Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I Quit Teaching Because of ChatGPT

time.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 164 posts

Re: I Quit Teaching Because of ChatGPT

#151

Post by mike_hearn »

Eumenes wrote: post #109

A friend of mine teaches an intro to web development course - its a 2 day thing, usually over the weekend at a co-working place that does events, and the stories he tells me are insane. These are mostly college graduates and white collar professionals who want to learn some code. They are often perplexed by the idea of a file and folders. Right clicking something is novel for some. He gives all the instructions ahead…

Yeah this is now a common story, also for undergrads who may only use an actual computer (for anything) for the first time when they get to university. Science classes have to start by teaching the basics of desktop computing.

Funnily enough, I don't remember anyone predicting this outcome when smartphones and tablets came out.

It may not matter though. Desktop OS's aren't so different. Files, folders, windows, right clicking, it can all be learned pretty quickly. Compared to the rest of learning software development it's a nice gentle learning curve.

Re: I Quit Teaching Because of ChatGPT

#152

Post by beej71 »

SoftTalker wrote: post #44
tonetegeatinst wrote: post #33

I don't trust LLM's to create novel ideas, and I'd never copy paste any AI output. Would I rework the output or maby use certain through processes, maby. But I'm not trusting an AI blindly, its a statistical capture of its training data not a magic wand. That said, most professors still force students to write code on paper with no autocorrect, google, or even access to the reference documentation which seems counter…

I'm probably in a small minority but I don't use auto-completion in code editors. I dislike it, and find it disrupts my thinking.

I'm also in that minority. And I think there's something to be said for memorizing that stuff instead of letting autocomplete always handle it. I think it might improve your mental tapestry you draw on to solve problems.

It might be slower and better to not autocomplete everything.

ChatGPT says that autocomplete is better. :) :) :)

Re: I Quit Teaching Because of ChatGPT

#153

Post by beej71 »

whiplash451 wrote: post #30

I feel for the author, being a part-time teacher myself and seeing the impact of ChatGPT first-hand. However, I think there is a viable alternative: 1. Spend the beginning of the year/semester showing the potentially disastrous effects of GenAI (e.g. through various exercises involving GenAI) 2. Once students have been "vaccined" against ChatGPT, assume they will still cheat and switch to a type of teaching that leav…

I ask my college students how much they would pay someone to solve a problem with ChatGPT. They say "zero". Then I tell them that's how much they'll get paid for doing it.

They ask, "Then why are we solving this problem for class?"

And then we can get into the reasons they're really here.

It's not a bad discussion to have.

Re: I Quit Teaching Because of ChatGPT

#154

Post by whiplash451 »

beej71 wrote: post #153
whiplash451 wrote: post #30

I feel for the author, being a part-time teacher myself and seeing the impact of ChatGPT first-hand. However, I think there is a viable alternative: 1. Spend the beginning of the year/semester showing the potentially disastrous effects of GenAI (e.g. through various exercises involving GenAI) 2. Once students have been "vaccined" against ChatGPT, assume they will still cheat and switch to a type of teaching that leav…

I ask my college students how much they would pay someone to solve a problem with ChatGPT. They say "zero". Then I tell them that's how much they'll get paid for doing it. They ask, "Then why are we solving this problem for class?" And then we can get into the reasons they're really here. It's not a bad discussion to have.

Super interesting technique!

Re: I Quit Teaching Because of ChatGPT

#155

Post by bamboozled »

gorbachev wrote: post #17
kibwen wrote: post #2

As long as LLM companies can hang on for another 15 years or so, there will be an entire generation of humans who will be as utterly incapable of living without LLMs in the same way that most people in developed countries are incapable of growing their own food. Intellectual lock-in will be their moat.

But think of 8 billion people paying $40 / month to OpenAI. Put yourself on the OpenAI IPO waiting list right now! /s

I find Claude to be better...

Re: I Quit Teaching Because of ChatGPT

#156

Post by adamc »

rectang wrote: post #139
kibwen wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a very inapropos quote, because A Study In Scarlet was the first Holmes story, and Conan Doyle later retconned this because it turns out to be very important for a detective of Holmes' sort to be able to draw on seemingly-useless knowledge in order to make serendipitous leaps of logic.

I maintain that it's relevant because it illustrates how unreliably people assess just what knowledge is likely to be useful. If anything, the fact that it was retconned reinforces that such assessments can be wrong. For example, there's a notion in this thread relying on GPS makes you soft and that unless you learn how to navigate the way your forebears did you'll be unprepared or something. I find this proposition…

I wouldn't say it makes you "soft", but it makes you inexperienced at it, and people often freeze when they don't know how to do something.

Drive around the country and you'll notice that sometimes Google maps doesn't work because your phone doesn't have reception.

Re: I Quit Teaching Because of ChatGPT

#157

Post by helboi4 »

thfuran wrote: post #71
helboi4 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will occasionally do long multiplication in my minds eye just to make sure I can lol. Anything more complicated than that, most people will not be doing anyway. University students however, almost universally do need to write sometimes. Similarly if I had decided to do something maths heavy at uni I would be expected to be able to do some pretty complex maths without a calculator first, even if I don't need to do t…

>Similarly if I had decided to do something maths heavy at uni I would be expected to be able to do some pretty complex maths without a calculator first, even if I don't need to do that all the time I got an engineering degree and don't remember ever being required to do math without a calculator. Of course, some things are easier if you don't need to bust out a calculator for everything.

I order to get in to the engineering degree though you would have had to do maths exams in school that required you to have proficiency in doing maths without a calculator that the average person does not have and will never need. I did not do an engineering degree but I did do a higher level maths class in school. I failed 2/3 of the exams but that still means I have learnt to do calculator free maths to a higher level than the vast majority of the population has ever even considered. And they don't need to. Probably doesn't impact their lives at all. That doesn't mean that there aren't some people who should really should learn to do that stuff. There's a reason I abandoned the idea of Physics or similar disciplines as a university degree choice - because I did not have the maths foundation to build on. Any arts and humanities degree, if not any degree really needs a foundation of writing skills in the same way.

Re: I Quit Teaching Because of ChatGPT

#158

Post by vonunov »

falcolas wrote: post #121
lucianbr wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink. This must have been a problem before the invention of LLMs. How was it solved before? Why didn't teaching go out of fashion when TV was invented, or why didn't math disappear when calculators were built? You yourself highlight problems that existed before LLMs, different problems in teaching. Obviously not all teachers quit because of those, and we still h…

> why didn't math disappear when calculators were built? Because you can see a child using a calculator. > Why didn't teaching go out of fashion when TV was invented Laws (which put students in classrooms) and a lack of TV use in classrooms. TV use in classrooms was generally driven by the teachers. > "ChatGPT is different than anything that has come before, and will change everything" It's effectively undetectable w…

>Because you can see a child using a calculator.

Besides, a calculator no more threatens the study of math than a word processor does writing, or a rhyming dictionary poetry. One reason is that if you hand me a TI-84, I'm not magically going to understand how to do calculus. Maybe I could somewhat piece things together, but probably not without accidentally . . . learning calculus. The other reason is that, as I am led to believe, the particular values and operations that happen in the field of Serious Math are much more incidental to the actual concepts in question than it may seem early on.

Hell, calculators haven't even really managed to supplant the study of arithmetic. They seem to have settled nicely into where they're useful.

Re: I Quit Teaching Because of ChatGPT

#159

Post by vonunov »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #37
adamc wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can already see it in people who cannot navigate their automobile without google maps or some equivalent.

I think what is more readily apparent is that younger folks cannot reverse their car without looking at the camera. Older folks still turn around and look.

Seems vaguely worrying but maybe I'm just becoming fuddy-dudded or something. I've never used a car with a backup camera (did have a rear dashcam in one though) so maybe I just don't know. But the fields of view I see in images of backup cam displays aren't confidence-inspiring for me. It seems like the kind of thing that might be useful if you routinely forget to check for random toddlers/pets/bicycles having picnics directly behind your vehicle before you pull out of the driveway in the morning. Or if maybe you have a significant problem with young children, who you had so far completely failed to take notice of, dashing with uncanny timing from weird "blind areas" as you back out of a parking space, etc.

I would blame my (pretty small) commercial driving experience. But no, not really. Before I ever took a Smith System course, I would have had trouble understanding this. I'm regularly concerned, to say the least, at the complacency/obliviousness I've seen. I don't get how someone could be comfortable with not having active situational awareness of these things.

And that's the only way I can imagine it being a realistic concern that children or other drivers will suddenly and unexpectedly appear in their path. Which is the only serious kind of thing I can imagine those camera FOVs helping with. Which they shouldn't have to, because people should be cognizant that backing is one of the more risky parts of driving in terms of likelihood of any kind of collision during it, so they should be on guard -- not merely as they are backing up, but the whole way to the car. Any children in the area should be easily noticed -- unless they are lying in wait on purpose for some reason -- and positive knowledge of their locations should be actively maintained until backing is done. Nearby cars parked but still running, or with people getting in or out of them, etc., should also be fairly trivially observed and noted. If positive awareness has been broken, then so has confirmation of a clear path, and in that case it's completely reasonable to go as far as getting back out of the car and walking a few steps and taking a couple of seconds to evaluate who is within "reach" and what they could conceivably do to screw up your day in the time it takes you to get out of the parking space. It seems like it isn't that much of a reach to do some simple due diligence that should, in a ideal world, make the backup camera a solution in search of a problem.

I don't know if you're a network person or what (in 30-second hindsight, networking knowledge may not be necessary to understand the "metaphor") but often it feels as if I'm on Collision Avoidance and everyone ("everyone") else is using Collision Detection.

Re: I Quit Teaching Because of ChatGPT

#160

Post by vonunov »

SoftTalker wrote: post #99
MarcScott wrote: post #65

I'm thinking of going back into teaching because of ChatGPT. I created an entire scheme of work for my wife today, including all the lesson plans, and next I'll work on some student resources and quizzes. It took about thirty minutes. She'll need to check them over to make sure they're okay, but still a massive time saver. I've taken photos of my son's revision activities and had ChatGPT mark them. It's surprisingly…

Why would anyone pay you to be a teacher when they could just use ChatGPT directly. Prompt it to develop a lesson plan to learn whatever, create the learning materials, and then evaluate their mastery of it. And be endlessly available, nights and weekends, for further discussion and help with any difficulties?

>further discussion and help with any difficulties

This is the part where you "draw the rest of the teacher"(1)

The part where all the magic happens. Public school teachers' day jobs anymore are rather focused on curriculum delivery and exam prep. They cherish the chances to actually engage in teaching -- not (necessarily) lecturing, not traffic-policing the classroom, not admin overhead, but connecting with a student and their understanding of a thing, and navigating the ways to conceptualize and illustrate it, and the ecstasy of the Click, and the pride of watching them sail forth into brilliance. That's the whole part of teaching that anyone ever became a teacher for (I hope, but not optimistically) -- namely, the part involving teaching.

If this seems unclear, it could be a semantic thing. Here, "teaching" refers to the actual essence of the profession, its locus of fundamental distinction from other professions, and the true target of a passion or fascination for teaching. Much as everything a doctor or developer does at their job cannot accurately be described as "practicing medicine" or "developing software". Some of the activities that are not the essential teaching or developing or practicing medicine are necessary, or at least ancillary, but there's not-insignificant amounts of stuff occupying the "not exactly what I got into this for"-to-"actively a waste of time" range.

I'm not trying to say that a One True Pure Essence of the Sacred Art of Teaching exists and is the sole motivator for all teachers everywhere forever, or anything. It's just that it seems like you thoroughly gathered up all the parts that are distinctly not seen as teaching proper (at least in my world, which I hope isn't an unusual perspective) and said something like, look, GPT can do all the support-work/busy-work/paper-work. What do we need the teacher for anymore? After all, GPT has got to be faster than the teacher at coming up with different ways to phrase explanations too, right? And so it is, I don't doubt that. But good teaching goes way deeper, and I have my doubts that an LLM is near the point of being able to act upon a nuanced theory-of-mind of a student's current understanding of a concept in context of their previous experience and learning/personality style and aptitudes. For example.

Maybe we overlap the same page, so let me not be uncharitable: There are surely many people employed as teachers who seldom teach anything to anyone (as opposed to, say, merely informing them of it). I would agree that their work is well within GPT's wheelhouse, and all speed to them on the way out, along with the content marketers who write pretend-useful articles all day, et al.

1. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/how-to-draw-an-owl

Post reply on HN