking! But seriously, teaching in public schools these days relies so much on technology, youtube, that it makes no sense to have teacher’s as paid professionals, just get subscriptions to technology services for the kids and teach them how to work them. I think we still need places to socialize kids, but that’s a different job. Anyway, yes, too many teachers are simply there to enforce unnecessary so…

Did your kids spend a year doing virtual classes? Our district here did a pretty good job compared to most, but for many kids it was basically a lost year.

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

#252

Post by godelski »

AppleBananaPie wrote: post #190
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'm surprised the answer of doing all exercises (including essay writing) in class is apparently not obvious. High school me was a moron and should not be trusted to do the real work and people who know better should force him to practice the skills lol Once he's grown and has a job he will one day realize and be thankful for the teachers that forced him to do the work. Obviously not true for all students but I don't…

  > I'm surprised the answer of doing all exercises (including essay writing) in class is apparently not obvious.
Because that results in less education time. If you do homework in class then you have to give up lecture time.

Of course, the other option is to extend school time.

Here's a good litmus test: if something seems very obvious, you're likely missing some hidden complexity.

It's not a perfect test, but if it's obvious to you and not to the people closer to the problem then there really should be alarm bells going off in your head. That feeling of "this is weird" is your brain telling you "I'm missing something" not "everyone is so dumb" (well... not mutually exclusive)

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

#253

Post by BrenBarn »

nunez wrote: post #67
zdragnar wrote: post #5

I recently found out that my nephew's school had no take-home homework before high school, instead having kids complete assignments during class time. At first, I was flabbergasted that they would deny kids the discipline building of managing unstructured time without direct supervision. Homework- at home- seemed like such a fundamental part of the schooling experience. Now, I'm thinking that was pretty much they onl…

There seems to be two schools od thought on this from what I've learned from my wife's experiences. One school has been abdicating homework for more in-classroom practice, as homework adds more grading and scheduling load on the teacher for little overall benefit. The core idea behind this is that motivated students will always practice at home, even if they aren't explicitly asked to. Unmotivated students --- usuall…

What do they do in the flipped classroom when (not if :-) some students come to class having done absolutely nothing at home?

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

#254

Post by BrenBarn »

causal wrote: post #202
mrob wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Homework only works as discipline building for people who don't need the help anyway. For normal students all it builds is resentment.

And robs children of family and play time. Play is critical work for the child mind.

But if that family and play time is being used to watch pointless videos online, or go down some sort of horror spiral with an LLM, that critical work is also not being done.

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

#255

Post by BrenBarn »

Balgair wrote: post #70
dham wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's another side of this. The teachers have gotten used to technology, too. They don't want to grade papers by hand anymore.

My SO was a TA in college, so I can echo this. You'd get a stack of 120 blue books to grade in a week's time a few times a quarter. The grading was entirely just checking if the student used a set of key words and had a certain length. This was a near universal method across the University for blue book exams. Honestly, an LLM would be a better grader than most stressed out grad students. Everyone has been phoning it…

I was a TA and knew many TAs, and no one I knew did things that way. (To some extent this can depend on the field though.)

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

#256

Post by godelski »

gpt5 wrote: post #133
monknomo wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the lefty one is more accurately that the children cannot help what kind of home their parents provide. Maybe their parents have a responsibility to do better, but if the parents are not delivering on their responsibility, should the children bear the consequence?

I think that both of you are close but missing the real moral debate. Assume for a moment that doing homework is a positive thing for kids. The debate is whether you should give homework if there are potentially kids whose home environment is not conducive for doing homework at home. I.e. do you choose a path that lifts the average (providing homework), but could put some kids at a disadvantage, or do you aim for the…

There's a simpler way to re-frame your question: Prioritarianism

Or: should we help the worst off at the expense of everyone else?

Most people will answer no. Mostly because this is a race to the bottom. And in a framework like education, you risk a slippery slope of making the bar progressively lower.

Left wing politics tends to focus on egalitarianism, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. This is the current school structure. Both the bottom and the top students get lower quality education in order to provide the best education for most. It is a logistics problem.

But your framing is bad. It need not be a zero sum game. We can lift the floor without costs to the middle or top.

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

#257

Post by godelski »

monknomo wrote: post #118
glitchc wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For many/most students, the home is not particularly conducive for doing homework a variety of reasons. I think this speaks to the parents and the type of home environment that they create. This is one of the major sources of disagreement between the right and the left, where the former (sometimes strongly) feel the parents bear responsibility for the type of environment their kids grow up in while the latter (equa…

I think the lefty one is more accurately that the children cannot help what kind of home their parents provide. Maybe their parents have a responsibility to do better, but if the parents are not delivering on their responsibility, should the children bear the consequence?

  > Maybe their parents have a responsibility to do better, but if the parents are not delivering on their responsibility, should the children bear the consequence?
This has always been the fundamental position for me. They're children. They don't have (legal) autonomy. They have no (legal) independence. There is no contention between the belief that parents should bear the responsibility for their children while also being in favor of programs like free school lunches.

I cannot understand how people are against such things. Sure, I don't want to pay for other people's kids, but what's the alternative? They starve? I guess we could make people sterile until they prove they have the income to support children and implement programs to constantly monitor the children's well being. But honestly a nation wide sterilization program and child monitoring service sounds wildly more expensive than these other programs. Not to mention insanely dystopian. Sounds much cheaper to just hand out free meals at school.

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

#258

Post by godelski »

glitchc wrote: post #128
monknomo wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the lefty one is more accurately that the children cannot help what kind of home their parents provide. Maybe their parents have a responsibility to do better, but if the parents are not delivering on their responsibility, should the children bear the consequence?

The counterargument is : If there are no consequences, what is the incentive to bear responsibility? Ultimately this argument does not have a clear answer because it's driven by beliefs, not facts.

  > If there are no consequences, what is the incentive to bear responsibility?
Sorry, but if a starving child is not enough of an incentive, I'm not sure we're talking about people that can be incentivized.

Either they want to provide for their children but are unable to or they just don't care.

Punishing the former does nothing to help the child, likely only exacerbates that situation as, last I checked... parents who care for their children really do not like their children being taken away from them.

Punishing the latter, you can only incentivize the latter to maybe do the bare minimum, skirting whatever they can get away with. You end up in an endless cat and mouse game needing to constantly check in and monitor kids. I mean child abuse is already illegal, and we don't seem to be able to get this problem solved.

Personally, I think it is a lot cheaper to just feed kids than to fund the services needed to constantly monitor parents, all the legal fees to prosecute them, and then all the fees to put children in foster care where the situation might repeat itself. Feeding them also has the added benefit of them not starving while all those things are happening. It guarantees the child gets food.

I'm all for punishing negligent parents, I'm not sure anyone is against that. But you know what I'm also against? Starving kids. Stop making this false dichotomy. It just ends up with starving kids.

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

#259

Post by Aerroon »

mrheosuper wrote: post #236
AppleBananaPie wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised the answer of doing all exercises (including essay writing) in class is apparently not obvious. High school me was a moron and should not be trusted to do the real work and people who know better should force him to practice the skills lol Once he's grown and has a job he will one day realize and be thankful for the teachers that forced him to do the work. Obviously not true for all students but I don't…

> High school me was a moron and should not be trusted to do the real work and people who know better should force him to practice the skills lol I knew some people doing great at high school due to being forced to study. Then they taste the "freedom" in college and fail hard because no one tells them what to do now.

They might perform well, but might hate every second of it. I was like that.

For example, high school poisoned reading for me. I hated fiction for several years after high school.

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