I wish instead Google would instead find a good way to have exercise books, with: 1) well-thought out exercises (covering all cases, whether in math or Spanish) 2) CORRECT solutions (just saying because even ChatGPT gets it wrong even for high school math) 3) that you can enter them using pen (if need be on an iPad) Just a way to make zillions of exercises if I want to. And for my kids, the problem is these days teac…
Lot of exercises does not really help. What is valuable is feedback, not the chore itself. You either need someone more knowledgeable guiding you, or rely on insights.
That's true. When it catches mistakes, preferably immediately, it should give useful feedback.
If the subject matter isn’t something the kid has a natural aptitude or interest in, and it’s not practical, and it’s not being taught in an unusually captivating way, why wouldn’t kids push back? I don’t blame them. I think adults should be able to justify why we’re using what boils down to the threat of force (if we’re honest) to make them sit in classrooms and listen to us.
> If the subject matter isn’t something the kid has a natural aptitude or interest in, and it’s not practical, and it’s not being taught in an unusually captivating way, why wouldn’t kids push back? Agreed. > I think adults should be able to justify why we’re using what boils down to the threat of force (if we’re honest) to make them sit in classrooms and listen to us. Disagree. The justification for why they should…
And the problem with that answer is that it doesn't lead to engagement or interest and that means it doesn't lead to learning. It's a bad answer.
I also disagree that there needs to be justification. I don't think students' minds work like that. What's needed is something different and probably many kinds of something different since there's many kinds of learners.
So far, a huge percentage of students are getting left behind when teachers and material fail to have a good answer.
"When do I ever need to use trig in real life" is an interesting question, because it points out certain flaws in the way our society approaches education. One of those flaws is the one you pointed out: the examples we use are not very interesting. But there's another flaw that gets overlooked most of the time, which is that we're raising kids to believe that "why are you teaching me something that you're not 100% su…
I asked my math teacher for applications and she just mumbled something, embarrassed. Took me until a while later to realize that most of my teachers had never stepped foot outside a school in their entire life. Later at university I complained about the lack of applications in the textbook, and my classmates became very upset. One of them responded, "we are mathematicians, we do not concern ourselves with applicatio…
> One of those flaws is the one you pointed out: the examples we use are not very interesting. I think the truth is a lot simpler. Most kids won’t use trig in real life.
That was pretty much my point. Most kids won't use trig in real life, so making trig more interesting is only half of what we need to do. The other half is making kids more interested in learning.
Kids are interested in learning. Adults are interested in learning. The human brain is interested in learning. It becomes tremendously happy when it learns and so do the humans. The problem is that the brain doesn't like effort and is very good at thinking about things that are more fun to learn. There's skills that can help with directing it back, but they need to be learned.
This seems like it has some pretty great potential. Human teachers don't have infinite patience. I recall my high school chemistry teacher's response when I was trying to understand why certain reactions happened: "just accept that these reactions happens and memorise them for the test. Don't try to understand it" I did not become a chemist. Now I'm in my thirties and I kinda wish I had studied something involving ch…
> I recall my high school chemistry teacher's response when I was trying to understand why certain reactions happened: "just accept that these reactions happens and memorise them for the test. Don't try to understand it" > I did not become a chemist. That kinda sounds like you got tripped up by the lie-to-children phase ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie-to-children ), demanding an explanation requiring advanced con…
This kinda sounds like you're blaming GP for their teacher being shit? Yes, you can't understand advanced chemistry concepts before establishing a basic understanding; that does not mean a teacher cannot help a student come to a better understanding with an answer. An answer better than "Do not try to understand it". I don't know how you could justify that answer being appropriate to give to a student.
If the subject matter isn’t something the kid has a natural aptitude or interest in, and it’s not practical, and it’s not being taught in an unusually captivating way, why wouldn’t kids push back? I don’t blame them. I think adults should be able to justify why we’re using what boils down to the threat of force (if we’re honest) to make them sit in classrooms and listen to us.
> If the subject matter isn’t something the kid has a natural aptitude or interest in, and it’s not practical, and it’s not being taught in an unusually captivating way, why wouldn’t kids push back? Agreed. > I think adults should be able to justify why we’re using what boils down to the threat of force (if we’re honest) to make them sit in classrooms and listen to us. Disagree. The justification for why they should…
If you ask adults about their school experiences, they very often say that it was a waste and they remember nothing and just remember hating math and that they never use any of that. And that we should teach about finance like loans, mortgages, bureaucracy, jobs, contracts, warranty rights, how to buy a house, how to buy a car, how elections work, etc. and other real life things that average adults do. It's super common outside the tech circles that you may be in.
I have been doing a lot of solo tinkering around this very idea —contextualizing learning for every middle school through college student according to their career and personal interests. Props for this team for actual piloting with real students. What I’ve found however is that students’ interests (in terms of novel engagement) move at the speed of culture. It’s the quirky TikTok personality, the local slang, aura f…
Any attempt to integrating modern culture into an LLM will be doomed to hilarious failure, like most attempts by schools to identify with the culture.
Like you say, it moves at the speed of light; they'll integrate the culture of a few months ago and it's already different. Kids will see the LLM trying to relate to them like their 40 year uncle trying to relate to them and will see right through it.
Between this bunch of nothing and Github announcing forcibly removing $0 overage budgets from Copilot accounts for premium request... this whole "AI" bunch seems really desperate to drive adoption of their expensive toy technology. I wonder why is PG not calling out his famous "Solution in search of a problem" yet :)
Because those with vested interests, such as large corporations and VCs - they naturally avoid acknowledging what the technology cannot yet do, what the technology is bad at. Their role is to promote optimism around the products they back, and this kind of selective narrative is a common form of dishonesty in big tech.
How is that difficult to understand? A recipe is an ordered list of steps of what to do. So of course a list can be used for a recipe. I personally prefer a serious text without bringing in unrelated concepts like food, but this is still understandable.
I think it's just clunky, like "a pencil can be used for a recipe". My first take is "wait, are we cooking a pencil? or stirring with it?" The first meaning of "use for a recipe" is "use as an ingredient." But then, it's a pretty weird thing to explain to begin with, approximately every human on the planet knows what the word "list" means. So what does this pseudo-definition add?
Well, this list (heh) was cs concepts or data structures. Most humans on the planet definitely don't know what a linked list is or how it's used, let alone how it's implemented. The cooking analogy is trying to bridge that gap a little.
I don't think it's good either. You'll mostly get the meaning if you already knew it.
> If the subject matter isn’t something the kid has a natural aptitude or interest in, and it’s not practical, and it’s not being taught in an unusually captivating way, why wouldn’t kids push back? Agreed. > I think adults should be able to justify why we’re using what boils down to the threat of force (if we’re honest) to make them sit in classrooms and listen to us. Disagree. The justification for why they should…
If you ask adults about their school experiences, they very often say that it was a waste and they remember nothing and just remember hating math and that they never use any of that. And that we should teach about finance like loans, mortgages, bureaucracy, jobs, contracts, warranty rights, how to buy a house, how to buy a car, how elections work, etc. and other real life things that average adults do. It's super com…
I’d invite these adults to consider what their life might be like had they never learned maths, or other school subjects they considered a waste of time.