lol that is exactly what I came down to say. Next he will tell us that toothbrushes dry at phenomenal rates based on a survey of children who 100% all brushed their teeth before bed.
Worse, all the things they said they used AI for sound a lot like rationalizations for how what they were doing wasn’t cheating.
I saw those answers, and all I could think of is why he put any credence in such blatant bullshit. You can't bullshit a bullshitter, so they say, which implies this guy is the biggest rube since Barnum and Bailey were working the crowds.
I often wonder if the biggest problem stemming from people no longer having kids is they forget what people with no commitment to honesty are capable of.
Oh, absolutely. I suppose it is more correct to say that kids do not have the social filters of adults fully installed, so rules like "Don't lie just to get what you want", "Be nice", and "Only comment on that lady's giant ass bursting out of her tights quietly when she can't hear" are not implicitly followed :D
There have been many, many educational innovations in the past. They all promised to significantly improve performance. They all failed.
Why did they fail? Because most students just weren't very interested in what they were supposed to learn. Learning requires effort on the part of the student, and if the student is not interested, the effort will be to pass or to get a good grade (and then to forget, because "who cares?).
Perhaps AI will solve this problem of "motivation"--to use the ed term. But I am skeptical.
I think that really is the key point. Some people are motivated enough to actually learn, but most stop when they have the feeling of having learned, regardless of the reality. A good human teacher can impart his interest in a subject and help test whether a student really learned vs just repeating something. Possibly AI can do that as well, but I suspect it takes interacting with a human and all the interpersonal mirroring and expectations that involves.
I wish it were true that, "A good human teacher can impart his interest in a subject and help test whether a student really learned vs just repeating something."
Teachers try mightily to get their students interested (I was a high school teacher) but usually can't move the dial much. History teachers are heart-broken at how little students care about the past (not counting the past 30 years of their music or the past 50 years of their sports). Testing understanding and long-term learning, rather than short-term memorization, is extremely difficult. Even if you can do it, it takes a tremendous amount of teacher time. Which is why it is not terribly common.
Most high school courses are structured in units, often equivalent to a textbook chapter, that last 2-4 weeks. During that time, facts and ideas are presented, the students do things with them (worksheets, discussions, projects, etc.) and then take a "summative assessment". They may not encounter those facts and ideas again until a mid-term or final. The units are remarkably self-contained. By ninth grade, students have learned--they are not stupid!--that this is how school works. If you try to test them on facts and ideas from unit 2 during unit 5, they will feel betrayed. "We did that two months ago!"
I said “can”, not “will in every circumstance.” The difference between a good inspiring teacher and a teacher that makes you dislike a subject you are otherwise interested in is immense. The fact that most primary and secondary schools are taught abysmally is not exactly an argument against that observation.
The space between "a good inspiring teacher" and "a teacher that makes you dislike a subject" is large, and my experience is that the vast majority of teachers work within that space. Most students come into a class not interested and exit not interested; the teacher doesn't make them dislike it, they would have disliked spending time on it no matter how inspiring the teacher was.
There is probably something you are not interested in, maybe soccer or the video game plants v. zombies. Now imagine you have to spend an hour a day, 4 days a week, over the next 9 months while someone inspiring tries to teach you about them. You probably wouldn't find the experience inspiring; you might even dislike it.
One problem you had, and all mass teachers have, is that mass indoctrination doesn't allow for individual interests. What fascinates one student bores another to death, and it's not just the topic, but the manner of teaching.
I doubt I remember even 1% of what I learned K-12, other than lots of practice reading stuff I have not remembered. K-12 is just daycare, and welfare for teachers and bureaucrats, to put it bluntly, and college is just more of the same for all but STEM. Pretending their purpose is to educate students for adulthood is a joke. It's mass indoctrination, like shooting birdshot; some pellets hit some targets, and it doesn't matter which. I remember one specific 1% of what teachers threw at us; other students remember a different 1%. No two students remember the same 1%.
That's what AI will change. AI tutors will teach what students are interested in, but they will also teach the same subject in a different manner to each student. No human teacher can do the same.
BTW, I'm serious about that 1%. All I remember from K-12 social studies that I have not relearned on my own as an adult is that California Indians boiled and smashed and ground up acorns to make them edible, and that when William the Conqueror died in a horse riding accident, he had grown so fat that it took so much longer to dig his grave that his corpse swelled up and would no longer fit, and it burst when they tried cramming him into his grave. Whether either of those is true, I do not know; those are the only two factoids I remember from K-12 social studies. That's not even 1% of what they taught. Algebra? I can probably do some minor equation refactoring. Geometry? Parallel is different on spheres, and all triangles have the same sum of their internal angles, which might be 180°. Trigonometry? Sine or Cosine of 30° is ½, Tangent of 45° is 1. Calculus? I can mechanically convert a formula to its derivative or integral because it's such a simple trick.
K-12 is daycare and welfare. Actual education is the excuse, and independent thinking an unwelcome byproduct.
Yes. As long as politicians are in thrall to teachers unions, whose donations fuel so many of their campaigns, government-controlled schools will continue to be mass indoctrination centers and welfare for teachers unions.
It's a lot more than that. People think that it's good to be "educated", that education will lead to young people being more productive and making more money, and that being educated involves learning all the things that state curriculum standards say should be learned.
As long as most people believe that, there will be no drastic change in curriculum requirements.
7th grade English teacher was fascinated by diagramming sentences. I don't know why, but it was her passion, and she made it so fun that I can still remember doing it 50 years later. I don't think I could diagram a sentence now, but I would recognize it, and I bet 5 minutes of reading up on it would restore 90% of what she taught. I have often thought that what languages really need is parentheses to make adjective grouping less confusing. Does "more open borders" mean more of the borders which are open, or that existing borders should be more open? But is this why I enjoyed her diagramming, or did her diagramming lead to the idea?
A high school teacher had just the opposite effect. Her classes consisted of analyzing poetry her way; I remember particularly being offended at how she ruined Robert Frost "A Fork In The Road" (or whatever it was called) by analyzing every last word to death. An entire year of that really soured me on almost all poetry. The only exception is Ogden Nash, who had always tickled my funny bone, and when I found she despised him, it was the icing on the cake.
Would an AI have made diagramming sentences fun; can an AI be passionate? On the other hand, maybe a good AI would have picked up on me wanting parentheses and thrown in more diagramming. And maybe a good AI would have picked up my disgust at analyzing every word in poetry and dropped the topic or changed its method.
Funny, I had the exact same experience. Conveniently, the same teacher was the German teacher, so I got to see sentence diagramming from both sides and understand why direct objects were so relevant.
Likewise the calculus/programming/physics teacher was excellent (at least I liked him a lot, some didn't) and really kept my interest going. Chemistry, not so much despite being the best student in the class.
College really drove home how some teachers can make you loath a subject.
I am skeptical of AI being able to mimic this behavior in a way that is infectious to humans. It is possible, certainly, and maybe I just am weird and things normal people find inspiring I find annoying (seems likely). I just don't think it has really happened yet, and people who learn things often do so because they were already interested.
That's it, I think -- AI will improve teaching when it gets to the point of tailoring its teaching to individual students, something mass teaching can never do, by definition.
Reducing class size is not the solution unless it were down to one. Whether teaching 20 or 30 K-12 students in a class, or lecturing to hundreds in college, it is still mass indoctrination rather than teaching, still the shotgun approach with most of the pellets missing.
The evaluation of the output is a key issue, and soon the general AIs will evaluate output for accuracy better than the best domain experts for all known known info, which is most of knowledge relevant to any real world decision. Tho estimating known unknowns, will the stock go up or down next day or year?, is not the same.
Education is about thinking processes, and learning: which is personally changing an unknown known to a known knowns. It’s already known to teacher/aitutor, unknown to student. AI may not be now, but could be as perfect as human consensus makes it, on the known knowns, less good on the known unknowns & especially unknown unknowns.
Tho there are false known knowns like Black avg IQs are lower than whites because of racism, not genetics. The truth is that genetics are the biggest reason, but all the ai models, & most professors at elite colleges, claim genetics is not the main reason, nor even an important reason. I certainly won’t trust ai models on racial & sexual subjects that are politically controversial. They all have, as recently written literary text so often has, the progressive biases.
For non-controversial domains, ai is becoming the primary domain experts, & most trusted source.
Back in it's early days the promise of television was that it would be our window onto the world and that we would all become better informed and more knowledgeable as we were exposed to the great works of literature and art and the thoughts of the great minds of the past.
The potential was there........but in the end. Well?
"Students report using AI to........." not cheat.
Well, bless his heart.
lol that is exactly what I came down to say. Next he will tell us that toothbrushes dry at phenomenal rates based on a survey of children who 100% all brushed their teeth before bed.
Worse, all the things they said they used AI for sound a lot like rationalizations for how what they were doing wasn’t cheating.
I saw those answers, and all I could think of is why he put any credence in such blatant bullshit. You can't bullshit a bullshitter, so they say, which implies this guy is the biggest rube since Barnum and Bailey were working the crowds.
I often wonder if the biggest problem stemming from people no longer having kids is they forget what people with no commitment to honesty are capable of.
But kids are also sometimes the most honest people in a room.
Oh, absolutely. I suppose it is more correct to say that kids do not have the social filters of adults fully installed, so rules like "Don't lie just to get what you want", "Be nice", and "Only comment on that lady's giant ass bursting out of her tights quietly when she can't hear" are not implicitly followed :D
"This time is different."
There have been many, many educational innovations in the past. They all promised to significantly improve performance. They all failed.
Why did they fail? Because most students just weren't very interested in what they were supposed to learn. Learning requires effort on the part of the student, and if the student is not interested, the effort will be to pass or to get a good grade (and then to forget, because "who cares?).
Perhaps AI will solve this problem of "motivation"--to use the ed term. But I am skeptical.
I think that really is the key point. Some people are motivated enough to actually learn, but most stop when they have the feeling of having learned, regardless of the reality. A good human teacher can impart his interest in a subject and help test whether a student really learned vs just repeating something. Possibly AI can do that as well, but I suspect it takes interacting with a human and all the interpersonal mirroring and expectations that involves.
I wish it were true that, "A good human teacher can impart his interest in a subject and help test whether a student really learned vs just repeating something."
Teachers try mightily to get their students interested (I was a high school teacher) but usually can't move the dial much. History teachers are heart-broken at how little students care about the past (not counting the past 30 years of their music or the past 50 years of their sports). Testing understanding and long-term learning, rather than short-term memorization, is extremely difficult. Even if you can do it, it takes a tremendous amount of teacher time. Which is why it is not terribly common.
Most high school courses are structured in units, often equivalent to a textbook chapter, that last 2-4 weeks. During that time, facts and ideas are presented, the students do things with them (worksheets, discussions, projects, etc.) and then take a "summative assessment". They may not encounter those facts and ideas again until a mid-term or final. The units are remarkably self-contained. By ninth grade, students have learned--they are not stupid!--that this is how school works. If you try to test them on facts and ideas from unit 2 during unit 5, they will feel betrayed. "We did that two months ago!"
I said “can”, not “will in every circumstance.” The difference between a good inspiring teacher and a teacher that makes you dislike a subject you are otherwise interested in is immense. The fact that most primary and secondary schools are taught abysmally is not exactly an argument against that observation.
The space between "a good inspiring teacher" and "a teacher that makes you dislike a subject" is large, and my experience is that the vast majority of teachers work within that space. Most students come into a class not interested and exit not interested; the teacher doesn't make them dislike it, they would have disliked spending time on it no matter how inspiring the teacher was.
There is probably something you are not interested in, maybe soccer or the video game plants v. zombies. Now imagine you have to spend an hour a day, 4 days a week, over the next 9 months while someone inspiring tries to teach you about them. You probably wouldn't find the experience inspiring; you might even dislike it.
I agree. I might add that most teachers seem to operate towards the bottom of the range, at least in my experience.
One problem you had, and all mass teachers have, is that mass indoctrination doesn't allow for individual interests. What fascinates one student bores another to death, and it's not just the topic, but the manner of teaching.
I doubt I remember even 1% of what I learned K-12, other than lots of practice reading stuff I have not remembered. K-12 is just daycare, and welfare for teachers and bureaucrats, to put it bluntly, and college is just more of the same for all but STEM. Pretending their purpose is to educate students for adulthood is a joke. It's mass indoctrination, like shooting birdshot; some pellets hit some targets, and it doesn't matter which. I remember one specific 1% of what teachers threw at us; other students remember a different 1%. No two students remember the same 1%.
That's what AI will change. AI tutors will teach what students are interested in, but they will also teach the same subject in a different manner to each student. No human teacher can do the same.
BTW, I'm serious about that 1%. All I remember from K-12 social studies that I have not relearned on my own as an adult is that California Indians boiled and smashed and ground up acorns to make them edible, and that when William the Conqueror died in a horse riding accident, he had grown so fat that it took so much longer to dig his grave that his corpse swelled up and would no longer fit, and it burst when they tried cramming him into his grave. Whether either of those is true, I do not know; those are the only two factoids I remember from K-12 social studies. That's not even 1% of what they taught. Algebra? I can probably do some minor equation refactoring. Geometry? Parallel is different on spheres, and all triangles have the same sum of their internal angles, which might be 180°. Trigonometry? Sine or Cosine of 30° is ½, Tangent of 45° is 1. Calculus? I can mechanically convert a formula to its derivative or integral because it's such a simple trick.
K-12 is daycare and welfare. Actual education is the excuse, and independent thinking an unwelcome byproduct.
"AI tutors will teach what students are interested in"
Only if every state drastically changes its curriculum requirements.
Yes. As long as politicians are in thrall to teachers unions, whose donations fuel so many of their campaigns, government-controlled schools will continue to be mass indoctrination centers and welfare for teachers unions.
It's a lot more than that. People think that it's good to be "educated", that education will lead to young people being more productive and making more money, and that being educated involves learning all the things that state curriculum standards say should be learned.
As long as most people believe that, there will be no drastic change in curriculum requirements.
7th grade English teacher was fascinated by diagramming sentences. I don't know why, but it was her passion, and she made it so fun that I can still remember doing it 50 years later. I don't think I could diagram a sentence now, but I would recognize it, and I bet 5 minutes of reading up on it would restore 90% of what she taught. I have often thought that what languages really need is parentheses to make adjective grouping less confusing. Does "more open borders" mean more of the borders which are open, or that existing borders should be more open? But is this why I enjoyed her diagramming, or did her diagramming lead to the idea?
A high school teacher had just the opposite effect. Her classes consisted of analyzing poetry her way; I remember particularly being offended at how she ruined Robert Frost "A Fork In The Road" (or whatever it was called) by analyzing every last word to death. An entire year of that really soured me on almost all poetry. The only exception is Ogden Nash, who had always tickled my funny bone, and when I found she despised him, it was the icing on the cake.
Would an AI have made diagramming sentences fun; can an AI be passionate? On the other hand, maybe a good AI would have picked up on me wanting parentheses and thrown in more diagramming. And maybe a good AI would have picked up my disgust at analyzing every word in poetry and dropped the topic or changed its method.
Funny, I had the exact same experience. Conveniently, the same teacher was the German teacher, so I got to see sentence diagramming from both sides and understand why direct objects were so relevant.
Likewise the calculus/programming/physics teacher was excellent (at least I liked him a lot, some didn't) and really kept my interest going. Chemistry, not so much despite being the best student in the class.
College really drove home how some teachers can make you loath a subject.
I am skeptical of AI being able to mimic this behavior in a way that is infectious to humans. It is possible, certainly, and maybe I just am weird and things normal people find inspiring I find annoying (seems likely). I just don't think it has really happened yet, and people who learn things often do so because they were already interested.
That's it, I think -- AI will improve teaching when it gets to the point of tailoring its teaching to individual students, something mass teaching can never do, by definition.
Reducing class size is not the solution unless it were down to one. Whether teaching 20 or 30 K-12 students in a class, or lecturing to hundreds in college, it is still mass indoctrination rather than teaching, still the shotgun approach with most of the pellets missing.
The evaluation of the output is a key issue, and soon the general AIs will evaluate output for accuracy better than the best domain experts for all known known info, which is most of knowledge relevant to any real world decision. Tho estimating known unknowns, will the stock go up or down next day or year?, is not the same.
Education is about thinking processes, and learning: which is personally changing an unknown known to a known knowns. It’s already known to teacher/aitutor, unknown to student. AI may not be now, but could be as perfect as human consensus makes it, on the known knowns, less good on the known unknowns & especially unknown unknowns.
Tho there are false known knowns like Black avg IQs are lower than whites because of racism, not genetics. The truth is that genetics are the biggest reason, but all the ai models, & most professors at elite colleges, claim genetics is not the main reason, nor even an important reason. I certainly won’t trust ai models on racial & sexual subjects that are politically controversial. They all have, as recently written literary text so often has, the progressive biases.
For non-controversial domains, ai is becoming the primary domain experts, & most trusted source.
Won’t it be great when Wikipedia is teaching kids? /sarcasm
Back in it's early days the promise of television was that it would be our window onto the world and that we would all become better informed and more knowledgeable as we were exposed to the great works of literature and art and the thoughts of the great minds of the past.
The potential was there........but in the end. Well?