71–80 of 182 posts
The dirty secret on NYC schools is that the upper-middle class tends to send their kids to private schools unless they can get their kids into some gifted/talented public schools. The real experimentation on what tools will and will not work is happening there under the watchful eye of wealthy hyper-involved (see: comfy jobs w/ adequate spare time) parents. I don't know what level of digital tools is best for which t…
Even if you're pro-AI, there's a reason calculators are banned from math classes until a certain point. It seems like a no-brainer to have people learn on hammers before moving them to nailguns. I can't help but think of this Chesterton Quote: "It is, on the contrary, a thing analogous to writing one's own love-letters or blowing one's own nose. These things we want a man to do for himself, even if he does them badly…
This bans it from all teaching tools and materials as well.
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bigger reason to ban AI in public schools then. AI + neglectful parents is a disaster in the making.
Yes that would work out well if by this ban we could also properly fund schools to create enough teaching staff. But you and I both know that's not happening. So on the off-chance one of these tools (that even used AI in the background) could create a tool that actually worked well for, say, gifted public schools kids that don't need as much one-on-one attention, they could free up limited human teacher hours to give…
Even allowing for generous overhead a ridiculous small class size of 15 could afford $320 000/year salary.
Its not the money.
Even if you're pro-AI, there's a reason calculators are banned from math classes until a certain point. It seems like a no-brainer to have people learn on hammers before moving them to nailguns. I can't help but think of this Chesterton Quote: "It is, on the contrary, a thing analogous to writing one's own love-letters or blowing one's own nose. These things we want a man to do for himself, even if he does them badly…
Just so we're clear, phones were already banned in classrooms. "Personal" use of AI within a classroom to help someone like a personal calculator or a personal "cheating aid" was already banned. This bans it from all teaching tools and materials as well.
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Star Trek isn't real.
“Isn’t real” isn’t a rebuttal. It’s just refusing to think.
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Saying that a human teacher is equivalent to an LLM is derogatory to the teachers and exaggerating the capabilities of the LLM. I say this as someone who uses these things daily in my work and personal life. Let's not murky the waters with complete falsehoods
LLMs have been better than many teachers I've had in my life. To no fault of the teachers, it's hard to compete with something that has understanding of every subject, is hooked up to the internet, and is given 1:1 time with the person learning at any time of the day, answering promptly.
At some point they will begin running out of human created data for model training and schools with strict AI policies will be the best source of non AI data going forward.
Thats kind of a symbiotic relationship that makes sense for students and AI companies.
Once AI output begins replacing human output and the models begin training on it, there may be increasingly few places left for data that isnt likely to lead to a model collapse.
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Just so we're clear, phones were already banned in classrooms. "Personal" use of AI within a classroom to help someone like a personal calculator or a personal "cheating aid" was already banned. This bans it from all teaching tools and materials as well.
Good? The amount of just flat out wrong information the average LLM spits out makes it unfit for education IMO. I can’t imagine asking teachers to have to personally vet every single lesson plan to ensure an AI wasn’t hallucinating when producing the content.
There's good teachers and bad teachers, there's good AI implementations and bad ones. This bans all of them.
I'm not particularly worried, meaningful experimentation will continue in private schools. I just hope public schools can learn from that and open it back up when it's mature.
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If kids use them for learning and not just cheating. You have to learn how to learn and how to think for yourself before you can do that
LLMs can teach you that too. You do not need to learn that first.
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There were certainly integral solving validators online when I took calculus in high school. At some point I gave up and just used that, because “the money is in web application development, I don’t need that calculus stuff”. Big regret. Edit: For reference, the regret came when I tried to do some RF related projects on the side. Those projects would likely have gone somewhere if I put some effort into even the basic…
I have never needed calculus since leaving university, nearly 40 year ago. If you're not in hard engineering, you probably won't (and if you are, you'll get to use all the computer assisting tools you want).
If you don't know math, you often won't be able to even realize when math is needed.
There's a Steve Yegge quote about this:
> You'll gradually realize that your math deficiencies aren't just something that you might need to beef up on if you ever "need to"; you'll see that virtually every problem space has a mathematical modeling component that you were blissfully unaware of until Done, and Gets Things Smart gal points it out to you and says, "There's an infinitely smarter approach, which by the way I implemented over the weekend." You stare slack-jawed for a little while, and then she says: "Here's a ball. Why don't you go bounce it?"