I Quit Teaching Because of ChatGPT • Hacker News Board

Re: I Quit Teaching Because of ChatGPT

#81

Post by chx » Tue, Oct 01, 2024, 4:20 PM UTC

lucianbr wrote: post #66

adamc wrote: post #39

I read this and it struck a chord. A decade or more ago, a friend of mine teaching English in a major state university told me that he was getting lots of students who couldn't seem to read a novel. They could read the words on the page, but they couldn't focus enough to really understand it. My experience is that writing things out always improves my understanding of the subject. It's similar to forcing yourself to…

> If the result of chatgpt is even more kids skating through life without really picking up these skills... it may have tragic consequences. Learning to think well is the single most important thing I got from education. Do teachers have no role here? "If many kids make a certain choice, there will be big trouble". Maybe teach them to do better? Is the role of educator reduced to giving assignements and grading them…

You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink.

We as educators can show the interesting parts, the wonders of a field but more we can't do. The author of the article seems to have not managed to get through. Truth to be told, such happens every day in schools because most schools use completely outdated ways to teach -- frontal pedagogy itself is such -- and so ChatGPT is not their biggest problem but it certainly makes a bad situation worse. Recommended watch: Ken Robinson's Ted talk Do schools kill creativity. Recommended reading: Carl Rogers Freedom to Learn: A View of What Education Might Become. For a shorter read, Aronson's Social Animal has a chapter.

Re: I Quit Teaching Because of ChatGPT

#82

Post by ffujdefvjg » Tue, Oct 01, 2024, 4:20 PM UTC

Der_Einzige wrote: post #11

[flagged]

> Current AI systems are by far the worst that they will ever be. 5-10 years from now, I will trust AI tutor/teachers and will make sure my kids is on the right side of the achievement curve.

Pretty sure I read that line about self driving cars 8 or 9 years ago.

Realistically, kids will always take the easiest path, why learn when AI will do all the thinking for them? And if AI does all the thinking and people begin to depend on them, what autonomy do these people have left? They've been completely neutered.

Re: I Quit Teaching Because of ChatGPT

#83

Post by raphael_kimmig » Tue, Oct 01, 2024, 4:20 PM UTC

lucianbr wrote: post #48

> I noted where arguments were unsound. I pointed to weaknesses such as stylistic quirks that I knew to be common to ChatGPT (I noticed a sudden surge of phrases such as “delves into”). That is, I found myself spending more time giving feedback to AI than to my students. > So I quit. This strikes me as a non-sequitur. Her students were making a certain class of mistakes, so... she quit? Don't students always make mis…

Can’t you empathise? The thought of having to grade and give advice on AI generated content makes me want to run away and live in a remote forest.

Re: I Quit Teaching Because of ChatGPT

#84

Post by righthand » Tue, Oct 01, 2024, 4:20 PM UTC

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…

When I “scan for correctness” a code change (ex code review), I do my best to look for code correctness. Often that change has to go through product review for visual correctness. A lot of my scanning is brief and determining logic with the variables I know. However I often exclude the cases that have already been tested through e2e and unit tests. These tests are valuable to ensure regressions don’t occur.

Please tell me what validation and regression testing can you guarantee by having an LLM generate a lesson plan? Why is it important to have your own unique generated lesson plan, even if that lesson plan is just a common template with synonyms swapped out?

You’ve eliminated a bunch of extra work for yourself but have no long standing regression check from the output of this generator.

These “actually LLMs are great for X topic” comments are just here for evangelism then? What do students gain from having you generate partially random lesson plans? Please don’t tell me “time savings”.

Re: I Quit Teaching Because of ChatGPT

#85

Post by thfuran » Tue, Oct 01, 2024, 4:20 PM UTC

throwawayffffas wrote: post #69

light_triad wrote: post #60

> With the easy temptation of AI, many—possibly most—of my students were no longer willing to push through discomfort. There's been an important shift in education in the last 20 years: a push for lessons to be short, entertaining and unchallenging. When students struggle with tasks, in many cases they are just told not to do them. LLMs are the next wave of this shift - what could be awesome tools for research and wr…

> There's been an important shift in education in the last 20 years: a push for lessons to be short, entertaining and unchallenging. When students struggle with tasks, in many cases they are just told not to do them. I was in school 20 years ago. That is not my recollection. Lessons were long, focused and challenging if you engaged.

That's what they said.

Re: I Quit Teaching Because of ChatGPT

#86

Post by adamc » Tue, Oct 01, 2024, 4:21 PM UTC

kennethrc wrote: post #10

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.

Define "cannot navigate"? I've been driving for decades, but where I live traffic is everywhere so I don't go more than a few miles without using Waze and its real-time traffic monitoring.

Find your way around an unfamiliar city or area without google maps or similar.

Re: I Quit Teaching Because of ChatGPT

#87

Post by SoftTalker » Tue, Oct 01, 2024, 4:21 PM UTC

atwrk wrote: post #22

golergka wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's your opinion on calculators? Update: I meant to compare calculators to something like a slide ruler for logarithms. I'm not from US and I tend to forget that some people use calculators to take 20% of 500.

Where I live these are not allowed in the classroom until 7th grade or so, i.e. when the kids have learned the skills and can then employ calculators mindfully.

This seems reasonable. When I was in school we started using calculators and other technology in 9th grade. That was in 1980 though.

Re: I Quit Teaching Because of ChatGPT

#88

Post by lucianbr » Tue, Oct 01, 2024, 4:21 PM UTC

Der_Einzige wrote: post #11

[flagged]

> 5-10 years from now

Doesn't anyone think the future is unpredictable anymore? Does your life experience not include things tanking an unexpected turn, ever?

I can't believe how many commenters here and elsewhere take the future trajectory of AI for granted. Where are the flying cars, the moon bases, the nuclear powered appliances? Things don't always go up on an exponential curve, and even when they do, results are not always what we thought initially. Isn't this obvious, and rather basic?

Re: I Quit Teaching Because of ChatGPT

#89

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o » Tue, Oct 01, 2024, 4:21 PM UTC

> The best educators will adapt to AI. In some ways, the changes will be positive. Teachers must move away from mechanical activities or assigning simple summaries.

So much of education always comes down to efficiency, scale, and standardization. The best way to teach or test someone is by having a one-on-one conversation with them, coincidentally the least standardized. The most scalable and standardized way to do it is to publish some material and then asynchronously collect answers to a predefined set of multiple choice questions.

It seems like everything you can fake or cheat on is a byproduct of choosing to be further along the efficiency/standardization/mechanization scale. Which is a byproduct of many many systemic factors, not least of which is funding.

It's frustrating as hell that so many of our teaching problems have obvious answers that are in many ways better for the students anyways, but those answers just aren't systemically or economically feasible. Maybe they'll have to become more viable as our current, ultra-mechanical system breaks.

Re: I Quit Teaching Because of ChatGPT

#90

Post by adamc » Tue, Oct 01, 2024, 4:23 PM UTC

SoftTalker wrote: post #72

Version467 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can confidently say that a car would be useless to me without gps. I can navigate the small town (10k people) I grew up in, but that’s it. I wouldn’t try to navigate the city I live in now (~350k people) in a car, beyond the street I live on. If I had to and knew gps was broken (hypothetically), then I’d try to reschedule, instead of attempting to navigate with signs and a paper map. I could probably work with prin…

GPS is super-convenient when you're in an unfamiliar area. I sometimes catch myself thinking how did we ever get along without it. But we did. You just looked at a map before you set off, noted street names and turns, and paid attention. You would do the same thing and manage pretty well if you had to.

Of course it's convenient. But I learned to drive before we had it, and learned to find my way around without it. Maps helped, but you can do a lot with logic and by understanding direction.