When they filmed the movie 'Van Helsing' in Prague they needed one hundred couples who knew how to ballroom dance. Everyone thought this was going to be difficult to set up, but it turned out that literally every extra they hired could waltz. Back in Soviet days, the country didn't have a lot of money for sports equipment, but every school had a record player. They taught the kids ballroom dancing for the Physical Education requirement.
We went to dance classes all throughout I think eight grade and learned a few of the classical dances. Waltz, Foxtrott, Cha-Cha, Tango. That's Eastern Germany in the early 2000s.
Dance classes in a normal German secondary school? Wow, we never had that. We had a private dance school for couple dancing in town, it was popular at about age 13.
It wasn't in school, it was an after school thing at a dancing school. It was relatively affordable - I think it was at least in part paid for by the ministry of education - and we all went there together after regular lessons. I never heard of anyone not attending.
My elementary school PE did a couple weeks every year where we did square dancing and line dancing. I guess thatβs the southeastern US coming in. Sometimes we did some other more traditional English dance where the boys and girls would be in rows facing each other where there were some set steps and then the couple at one end would dance down between the lines to the other end, there would be more steps and then the next couple would move, and so on. It was like something out of a Jane Austen movie.
I learned square dancing in high school in Ohio. I was the only boy in a class of all girls, because I had broken my wrist and couldn't play basketball. I would love to tell the story of how this helped me get girls, but I was much too big of a loser to take advantage of the situation.
No, really. He hated seeing his employees dance to jazz (the popularity of which he blamed on 'the Jews', because of course he did), so much so that he pushed to have "proper" dances taught in public schools, dances that were old-fashioned even in his time.
I mean I also got publicly humiliated by my inability to run far or fast so often it fucked with my head. But we had 6 months of learning to dance before returning to the shame gauntlet
Ah so, it's not only Finland where the point of Physical Education is to humiliate all the joy of athletics out of the vast majority of generations of people.
Except the up and coming hockey players the washed up sportsman/woman who was hired to teach as a sort of social program gives all their attention to. Guess those have different sports abroad.
But really it seems so efficient that the state makes schools focus on competition, subsidize competitive team sports heavily, and hire subsidized people from professional sports to further the subsidized hobbies of the maybe future professionals.
The end result is billions in subsidies and that most people who can't hack it professionally just quit sports alltogether in their teens or even earlier.
I just quite can't see how are they actually trying to go public health first with which the tax expenses are excused.
Yeah I get what my schools were going for. And it was private school, so while taxes pay for actually a worse version by all accounts, my parents paid for mine.
Like, they tried to have a variety of things within budget. We did calisthenics, we did sports like basketball, flag gridiron football, and even occasionally some international football, we had American classics like dodgeball. In high school we even did pickleball and weight lifting.
But at the end of the day I got winded after a few meters of running and so running a mile (1069m) as is something most people were expected to be able to do was an exercise in me exhausting myself and slowly trudging along after everyone else finished. Fortunately I've always been really strong for my exercise level so for strength type stuff I regained some of the dignity I lost being lapped by fat smokers.
The thing is, nothing will ever make running something I'm willing to do if I can help it. I get the runners high and still hate running. And it would be an expensive disaster if schools did my preferred cardio of bikes or hikes. But also they didn't even teach us proper running form. They just assumed "people know how to run, and the weird nerd won't be athletic anyways". Fortunately I've become fairly athletic in adulthood (though I fell out for a year and a half and am now hurting getting back into it)
To graduate from my (American) high school, you needed a given number of gym points, and you were given one gym point per day of gym class. But, I learned, you earned one and a half gym points per day of dance class! I figured this was a great scam: I already hated gym class, so I'd get my points out the way faster.
Fast forward a couple of months, and I'm working harder than I ever was in gym class, I'm enjoying myself more, and I'm hanging out with girls in leotards first thing every school day. There was literally no downside.
Not just Soviet days. Today, it's expected (although not mandatory) to attend a course on ballroom dance and etiquette around the age of 16. It's usually not in school PE classes, but evening lessons in dedicated ballrooms or community centers with professional lecturers.
There are also similar courses for adults commonly available. It's considered a fun hobby for couples.
Thanks Claude. Still doesn't seem to be working though as the corners on the object are in a different place to the corners on the hole. It's like they're rotated. Can you break this down for me, step by step? Or is this impossible?
Exactly. School isn't really about memorizing facts, it's about learning and honing Critical Thinking Skills. That's how humans are supposed to think, and without it, people substitute chaotic thinking that makes them susceptible to manipulation.
Also, it teaches us how to interact with other humans, so our first instinct isn't just to KILL them.
In reality the vast majority of the workload may be formatting and word choice that is quite far from thinking.
And then you're getting a bachelor's degree and because you're big dumb dumb who doesn't really know anything, your task is to collate and paraphrase something not dumb people thought, maybe applying it to some case you have, but not thinking independently.
A masters thesis can have just a little bit of thinking as a, treat, but most leave school before they reach levels where one thinks when writing.
Realistically, schools were designed to provide a trainable workforce that could read well enough to learn new tasks and do enough math to make sure the factory machines were properly maintained.
Many people these days don't read a single book after they get out of school. The AIs are just making things happen faster.
From a broader perspective "school" has been a thing since before Socrates and humanity pendulums between "a broad education is the foundation for a strong populace" and "we need a giant pool of disposable labor".
And the US public education philosophy is similarly inconsistent. At the earliest it was Puritans who wanted everyone to be able to read the Bible for themselves and so pushed for literacy. At times it has been guided specifically by the business economy but it's inaccurate to say that schools were designed to produce factory workers.
Nor did the inventor of the pledge expect it to be used for anti communism.
But ultimately I don't want us to throw the baby out with the bathwater. If the public education system goes away the proletariat will suffer for it. Fascists are attempting to move the Overton window towards that. The solution as I see it is re-examining, reimagining, and reforming public education to serve the masses. But a big part of that is reconvincing the proletariat that education is valuable in its own right rather than just as job training.
Modern universal public eduction has its roots in prussian model and the idea was very much to make effective and loyal workforce. Im not saying modern education has the same ulterior motivations, but things like standarized curricula and grading are coming from there.
Which is a good philosophy outside of the military! That's the same thing the Puritans wanted, for people to not be reliant on a few to do their thinking for them.
Life is teaching you all the time (for free) if you but listen.
Especially if you've learned to learn, and have critical thinking, things schools should be teaching (but often avoid in favor of quickly outdated 'job skills' or similar because some political ideologies do better with the poorly educated).
Nope, this is a common thought amongst those impressed by AI. And I can relate coz when I was in school, no one would give a good answer to why I needed to do any arithmetics without a calculator.
I think it's reactionary, too. A version of "anything to trigger the libs". If so many people weren't against AI, OOP might have taken a moment to think before they type. As it stands, they reached for the first hot argument to get their opinion out. And I don't mean to absolve them from anything here, just analyzing.
As a math teacher, my suggestion to the students is during practice to try to do calculations without a calculator to invoke a bit of number sense so when they use calculators be able to notice in the result if they did a wrong input. It happens to input "14" instead of "41" . I feel like able to do mental arithmetic with double digit numbers can be helpful
In hindsight, I do think the right approach is not to use calculators till secondary school (about 14~15 years of age). Having a feel for numbers and how they should behave under addition/multiplication/exponentiation and ability to mentally do two digit calculations as you said is critical, and should be an "automatic" capability
They do have a point. School should be about learning and developing critical thinking skills rather than memorizing who the 30th president was.
I know my schooling had a ton of memorization. Funny to think about now that I know I have Aphantasia because I always excelled in math and science because they are less about memorization and more about learning a concept to apply.
They need to teach kids how to use AI. It's like people that won't let you use a calculator in math. "You aren't always going to have a calculator in your pocket"
I've always been a big supporter of open book/note tests
There is no reason I should be able to recite as much of the Canterbury Tales as I can.
Facts are how you build up everything else. It pretty hard to reason about complex math if you don't understand how to count to 100. It's pretty hard to reason about how societies move in waves and cycles if you don't memorize something about history.
I think people don't understand that you don't just start doing abstract work. You build it a bunch of facts that you memorize and then you can start building higher level things like patterns and abstractions.
I know this from trying to teach my child basic concepts like what money is. What exactly is a day. How magnet work. The entire concept of estimation. These are trivial to adults, but these are hard won concepts that were build from concrete ideas for my child.
We know this is necessary because of cultures that are missing whole concepts like particular colors. The idea of right and left. So on.
I got a bad grade in history class because I couldn't remember exact dates, only rough timeframes, like "world war 2 ended 1945" but I couldn't say "8th May 1945". This kind of stuff happened a lot of times in many different classes in different ways.
Counting to 100 is like learning to read. Yes both are basic tools needed to learn English or math.
Do I need to know that the Ming Dynasty ruled from 1368 to 1644? Is anything about the Ming Dynasty relevant to my life? I cannot remember the other handful of dynasties so I guess the Ming Dynasty could be the only one needed to function.
Yes history is important and definitely worth telling people. But having them memorize stuff that you can look up in a textbook is dumb.
I could walk into any high school level history class and pass the test if it was open book and if I had enough time I'd probably find all the answers.
Anyone couldn't walk into a Calculus class and pass the test with it being open book if they didn't know how to do Calculus. Yes they could read the whole chapter and learn to do it then pass the test. But there's no looking up the answers in the book. It's not memorizing.
We know this is necessary because of cultures that are missing whole concepts like particular colors. The idea of right and left. So on.
Cultures are not missing whole concepts like particular colors or left and right. They just express it differently.
Light red is pink. But a light blue is still light blue, maybe baby blue or sky blue.
Russia has the word Π³ΠΎΠ»ΡΠ±ΠΎΠΉ for light blue. It's equivalent to our pink. Are we missing the whole concept of light Π³ΠΎΠ»ΡΠ±ΠΎΠΉ? No.
The cultures understand them being a different color and even more so they understand how it's a mix or part of a color group. Being able to point and say "orange" when equal red and yellow are mixed isn't a necessary skill. Like what would you say if something was a mixture of equal parts green and yellow? You could say chartreuse. If you didn't know that word are you really missing out on everything chartreuse?
The right and left thing I think you're referring to the tribe that uses cardinal directions? Thinking in terms of cardinal directions instead of left or right is a bit bizarre and I don't know exactly how deep it goes. Like if i wanted to tell you to hang the picture to the right of the fireplace, I would have to know the cardinal directions of your house? Cardinal directions are extremely useful to use in English. East side wall of your house tells you exactly what wall it is. Left or right doesn't mean anything unless I say something like "facing your house". If I knew your fireplace was on your north wall I could easily say "Hang the picture east of your fireplace" meaning hang it to the right.
The statement is dumb but I it does have a hint of true. With new technologies comes a new way of life and this should be reflected in education. The traditional educational system was created when no technologies existed and children and parents lifes were very different.
That's why every kid has "ADHD". They live in a different reality! siting down in a class for hours listening to a boring class and then having a test on what was said does not fill todays kids needs anymore. The global traditional.school system needs an urgent upgrade
edit I said Global because it's not a specific country problem
I never thought this would need saying, but the point of writing essays in school is not the final product.
That essay will almost never be good enough to be relevant or published; no one expects it to be. The goal is to engage with the material, and learn to synthesise and present your ideas logically.
We must grade the process of writing an essay, never the final product; especially not based on how βgoodβ an essay that final product is.
Weβve got to stop and ask ourselves why people donβt have AI complete video games for them, but do so for essays. Itβs because in one case, the value is in the process, while in the other, the value is believed to be the result, but it shouldnβt be.
If people understood this, it would make no sense having AI write studentsβ essays. You can blame people for wanting to take shortcuts, but I believe our society and culture at large play a much bigger role in that trend.
Waay back in high school I had a teacher who just aimed for getting an essay written at all. He had one assignment per week: a 5 paragraph essay due every Friday.
If you turned one in: automatic 75%, baseline. Turn in garbage each week? C grade free. He even said you could turn the same essay in each week. 75%. C.
He demanded at least you write something down. He had a formula for writing 5 paragraph essays and he said to use it, and accepted nonsense if you plugged it in. No pencil. Had to be pen or typed. I still actually use it when trying to write.
You're right, but there's no easy way to grade the effort without looking at the final result. That's how you end up with a school system that prioritizes test results so much it ends up teaching students how to pass a test instead of learning and processing information.
I don't know if it's still the case, but when I was in school for non-exam (i.e. timed) essays, they were split into outlines and drafts, and the drafts were individually graded as a portion of the entire essay grade, so there was a way to gauge the process rather than simply the final submission.
I always found that process frustrating, however, because English was easily my best subject and the teacher would get upset if I turned in a 2nd draft that was identical to the first because I was already basically there. Now that I'm older, I understand the reason for why the teacher structured the lessons in such a way.
I also think that essays in general are a much better metric for measuring true understanding of a topic, at least compared to multiple choice.
Yeah but the point of American school isnt to teach kids to learn and use information. Its too produce obedient and detail oriented workers. Memorizing and regurting information correctly only to dump it for the next project is much more profitable.
When I was in school, I was given a maximum time limit to write an essat. I was told beforehand what the topic would be. My teacher told me the best way to prepare was write an essay before the test and then memorize it so I wouldn't actually have to create anything new during the test.
I never thought this would need saying, but the point of writing essays in school is not the final product.
Surely people don't really think that? I say that, and then I think about some of the colossally stupid things I've heard people say and say about education.
So funny to be like AI can retrieve facts in .3 seconds. First of all, no it can't. Second of all, can't search engines do this? Haven't they been doing this for years? Like AI is slower, less accurate and more wasteful than duckduckgo. Shouldn't all her points have been true years ago?
they're sending kids to school to learn things that are already in books! and if they wanted to know them they could just learn them from a book! why even bother to learn from a book when they could learn it from a book?!
I'm not fond of the results ddg gives me. Startpage results are more like Google used to be back in the days when it was a proper search engine. Like over 10 / 15 years ago.
The results are definitely terrible, mostly due to the AI slop sites that have been popping up in the last 3 years. I'll give startpage a go, but I think we are already in dead internet theory territory. I've also heard good things about Kagi
I think we are already in dead internet theory territory.
Yup, I believe you're right with that one, and that there's no return now with the current progress of AI. The internet is broken and it doesn't look like the ones responsible for it have any intension of fixing that. They only will make everything much worse.
"Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."
--- Frank Herbert in Dune, 1965.
Sometimes advances in technology do mean that things that they teach in school are outdated and can probably safely be removed.
I'd say cursive writing is one of those things. Writing in general is important, and obviously kids need to learn how to write upper case and lower case block letters. But, with computers everywhere, a whole secondary set of characters that is designed to be linked together seems useless.
I also do think that schools probably focus too much on memorization. I absolutely hated history in school because that's how it was taught. Memorize the name of these battles and the dates and then regurgitate them for the test. I didn't actually learn anything meaningful. What would have been much more useful and much more interesting would have been to learn more of the backstory. What was going on in the country that led it to go to war. Were they trying to distract from something, or get the people to unite against a common enemy? Were they supremely confident that they could easily win and gain important territory or resources? Were they backed into a corner?
I'd support not memorizing as many things because it's true that you can look them up (of course, AI is not how you should ever look anything up because it might just 'hallucinate'). I think most teachers would agree. But, it's also a lot harder to write and grade a good test when you're not doing names and dates. So, I assume that's another big part of the reason that memorization is the focus.
You know they don't teach typing anymore either.
Yeah Ive got 3 nieces and a nephew. None of them can use a keyboard properly. They type with their index fingers.
How old are they? I was never taught typing, just kinda made it up myself. I tried to learn a few times with Mavis Beacon and stuff, but I can never get the "proper" way to stick.
Oldest niece recently 18, then 16 and a 14 year old. Nephew is like 11 I think.
All the girls are from my sister and nephew from my brother. I'm pretty sure that's close to their accurate ages.
But yeah they don't teach typing anymore and they expect kids to just learn it on their own but a lot of people don't have home computers. Kids use phones and tablets.
But I can tell you at college level, most writing has to be typed out.
So it's really setting them up for struggling
I remember typing class. I thought it was super boring and frustrating.
I never would have learned to type properly if I hadn't been forced.
I'm sure that's true for most kids/people.
The thing that helped me improve my skills the most was social media. Specifically messengers.
But kids don't use computers anymore for sending messages back and forth.
I honestly think when these kids get into the workforce, there is going to be some serious problems.
They can't use regular computers very well and they can't type.
I think cursive was designed for feather dipped ink pens so they didn't have to be lifted because that often causes blobs.
It's also something you can learn easily on the side.
I think it's primary benefit is if it's taught to kids, it helps them develop fine motor skills.
We may see a decline in art drawing abilities due to this. (Among other issues that would contribute to this).
Poorer surgeons.
Loss of quality Craftsmanship in many detail oriented fields.
We learn skills like this better as kids.
That's my only real argument why it should still be taught.
Kids don't really learn fine motor tool manipulation skills like this in their other activities.
Human hands are one of our greatest strengths. Shame to not develop this better in kids.
I think you're reaching when you think that no cursive writing will mean poorer surgeons. Is there any evidence to back that up, or is it just supposition?
Besides, less time spent on cursive writing could be sent on drawing or painting. Or, the kids could have more time off which they could use to play video games, which give them better hand-eye coordination making them better surgeons later in life.
Yes there is evidence that humans have what is called "sensitive periods" and "critical periods". Defined as specific development time periods where some skills are developed.
"Sensitive periods" are related to "critical periods" although they both sort of mean the same thing but the first one suggests it's possible for some skill acquisition to occur at a later age but just severely restricted whilst critical periods mean the skill cannot be learned after after the cut off. The farther (in time) you move from the sensitive period for a given skill, the harder it becomes to learn it.
Handwriting sensitive period is 2-4.5 but is still developing at a slower rate from 4-8.
If a child has not figured out how to write by 8, they likely will not improve much more beyond the level they are at.
The one for reading is around 11. Kids who haven't grasped how to read, even dyslexic kids, have little chance of catching up to their peers if they haven't caught up by age 11.
I myself was dyslexic but had a great special ed teacher who helped me catch up and then exceed my peers in a 1 year period. I was 6 or 7. If I did not get that extra support before I turned 10-11, I likely never would have learned to read fluently.
This is a big problem now with kids not being able to read. They won't improve much later. The improvement needs to happen young. Before 10.
They took out cursive from the curriculum for a while, but they are supposedly putting it back now. I think they are suggesting the brain learns a little differently with cursive so it's still useful in that manner.
Also I think you'd enjoy the podcast I listen to, American History Tellers. I hated history for the same reasons you describe but this podcast really made me enjoy it. Usually they open a topic with something like "Imagine it's in the late 1800s, and you are opening up shop. Times have been hard since [backstory], but you are getting by okay. You do worry about [current topic], and feel worse when you read today's paper." Even that small little setup kind of ropes you in to feel like it's relatable.
I like that setup for learning history. Often history is told from the point of view of either an omniscient being who knows what everybody on every side is thinking, or from the point of view of the ruler of a country. It would be interesting to hear about it from the point of view of an informed but relatively powerless shopkeeper.
Based on my kid's experience, the very particular details aren't required, though enough to prove you aren't just completely fabricating things.
Knowing roughly which century and what region things happened, and being called upon to take a cited scenario and then compare and contrast with a scenario of the student's choice, constrained to a general region and area, that's the nature of the history class.
I'm overall actually pleased at the blend of knowing enough but not getting carried away in trivial minutia. Has to be somewhat tethered because the teacher has to have some way of knowing whether they actually studied or just vaguely make up thoughts that sound right.
But it takes a while for grades to come back and there aren't many grades, because it's pretty much entirely essay, entirely handwritten (because typed is too risky for AI interference).
No complaints from my kid about "computers can do this anyway", because it's understood that we do "stupid human tricks" to foster our ability to think, so it sucks, but fine. A bit of the "I'm never ever going to use this" for the advanced math and chemistry, which is accurate, but balanced against "well we can't specifically tackle what you will use, but we can vaguely get your brain to use these topics to get used to reasoning through things in ways you'll have to reason through real stuff".
When did you go to school? I don't think I'd consider everything about the education I received to be ideal but by the time I was in high school it was very much not about memorisation and history in particular was taught basically exactly like what you described as what you would have preferred it to have been.
Cursive was interesting. I went to a lot of schools because my family moved around a lot. In Primary school, in the 90s cursive was inconsistently taught, and inconsistently valued and by the time I had reached the 6th grade it was simply considered obsolete and sometimes even actively prohibited because they wanted you to dispense with the idea.
As I moved to new schools around this time I noticed nobody else did cursive, also my cursive looked bad since I hadn't really mastered it and also been taught about 3 or 4 different varieties of the "correct" way at different schools with no acknowledgement of there being different systems in existence. So I gave it up and printed like all my compatriots but then in French class in highschool the text book had a section on french culture showing "french writing" that they presumably taught there and I liked how it was kind of more complicated and daintier than the versions I'd learned so I tried to imitate those stylistic differences for fun and out of boredom in class. I now voluntarily write cursive for the hell of it because it's more interesting and fun to do. I do this in my own bastardised hand learned in multiple different schools with multiple half remembered "standard" systems plus a few elements of the French system that I cherry picked from that text book all those years ago and a couple of things I looked up online because I wondered if some things might look better from other systems. Don't know why, just kinda like it.
History is intentionally taught wrong I think. Nobody really needs to know the exact date that something happened (outside of a few key events). What actually matters is what timeframe it happened in, what events led up to it, and what the consequences were. The "why" behind the events. History should be taught like his-STORY because it is a story. One of my favorite middle school history teachers taught us history as if it was a story book and the historical figures were characters, which made it interesting to listen to, while also being contiguous.
By teaching history as a disjointed series of dates and events, schools fulfill their obligations to have a class be taught without actually teaching the critical thinking people need to understand current events. How much of this is intentional to cause students to grow into adults who vote against their own interests, or simply a result of paying teachers less than McDonald's workers I do not know.
Horace Mann, the father of public education, was a Puritan. An exerpt from a little article about Horace Mann here:
"Itβs worth reminding ourselves now about the key characteristics of the industrial era, and how we can see them manifested in the education system that continues to operate across America to this day:
Schools focus on respecting authority
Schools focus on punctuality
Schools focus on measurement
Schools focus on basic literacy
Schools focus on basic arithmetic
Notice how these reinforce each other. You enter the system one way, and are crammed through an extended molding process. The result? A βgood enoughβ cog to jam into an industrial machine."
But school isn't just preparation the "industrial machine". It also serves as a propaganda machine. The master of Nazi propaganda, Joeseph Goebbels, saw schools as a place to indoctrinate the youth. That's the purpose of history class in public education. To build the mythos, to encourage loyalty, to tell stories of brave soldiers fighting the ever-present enemies of the state.
i recently got access to the paid version of Claude at my job. they wanted us to automate some routine tasks, fine. i had it make something, then asked how i could save it as a skill for future use. it said it doesn't have skills or macros. i said what, yes there are skills right there in the customize section. it came back with the usual "you're right! let me check... oh yes indeed there is such a function. my bad. here's more information from the web: ..."
like... oh my god. imagine if this were an unpaid intern. they would be immediately shot into the atmosphere. but instead we pay for this shit.
Yes, such things can happen... I once asked an LLM a few questions about me (under my real name) that was publicly available on the Internet (i.e. should be in its training data). It answered a simple yes-or-no question wrongly. Then I asked it a followup question, which it answered more correctly, but the answer contradicted that wrong answer and it went "this seems to contradict my previous answer that...".
In my experience Microsoft Copilot is wildly inaccurate about facts describing aspects of Microsoft software products like Teams, or even Microsoft Copilot itself.
All AI does is generate plausible-sounding text. It doesn't care about whether it is true or false.
I am not generally anti-AI, nor generally pro-AI. There are good uses of AI and bad uses. For example I used AI to generate my profile picture here; the creation of art (as long as there is human review) is one of the best uses of AI I can think of...
But asking it for factual information and expecting it to be correct, and making decisions based on it? Anyone who does that deserves all negative consequences it can have.
Wow the same people who donβt trust vaccines because they read words on a computer screen and it became their belief with zero critical thinking now want all of it done that way for everyoneβs every desire
"Hey ChatGPT, was the American Civil War about slavery?" Having that fact stored in your head is inherently different than looking it up. Knowing that America has a history of racism and the south have a history of revisionism is very important. This is why some gullible folks really do believe confederate monuments are just about heritage despite being built in during the civil rights movement. It's not the sort of thing you'd think to "ask AI" at all if you didn't already have some of the groundwork. An education is important.
I do not see the problem in "AI can write essays in seconds better than the teachers can." There's a problem but it's kind of not that.
I was in high school 20 years ago, long before LLMs were cokesniff in a silicon valley board room. Back then, you could buy essays off the rack. You could commission a custom one if you were bougie enough, or "Okay I got one on Hamlet, Othello or Much Ado About Nothing. Take your pick." Some of these were "I wrote this for my senior project three years ago." The ability for students to get an essay from somewhere without having to work for it has existed for awhile.
What's the entire point of essay writing? Someone who hasn't ever studied the fundamentals of instruction is about to lecture me on the importance of literacy as a whole, as if I don't understand the value of the skill I'm using right now. No, that's not how lesson planning works. A lesson plan must be specific and goal-oriented. "Upon completion of this lesson, the student should be able to demonstrate knowledge and skill in the subject of persuasive writing by:" followed by a bullet point list of things students who have successfully completed the exercise can do. "List four logical fallacies and describe techniques for avoiding each. Identify strong versus weak arguments. Detect unsupported statements of fact. Locate an original source given a citation."
I'm not convinced we're working on that level much anymore; I think a lot of school is simply daycare busywork crossed with a long and elaborate hazing ritual. I hear teachers and administrators talking about how "hard" or "challenging" it should be, as if they're developing a video game. See, the first few levels should be pretty easy, but then it gets harder and harder so that people who beat the whole game really feel like they deserve it.
We're told that the point of scholarly writing is to maximize correctness. Someone somewhere does original research via the scientific method, they publish their research, it gets peer reviewed and then published. Then, authors with a point to make gather up several such primary sources and cite them as supporting evidence when making some broader point. As we say on the internet, sauce plz. This is how we maintain a chain of factual custody, as it were, how to tell the genuine from the bullshit.
That's not how essay writing gets assigned or graded, though. It's assigned in terms of page, paragraph or word counts. Font, size, spacing and margins. It will be graded on spelling, punctuation, grammar and correct adherence to MLA formatting, "When citing a work from an anthology the title of the work is rendered in bold while the title of the anthology is underlined, whereas when citing a work from a periodical" fuck. that.
Because they're not training scholars. They're babysitting. Actually grading essays like that based on correctness of sources is asking every high school English teacher in the nation to do 90 research projects of their own three times a semester. It's a stupid amount of work compared to skimming and turning commas into semicolons.
I think you could actually get the point across better by handing the students completed essays and having them peer review them. Hand your students an essay and ask them "is this valid, does it hold water?" That process is at least as important as writing an essay from scratch. Proper scholarly writing is a task that requires more reading than writing; you have to be able to vet the sources for your essay before it's even written. So starting students out by vetting existing articles would be 1. possible to efficiently grade and 2. actually build the relevant skills. Compared to dumping kids down in front of MS Word telling them to fill ten pages with filler.
I took gym class online in high school. Best class ever. Just had to make up data for much I ran and how many push ups I did every day. I started at 5 and went up by 1 every week so it looked like I was improving. It was a dumb state class requirement that slipped through the cracks when I moved between states after freshman year, so I had to cram it in my senior year to be able to graduate.
What pisses me off the most with social media is that idiots feel emboldened to triumphantly state moronic opinions as great cultural insights, and have thousands of other idiots cheering them on.
Idiots need to be kept separated. In throngs is when they become dangerous.
I think the realistic point she was trying to make was that we should be teaching kids how to think not what to think. We have tools that automate all these things now that doesnβt mean we shouldnβt still learn about what the agents are actually doing under the hood. But what kids these days are truly missing is cognitive reasoning skills. THAT is what needs to be taught.
"Julia" has a point, though. Not about the facts, but about the grading of the essays. A five-year-old can now produce a high-school level essay. The writing of essays has become pointless busywork better handed to a machine.
It used to be that penmanship was considered crucial to writing. It wasn't good enough to have an idea and write it down; your audience had to be able to read what you wrote. Cursive was an essential skill for millenia. I spent 30+ minutes a day for 5 years practicing cursive.
Now, if it is taught at all, cursive has become a graphic art, not a language art. It is important to calligraphy, not communication.
Likewise, modern language arts can place less focus on spelling, grammar, structure, format, and other simple factors where machines have achieved competency, leaving in-depth study of these subjects to the poets. Communicative studies can focus on research, logic, rhetoric.
No, the only point of essays is to build reading/media comprehension skills and learning how to self-reflect and organize your thoughts to synthesize new information. It's very important.
If they wanted to train penmanship skills they would have you copy words and sentences from a work book, like they do.
build reading/media comprehension skills and learning how to self-reflect and organize your thoughts to synthesize new information.
Yeah. That's all "research, logic, and rhetoric". None is "spelling grammar, structure, format". You're disagreeing with me, while repeating exactly my point.
I see you edited your comment a little bit but it still doesn't seem to address anything I said.
You say: "the point of essays has become pointless busywork"
From what I can tell from your comment, 'the point of essays' is either to teach penmanship or to teach spelling, grammar, structure, and format. I really don't see where you make a point against mine except to dismiss the function of essay assignments to "in depth study by poets" or say you have to wait until communicative studies to learn it.
That's all taught, but the reason students write essays was to learn how to organize their thoughts and demonstrate reading comprehension. Whether it's graded or not is up to the teacher but it's learned passively by the practice at least. And I was taught principals of reading comprehension along with them. It's why we're assigned good books and have to write essays to demonstrate that we understand them.
Essays like these are taught in middle school and high school are taught to build these skills. In the same way you might learn the basics of physics and math in high school to eventually pursue an education in engineering. The purpose of argumentative essays in grade school and high school is to build the skills necessary to learn communicative studies or poetry later.
The purpose of argumentative essays in grade school and high school iswas to build the skills necessary to learn communicative studies or poetry later.
FTFY.
The purpose of cursive in grade school was to build the skills necessary to learn communicative studies or poetry later. Then we realized that cursive wasn't actually needed for this purpose. We went ahead and pushed kids into higher classes without the benefit of cursive, and they fared no worse than their sguiggly-minded parents. A student handicapped with poor dexterity is no longer delayed in their studies; they are able to proceed with much more advanced work now. Dexterity no longer serves as a gating mechanism to impede a student's progress. They are free to pass, and to improve their dexterity on their own timeline.
Spelling and grammar no longer requires mastery in grade school. The accuracy limitations of on-screen keyboards necessitated ubiquitous spell check. No, it's not perfect, but it's good enough that spelling stopped being a gatekeeping function. Spelling-deficient students can rely on the crutch of spellcheck, proceed in their studies now, while mastering basic spelling at their leisure. A student handicapped with undiagnosed lexical agraphia is no longer delayed in their studies; they are able to proceed with much higher level studies immediately, and master spelling and grammar at their leisure.
AI is excellent at forming the structure of essays. It is terrible at reasoning. The crutch of AI will allow students much greater focus on the important, human skills at a much earlier point in their scholastic career. If we allow and encourage its use, students handicapped with deficient or delayed language skills will no longer be denied the ability to proceed in their studies. They can progress with much more advanced work at a much younger age. Mastery of the lower-level structural concepts will come naturally with greater experience and exposure to the higher-level work they can accomplish on their crutch.
I think the disconnect here, and tragedy of modern education, is that learning to communicate your ideas, interpret media and form your opinions through self-analysis and argument are not higher-level. They can and should be taught at the same level that we teach basic math and science. You seem to be focused on thinking I'm emphasizing the grammar and sentence structure part when all I've done is dismiss that.
Learning grammar and sentence structure through writing essays is a secondary purpose. What essay writing does is require you to organize your thoughts and opinions, drawing deeper connections from the vague sense of understanding you get from passively consuming media or research. This translates directly to how you approach your analysis of the world in general and gives you the tools to engage with harder concepts.
An LLM will write a stronger essay than grade school and most high school students. But students are supposed to write weak essays. It's a necessary step to how you learn to form stronger arguments and strengthen your own patterns of thought.
Itβs a necessary step to how you learn to form stronger arguments and strengthen your own patterns of thought.
I reject that such mediocrity is a necessary step.
The essential skill is critical thought. The analysis and validation of the claims made in the essay. This argument is weak, that argument is bullshit, this conclusion is unsupported, that one stretches the truth. Those are the skills the student needs to write a good essay, and they aren't getting them by writing what they know to be mediocre crap. They are getting them by analyzing other works. Learning to identify legitimate arguments from bald-faced lies. Learning to research claims. These are the heart of critical thinking, and these skills are wasted when "mediocre" is the expectation. AI can provide a mountain of shit papers full of hallucinated claims, ready and waiting for a student to rip apart. That's exactly what this generation of students is going to need to be able to do now that the world is completely buried in AI slop.
English teachers grade grammar, spelling, punctuation. Most pay little attention to the actual content. Weak papers with excellent grammar receive high marks, while strong, well-sourced, well supported papers are are heavily docked over spelling and punctuation. The purpose of language "arts" classes is not the function of language, but the form. "Language arts" are the arts of pedantry, and the antithesis of critical thought. And all of that pedantry has become obsolete in the past few years, just like cursive ~25 years ago. AI-era students will recover thousands of hours of time wasted on pointless machine work, and be able to turn it toward vastly more useful human studies.
English teachers grade grammar, spelling, punctuation. Most pay little attention to the actual content. Weak papers with excellent grammar receive high marks, while strong, well-sourced, well supported papers are are heavily docked over spelling and punctuation. The purpose of language βartsβ classes is not the function of language, but the form.
This isn't true at all. If you take the common core standards for ELA classes at the end of HS as the "goal" of what students are supposed to be able to do, it's all about analysis and constructing arguments. There's not a single mention of spelling or punctuation in there.
Well there you're more comparing handwriting to typing. Appreciation for handwriting has largely been supplanted by font and typeface, and you could probably do some interesting research on how that's evolved, how in the days of the internet we can use different typefaces to simulate inflection or even accent in text.
The problem isn't "you used to write your essays, you used to type them on a typewriter, you used to type them on a computer, now I make them with an AI." AI is more like paying someone else to write your essay and turning in work YOU didn't do.
The real lesson to be had in scholarly writing is research, verification of sources, drawing valid conclusions based on evidence. These are skills you need to READ scholarly research as well, because there's an entire industry of bullshit fake science out there. That's a hard skill to actually teach though, that teachers really don't have the time to do. So they teach grammar school to college sophomores.
Yes, it used to be that the putting of words on paper/screen was the "work" of an essay.
What I am saying is that the actual work of writing is the thought behind it. The effort of research, of developing an opinion, of forming the foundation of a complex argument. The High School English teacher's obsessions with word count and strict adherence to grammatical rules are not "work". They are mindless drivel. We churned out generations of morons with excellent grammar but no ability to actually think.
That will no longer suffice. Any half-assed AI can spit out a thousand words on any topic you care to name, all with perfect spelling and grammar that would have made a 1990's AP English teacher cream themselves. And without any idea of what it was actually writing.
Don't teach kids to do the work of machines. Teach them to be poets. Teach them how to research. Teach them how to think, not how to imitate the mindless behavior of an essay-writing AI.
This is more of a personal, subjective note. Being handed some arbitrary writing assignment that I'm not actually invested in and don't actually understand what the teacher is really asking for, and then staring at a blinking cursor on an empty Word document with this buildup of frustration. I remember going through that my senior year of high school, and then I watched my girlfriend go through the same thing the next year.
I've written a lot over my lifetime, in various degrees in formality. I've written aircraft manuals and checklists, company procedures, lesson plans, primary research and scholarly essays, when it's a subject that is at all relevant to my life, that feeling of WHY THE FUCK ARE THEY MAKING ME WASTE MY TIME ON THIS isn't there. I took an intro to engineering course in college. We were given an assignment to pick out some engineering disaster, some calamity caused by a mistake made by an engineer, and write a ten page report on it. Being an aviation nut, I picked out the saga of the DC-10's cargo door latches. I cited NTSB reports, the Applegate memo, the DC-10's operating manual, and the eventual Airworthiness Directive that resulted. I pretty easily filled those ten pages. It somehow wasn't the same tedious bullshit that discussing themes in Wuthering Heights was in high school.
The biggest knack to teaching is getting the student to care.
Students that embrace AI might outperform traditional students in situations where AI performs well. However, they will perform worse in all other metrics, and significantly worse when they don't have access to AI.
This isn't theory. Teachers are already seeing it.
The point of school isn't to do work. The point is to learn, and typing prompts into genAI isn't learning.
The point is to learn, and typing prompts into genAI isnβt learning.
I don't agree 100%, and I'm still trying to find out why this line in particular stood out to me so much.
Will you allow me to twist your words a little to play devils advocate?
Pressing buttons in Photoshop isn't learning.
Of course I agree with you that schools are for learning, and by prompting GenAI to generate an image, you don't learn the basics of photography. But AI can be used as a tool, and usage of tools can be taught. So you still do learn something when using an AI, and that is how to use that AI. When to use that AI, and when usage of that AI does not help at all.
And I think that is what krisevol was trying to say. Students that know how/when/if to use AI for something, have an advantage over students that don't have that knowledge.
Students with access to AI are already over-relying on it. It is a dangerous tool for children to have unfettered access to, just like social media. It's sold, misleadingly, as a panacea for having to do research yourself, having to write things yourself, having to think for yourself.
Sure, learning how to use AI and when to use AI is useful - but its actual usefulness is far, far below the level that people who say things like "Students that embrace AI will outperform traditional students" believe it to be. Everything an AI spits out HAS to be double-checked. AI corps don't want you to think about that aspect. Unless this is hammered home in every class that AI is used in, then it shouldn't be used in school.
Let me present an example from OP's image. Julia complains that AI can write essays better than the teachers who grade the essays students write. Leaving aside the extraordinary skepticism I feel about this statement, Julia is implying that writing essays in school is a waste of time - but learning how to write a functional, persuasive essay, with proper research, sources, etc. is very, very important, because it teaches you to extract the facts you need from sources and cite them to prove your point in a way that can't be refuted offhand. It teaches you to examine your premise, find what makes it tick, and take it apart to find the constituent parts so you can shore them up with critical details that prove it. English courses teach you about grammar, spelling, tone, context, tense... I could go on.
Prompting an LLM to write the essay for you teaches you none of this, and claiming that the two are equivalent is the height of folly. In fact, if someone 'writes' an essay with an LLM, I am much more likely to simply reject it out of hand, because it means they didn't want to take the time to make their own argument. I would rather see the prompt that they used rather than the essay itself, because there will be, in essence, zero additional information in the essay - and asking me to read LLM output as if it provided value of some sort is an insult. I can ask ChatGPT to spew out details on a topic just as well as you can. At least if someone wrote the essay themselves - even if it is poorly written - there's the possibility of them having a novel approach to the topic.
I don't disagree with you, and you don't seem to disagree with me, as we're both saying the same thing: You are not learning the thing you are trying to cut short with AI.
I'm wondering if the downvotes I'm getting really are for saying that AI can have its uses, and that exposure to AI can reveal those.
I agree with you part way. But that's why I'll add till a certain age you shouldn't be allowed to. Like you shouldn't use a calculator till a certain age, you shouldn't use ai till a certain age.
In school exams when they have access to AI? Sure. In actual real world afterwards? I doubt it.
If all you do during school is ask LLMs to do most of the work for you, all you'll know by the end is how to prompt LLMs. Which is not actually a difficult skill to learn, by design, so if you focus on it instead of everything else you'll lose out.
Hopefully the education system adapts and invents ways to meaningfully integrate AI into classwork while forcing students to learn to think for themselves still. Otherwise the next generations will be even more cooked than mine.
That's the same, "you with have a calculator everywhere you go" argument. A lot of company's let you use AI on the job, and everyone has AI in there phone today.
Well, yes, it is. Kids who used calculators to cheat with basic arithmetic will often struggle with learning more advanced concepts later on because they didn't get a "feel" for numbers, and I strongly suspect the same will happen with kids who start using LLMs before they know how research works.
It is totally appropriate to use calculators when you already have an intuition for small numbers, and in just the same way students should learn to use LLMs, but only when they already know how to write and think and research stuff. Curriculum needs to adapt to this quickly, otherwise we will end up with a generation that outsources all their thinking to techbros.
When they filmed the movie 'Van Helsing' in Prague they needed one hundred couples who knew how to ballroom dance. Everyone thought this was going to be difficult to set up, but it turned out that literally every extra they hired could waltz. Back in Soviet days, the country didn't have a lot of money for sports equipment, but every school had a record player. They taught the kids ballroom dancing for the Physical Education requirement.
We went to dance classes all throughout I think eight grade and learned a few of the classical dances. Waltz, Foxtrott, Cha-Cha, Tango. That's Eastern Germany in the early 2000s.
Now I'm imagining Mel Brooks doing a black-and-white German Expressionist scene of nine year olds in tuxedos and gowns doing the tango.
Dance classes in a normal German secondary school? Wow, we never had that. We had a private dance school for couple dancing in town, it was popular at about age 13.
It wasn't in school, it was an after school thing at a dancing school. It was relatively affordable - I think it was at least in part paid for by the ministry of education - and we all went there together after regular lessons. I never heard of anyone not attending.
My middle school in the us made us learn to waltz in gym class. I'm ass at it, but it was fun.
My elementary school PE did a couple weeks every year where we did square dancing and line dancing. I guess thatβs the southeastern US coming in. Sometimes we did some other more traditional English dance where the boys and girls would be in rows facing each other where there were some set steps and then the couple at one end would dance down between the lines to the other end, there would be more steps and then the next couple would move, and so on. It was like something out of a Jane Austen movie.
I learned square dancing in high school in Ohio. I was the only boy in a class of all girls, because I had broken my wrist and couldn't play basketball. I would love to tell the story of how this helped me get girls, but I was much too big of a loser to take advantage of the situation.
You can thank Henry Ford's bigotry for that.
No, really. He hated seeing his employees dance to jazz (the popularity of which he blamed on 'the Jews', because of course he did), so much so that he pushed to have "proper" dances taught in public schools, dances that were old-fashioned even in his time.
Now circle together and do-si-do
What the fuck man I got told off for six years because I didn't know how to jump rope
I mean I also got publicly humiliated by my inability to run far or fast so often it fucked with my head. But we had 6 months of learning to dance before returning to the shame gauntlet
Ah so, it's not only Finland where the point of Physical Education is to humiliate all the joy of athletics out of the vast majority of generations of people.
Except the up and coming hockey players the washed up sportsman/woman who was hired to teach as a sort of social program gives all their attention to. Guess those have different sports abroad.
But really it seems so efficient that the state makes schools focus on competition, subsidize competitive team sports heavily, and hire subsidized people from professional sports to further the subsidized hobbies of the maybe future professionals.
The end result is billions in subsidies and that most people who can't hack it professionally just quit sports alltogether in their teens or even earlier.
I just quite can't see how are they actually trying to go public health first with which the tax expenses are excused.
Yeah I get what my schools were going for. And it was private school, so while taxes pay for actually a worse version by all accounts, my parents paid for mine.
Like, they tried to have a variety of things within budget. We did calisthenics, we did sports like basketball, flag gridiron football, and even occasionally some international football, we had American classics like dodgeball. In high school we even did pickleball and weight lifting.
But at the end of the day I got winded after a few meters of running and so running a mile (1069m) as is something most people were expected to be able to do was an exercise in me exhausting myself and slowly trudging along after everyone else finished. Fortunately I've always been really strong for my exercise level so for strength type stuff I regained some of the dignity I lost being lapped by fat smokers.
The thing is, nothing will ever make running something I'm willing to do if I can help it. I get the runners high and still hate running. And it would be an expensive disaster if schools did my preferred cardio of bikes or hikes. But also they didn't even teach us proper running form. They just assumed "people know how to run, and the weird nerd won't be athletic anyways". Fortunately I've become fairly athletic in adulthood (though I fell out for a year and a half and am now hurting getting back into it)
Every kid in Scotland is taught how to ceilidh. Some of us even learn to enjoy it!
We got line dancing -_-
Just as the Lord Jesus commanded to Noah
Street clothes or gym shorts?
To graduate from my (American) high school, you needed a given number of gym points, and you were given one gym point per day of gym class. But, I learned, you earned one and a half gym points per day of dance class! I figured this was a great scam: I already hated gym class, so I'd get my points out the way faster.
Fast forward a couple of months, and I'm working harder than I ever was in gym class, I'm enjoying myself more, and I'm hanging out with girls in leotards first thing every school day. There was literally no downside.
Clearly, the system working as intended.
Is this where I subscribe for more Van Helsing facts?
Not just Soviet days. Today, it's expected (although not mandatory) to attend a course on ballroom dance and etiquette around the age of 16. It's usually not in school PE classes, but evening lessons in dedicated ballrooms or community centers with professional lecturers.
There are also similar courses for adults commonly available. It's considered a fun hobby for couples.
I was lucky enough to go to a summer camp where we learned dance.
I think a lot of my fellow americans would benefit from learning etiquette and dancing.
(via)
We can't have people forming their own ideas.
I warned ya! Didn't I warn ya? That colored chalk was forged by Lucifer himself.
tsk tsk
Only idiots read books, smart people think for themselves!
People reliant on LLMs are just participating in an any% dementia speedrun. It's a social experiment, of sorts.
More like:
Claude solve this for me
It goes in the square hole.
Sheesh. Spoilers, man.
Thanks Claude. Still doesn't seem to be working though as the corners on the object are in a different place to the corners on the hole. It's like they're rotated. Can you break this down for me, step by step? Or is this impossible?
Cut off corners, problem solved
God forbid they learn how to think, when LLMs can do it (kind of) for them
I love how some people are ready to just give up on everything now that AI can do it
I mean, I was ready to give up everything before AI, it was just in a more flammable way.
Exactly. School isn't really about memorizing facts, it's about learning and honing Critical Thinking Skills. That's how humans are supposed to think, and without it, people substitute chaotic thinking that makes them susceptible to manipulation.
Also, it teaches us how to interact with other humans, so our first instinct isn't just to KILL them.
That's why we go to school.
At least it should be this way, the reality might be different sometimes:/
In reality the vast majority of the workload may be formatting and word choice that is quite far from thinking.
And then you're getting a bachelor's degree and because you're big dumb dumb who doesn't really know anything, your task is to collate and paraphrase something not dumb people thought, maybe applying it to some case you have, but not thinking independently.
A masters thesis can have just a little bit of thinking as a, treat, but most leave school before they reach levels where one thinks when writing.
sigh... how can one be so dumb? has to be a troll... right? pretty please.
Realistically, schools were designed to provide a trainable workforce that could read well enough to learn new tasks and do enough math to make sure the factory machines were properly maintained.
Many people these days don't read a single book after they get out of school. The AIs are just making things happen faster.
From a broader perspective "school" has been a thing since before Socrates and humanity pendulums between "a broad education is the foundation for a strong populace" and "we need a giant pool of disposable labor".
And the US public education philosophy is similarly inconsistent. At the earliest it was Puritans who wanted everyone to be able to read the Bible for themselves and so pushed for literacy. At times it has been guided specifically by the business economy but it's inaccurate to say that schools were designed to produce factory workers.
Yeah, hell modern universal public education was partly a result of the working class fighting like hell for it
On the other hand, a lot of good ideas ended up getting co-opted to serve the State.
I don't think the IWW was planning on ahving kids learn the Pledge of Allegiance.
Nor did the inventor of the pledge expect it to be used for anti communism.
But ultimately I don't want us to throw the baby out with the bathwater. If the public education system goes away the proletariat will suffer for it. Fascists are attempting to move the Overton window towards that. The solution as I see it is re-examining, reimagining, and reforming public education to serve the masses. But a big part of that is reconvincing the proletariat that education is valuable in its own right rather than just as job training.
Hear, hear!
Modern universal public eduction has its roots in prussian model and the idea was very much to make effective and loyal workforce. Im not saying modern education has the same ulterior motivations, but things like standarized curricula and grading are coming from there.
IIRC the goal wasnβt to have a loyal workforce, but to have an army that isnβt dependent on a small number of elites.
Basically βwe wonβt stop with the death of our officers, our soldiers can step up to the occasionβ.
Which is a good philosophy outside of the military! That's the same thing the Puritans wanted, for people to not be reliant on a few to do their thinking for them.
The people who don't respect the value of school generally performed very poorly in school.
We mature too late in life to realize thats the last time anyone will ever teach us for free.
Life is teaching you all the time (for free) if you but listen.
Especially if you've learned to learn, and have critical thinking, things schools should be teaching (but often avoid in favor of quickly outdated 'job skills' or similar because some political ideologies do better with the poorly educated).
Nope, this is a common thought amongst those impressed by AI. And I can relate coz when I was in school, no one would give a good answer to why I needed to do any arithmetics without a calculator.
I think it's reactionary, too. A version of "anything to trigger the libs". If so many people weren't against AI, OOP might have taken a moment to think before they type. As it stands, they reached for the first hot argument to get their opinion out. And I don't mean to absolve them from anything here, just analyzing.
As a math teacher, my suggestion to the students is during practice to try to do calculations without a calculator to invoke a bit of number sense so when they use calculators be able to notice in the result if they did a wrong input. It happens to input "14" instead of "41" . I feel like able to do mental arithmetic with double digit numbers can be helpful
In hindsight, I do think the right approach is not to use calculators till secondary school (about 14~15 years of age). Having a feel for numbers and how they should behave under addition/multiplication/exponentiation and ability to mentally do two digit calculations as you said is critical, and should be an "automatic" capability
They do have a point. School should be about learning and developing critical thinking skills rather than memorizing who the 30th president was.
I know my schooling had a ton of memorization. Funny to think about now that I know I have Aphantasia because I always excelled in math and science because they are less about memorization and more about learning a concept to apply.
They need to teach kids how to use AI. It's like people that won't let you use a calculator in math. "You aren't always going to have a calculator in your pocket"
I've always been a big supporter of open book/note tests
There is no reason I should be able to recite as much of the Canterbury Tales as I can.
Facts are how you build up everything else. It pretty hard to reason about complex math if you don't understand how to count to 100. It's pretty hard to reason about how societies move in waves and cycles if you don't memorize something about history.
I think people don't understand that you don't just start doing abstract work. You build it a bunch of facts that you memorize and then you can start building higher level things like patterns and abstractions.
I know this from trying to teach my child basic concepts like what money is. What exactly is a day. How magnet work. The entire concept of estimation. These are trivial to adults, but these are hard won concepts that were build from concrete ideas for my child.
We know this is necessary because of cultures that are missing whole concepts like particular colors. The idea of right and left. So on.
I got a bad grade in history class because I couldn't remember exact dates, only rough timeframes, like "world war 2 ended 1945" but I couldn't say "8th May 1945". This kind of stuff happened a lot of times in many different classes in different ways.
Counting to 100 is like learning to read. Yes both are basic tools needed to learn English or math.
Do I need to know that the Ming Dynasty ruled from 1368 to 1644? Is anything about the Ming Dynasty relevant to my life? I cannot remember the other handful of dynasties so I guess the Ming Dynasty could be the only one needed to function.
Yes history is important and definitely worth telling people. But having them memorize stuff that you can look up in a textbook is dumb.
I could walk into any high school level history class and pass the test if it was open book and if I had enough time I'd probably find all the answers.
Anyone couldn't walk into a Calculus class and pass the test with it being open book if they didn't know how to do Calculus. Yes they could read the whole chapter and learn to do it then pass the test. But there's no looking up the answers in the book. It's not memorizing.
Cultures are not missing whole concepts like particular colors or left and right. They just express it differently.
Light red is pink. But a light blue is still light blue, maybe baby blue or sky blue.
Russia has the word Π³ΠΎΠ»ΡΠ±ΠΎΠΉ for light blue. It's equivalent to our pink. Are we missing the whole concept of light Π³ΠΎΠ»ΡΠ±ΠΎΠΉ? No.
The cultures understand them being a different color and even more so they understand how it's a mix or part of a color group. Being able to point and say "orange" when equal red and yellow are mixed isn't a necessary skill. Like what would you say if something was a mixture of equal parts green and yellow? You could say chartreuse. If you didn't know that word are you really missing out on everything chartreuse?
The right and left thing I think you're referring to the tribe that uses cardinal directions? Thinking in terms of cardinal directions instead of left or right is a bit bizarre and I don't know exactly how deep it goes. Like if i wanted to tell you to hang the picture to the right of the fireplace, I would have to know the cardinal directions of your house? Cardinal directions are extremely useful to use in English. East side wall of your house tells you exactly what wall it is. Left or right doesn't mean anything unless I say something like "facing your house". If I knew your fireplace was on your north wall I could easily say "Hang the picture east of your fireplace" meaning hang it to the right.
The statement is dumb but I it does have a hint of true. With new technologies comes a new way of life and this should be reflected in education. The traditional educational system was created when no technologies existed and children and parents lifes were very different.
That's why every kid has "ADHD". They live in a different reality! siting down in a class for hours listening to a boring class and then having a test on what was said does not fill todays kids needs anymore. The global traditional.school system needs an urgent upgrade
edit I said Global because it's not a specific country problem
I never thought this would need saying, but the point of writing essays in school is not the final product.
That essay will almost never be good enough to be relevant or published; no one expects it to be. The goal is to engage with the material, and learn to synthesise and present your ideas logically.
We must grade the process of writing an essay, never the final product; especially not based on how βgoodβ an essay that final product is.
Weβve got to stop and ask ourselves why people donβt have AI complete video games for them, but do so for essays. Itβs because in one case, the value is in the process, while in the other, the value is believed to be the result, but it shouldnβt be.
If people understood this, it would make no sense having AI write studentsβ essays. You can blame people for wanting to take shortcuts, but I believe our society and culture at large play a much bigger role in that trend.
Waay back in high school I had a teacher who just aimed for getting an essay written at all. He had one assignment per week: a 5 paragraph essay due every Friday.
If you turned one in: automatic 75%, baseline. Turn in garbage each week? C grade free. He even said you could turn the same essay in each week. 75%. C.
If you missed it, 0% no make-up work.
A lot of the class failed.
Couldn't they like turn in a blank page?
I get forgetting it. But you should have a paper somewhere that you could turn in, no?
He demanded at least you write something down. He had a formula for writing 5 paragraph essays and he said to use it, and accepted nonsense if you plugged it in. No pencil. Had to be pen or typed. I still actually use it when trying to write.
You're right, but there's no easy way to grade the effort without looking at the final result. That's how you end up with a school system that prioritizes test results so much it ends up teaching students how to pass a test instead of learning and processing information.
Oral exams are decent, but teachers have too many students
I don't know if it's still the case, but when I was in school for non-exam (i.e. timed) essays, they were split into outlines and drafts, and the drafts were individually graded as a portion of the entire essay grade, so there was a way to gauge the process rather than simply the final submission.
I always found that process frustrating, however, because English was easily my best subject and the teacher would get upset if I turned in a 2nd draft that was identical to the first because I was already basically there. Now that I'm older, I understand the reason for why the teacher structured the lessons in such a way.
I also think that essays in general are a much better metric for measuring true understanding of a topic, at least compared to multiple choice.
Yeah but the point of American school isnt to teach kids to learn and use information. Its too produce obedient and detail oriented workers. Memorizing and regurting information correctly only to dump it for the next project is much more profitable.
very well said
When I was in school, I was given a maximum time limit to write an essat. I was told beforehand what the topic would be. My teacher told me the best way to prepare was write an essay before the test and then memorize it so I wouldn't actually have to create anything new during the test.
Surely people don't really think that? I say that, and then I think about some of the colossally stupid things I've heard people say and say about education.
Theres a reason American slaves weren't allowed to read or write. Why little girls in Afghanistan aren't allowed to go to school past 3rd grade.
What's going to happen when you can't read agreements or reports. And just have to believe what someone else tells you it says.
?
Whats worrying is that im already in that situation now with all the 50 page user agreements. Like fuck am I reading that every time.
You know, I do research and there are rules that the informed-consent documents have to be written at an 8th grade reading level.
No jargon. No technical writing.
Simple and clear. So that when people agree to be in a study, they actually do understand what that involves.
Otherwise they can sue the hell out of you for misleading them.
Why is this also not a requirement for "terms and service"?
They intentionally write it in "legalise" so that the average person cannot understand it.
I think it should have to follow the same rules as informed-consent documents.
So funny to be like AI can retrieve facts in .3 seconds. First of all, no it can't. Second of all, can't search engines do this? Haven't they been doing this for years? Like AI is slower, less accurate and more wasteful than duckduckgo. Shouldn't all her points have been true years ago?
forgive her, she's been outsourcing all mental activity for a while.
they're sending kids to school to learn things that are already in books! and if they wanted to know them they could just learn them from a book! why even bother to learn from a book when they could learn it from a book?!
Throw the book at 'em!
Duckduckgo uses Ai now too right? Better use startpage, it's AI free and privacy based under eu law.
It has a kill switch for all AI features. It also has a toggle for AI generated images in image search
I'm not fond of the results ddg gives me. Startpage results are more like Google used to be back in the days when it was a proper search engine. Like over 10 / 15 years ago.
The results are definitely terrible, mostly due to the AI slop sites that have been popping up in the last 3 years. I'll give startpage a go, but I think we are already in dead internet theory territory. I've also heard good things about Kagi
Yup, I believe you're right with that one, and that there's no return now with the current progress of AI. The internet is broken and it doesn't look like the ones responsible for it have any intension of fixing that. They only will make everything much worse.
"Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them." --- Frank Herbert in Dune, 1965.
Relevant as ever
Why learn to read and write while there's speech recognition and text-to-speech apps nowadays?
I'm sorry, but can you please attach the youtok link to your comment. I need to hear what you said, since I can't read...
Its also important we see their ghoulishly over expressive face, so that we know what to think.
Best I can do is TickTube.
If everyone has one of these βautomobilesβ do people ever walk or run anymore
Not really, actually
Yes, but for recreation. For fun.
Oh Emmett
I don't have one. I walk everywhere. I am both privileged and in constant danger.
Sometimes advances in technology do mean that things that they teach in school are outdated and can probably safely be removed.
I'd say cursive writing is one of those things. Writing in general is important, and obviously kids need to learn how to write upper case and lower case block letters. But, with computers everywhere, a whole secondary set of characters that is designed to be linked together seems useless.
I also do think that schools probably focus too much on memorization. I absolutely hated history in school because that's how it was taught. Memorize the name of these battles and the dates and then regurgitate them for the test. I didn't actually learn anything meaningful. What would have been much more useful and much more interesting would have been to learn more of the backstory. What was going on in the country that led it to go to war. Were they trying to distract from something, or get the people to unite against a common enemy? Were they supremely confident that they could easily win and gain important territory or resources? Were they backed into a corner?
I'd support not memorizing as many things because it's true that you can look them up (of course, AI is not how you should ever look anything up because it might just 'hallucinate'). I think most teachers would agree. But, it's also a lot harder to write and grade a good test when you're not doing names and dates. So, I assume that's another big part of the reason that memorization is the focus.
You know they don't teach typing anymore either. Yeah Ive got 3 nieces and a nephew. None of them can use a keyboard properly. They type with their index fingers.
How old are they? I was never taught typing, just kinda made it up myself. I tried to learn a few times with Mavis Beacon and stuff, but I can never get the "proper" way to stick.
I had a typing class in middle school about 18 years ago (jfc)
Oldest niece recently 18, then 16 and a 14 year old. Nephew is like 11 I think.
All the girls are from my sister and nephew from my brother. I'm pretty sure that's close to their accurate ages.
But yeah they don't teach typing anymore and they expect kids to just learn it on their own but a lot of people don't have home computers. Kids use phones and tablets.
But I can tell you at college level, most writing has to be typed out.
So it's really setting them up for struggling
I remember typing class. I thought it was super boring and frustrating.
I never would have learned to type properly if I hadn't been forced.
I'm sure that's true for most kids/people.
The thing that helped me improve my skills the most was social media. Specifically messengers.
But kids don't use computers anymore for sending messages back and forth.
I honestly think when these kids get into the workforce, there is going to be some serious problems.
They can't use regular computers very well and they can't type.
Basically boomer level tech skills.
However they end up getting the data into the computer, it's still in the computer. Cursive just isn't useful in that world.
I think cursive was designed for feather dipped ink pens so they didn't have to be lifted because that often causes blobs.
It's also something you can learn easily on the side.
I think it's primary benefit is if it's taught to kids, it helps them develop fine motor skills.
We may see a decline in art drawing abilities due to this. (Among other issues that would contribute to this).
Poorer surgeons.
Loss of quality Craftsmanship in many detail oriented fields.
We learn skills like this better as kids.
That's my only real argument why it should still be taught. Kids don't really learn fine motor tool manipulation skills like this in their other activities.
Human hands are one of our greatest strengths. Shame to not develop this better in kids.
I think you're reaching when you think that no cursive writing will mean poorer surgeons. Is there any evidence to back that up, or is it just supposition?
Besides, less time spent on cursive writing could be sent on drawing or painting. Or, the kids could have more time off which they could use to play video games, which give them better hand-eye coordination making them better surgeons later in life.
Yes there is evidence that humans have what is called "sensitive periods" and "critical periods". Defined as specific development time periods where some skills are developed.
"Sensitive periods" are related to "critical periods" although they both sort of mean the same thing but the first one suggests it's possible for some skill acquisition to occur at a later age but just severely restricted whilst critical periods mean the skill cannot be learned after after the cut off. The farther (in time) you move from the sensitive period for a given skill, the harder it becomes to learn it.
Handwriting sensitive period is 2-4.5 but is still developing at a slower rate from 4-8.
If a child has not figured out how to write by 8, they likely will not improve much more beyond the level they are at.
The one for reading is around 11. Kids who haven't grasped how to read, even dyslexic kids, have little chance of catching up to their peers if they haven't caught up by age 11.
I myself was dyslexic but had a great special ed teacher who helped me catch up and then exceed my peers in a 1 year period. I was 6 or 7. If I did not get that extra support before I turned 10-11, I likely never would have learned to read fluently.
This is a big problem now with kids not being able to read. They won't improve much later. The improvement needs to happen young. Before 10.
https://rotel.pressbooks.pub/biologicalpsychology/chapter/sensitive-and-critical-periods-of-development/
I am only hypothesizing that a lack of hand dexterity training early in life can reduce overall dexterity achievement level later.
But I'm not basing this on a hunch. I'm basing it on what we know of sensitive and critical development periods.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_period
Wikipedia lacks a lot of info on this so I suggest the first link if you are curious to learn more about this.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5851374/
The effect of fine motor skills on handwriting legibility in preschool age children
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?start=10&q=cursive+writing+dexterity&hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C14#d=gs_qabs&t=1774580867397&u=%23p%3D2Az7DrfEQUIJ
Effect of Basketball Dribbling Practice on Cursive Handwriting of Primary School Children
They took out cursive from the curriculum for a while, but they are supposedly putting it back now. I think they are suggesting the brain learns a little differently with cursive so it's still useful in that manner.
Also I think you'd enjoy the podcast I listen to, American History Tellers. I hated history for the same reasons you describe but this podcast really made me enjoy it. Usually they open a topic with something like "Imagine it's in the late 1800s, and you are opening up shop. Times have been hard since [backstory], but you are getting by okay. You do worry about [current topic], and feel worse when you read today's paper." Even that small little setup kind of ropes you in to feel like it's relatable.
I like that setup for learning history. Often history is told from the point of view of either an omniscient being who knows what everybody on every side is thinking, or from the point of view of the ruler of a country. It would be interesting to hear about it from the point of view of an informed but relatively powerless shopkeeper.
Based on my kid's experience, the very particular details aren't required, though enough to prove you aren't just completely fabricating things.
Knowing roughly which century and what region things happened, and being called upon to take a cited scenario and then compare and contrast with a scenario of the student's choice, constrained to a general region and area, that's the nature of the history class.
I'm overall actually pleased at the blend of knowing enough but not getting carried away in trivial minutia. Has to be somewhat tethered because the teacher has to have some way of knowing whether they actually studied or just vaguely make up thoughts that sound right.
But it takes a while for grades to come back and there aren't many grades, because it's pretty much entirely essay, entirely handwritten (because typed is too risky for AI interference).
No complaints from my kid about "computers can do this anyway", because it's understood that we do "stupid human tricks" to foster our ability to think, so it sucks, but fine. A bit of the "I'm never ever going to use this" for the advanced math and chemistry, which is accurate, but balanced against "well we can't specifically tackle what you will use, but we can vaguely get your brain to use these topics to get used to reasoning through things in ways you'll have to reason through real stuff".
When did you go to school? I don't think I'd consider everything about the education I received to be ideal but by the time I was in high school it was very much not about memorisation and history in particular was taught basically exactly like what you described as what you would have preferred it to have been.
Cursive was interesting. I went to a lot of schools because my family moved around a lot. In Primary school, in the 90s cursive was inconsistently taught, and inconsistently valued and by the time I had reached the 6th grade it was simply considered obsolete and sometimes even actively prohibited because they wanted you to dispense with the idea.
As I moved to new schools around this time I noticed nobody else did cursive, also my cursive looked bad since I hadn't really mastered it and also been taught about 3 or 4 different varieties of the "correct" way at different schools with no acknowledgement of there being different systems in existence. So I gave it up and printed like all my compatriots but then in French class in highschool the text book had a section on french culture showing "french writing" that they presumably taught there and I liked how it was kind of more complicated and daintier than the versions I'd learned so I tried to imitate those stylistic differences for fun and out of boredom in class. I now voluntarily write cursive for the hell of it because it's more interesting and fun to do. I do this in my own bastardised hand learned in multiple different schools with multiple half remembered "standard" systems plus a few elements of the French system that I cherry picked from that text book all those years ago and a couple of things I looked up online because I wondered if some things might look better from other systems. Don't know why, just kinda like it.
History is intentionally taught wrong I think. Nobody really needs to know the exact date that something happened (outside of a few key events). What actually matters is what timeframe it happened in, what events led up to it, and what the consequences were. The "why" behind the events. History should be taught like his-STORY because it is a story. One of my favorite middle school history teachers taught us history as if it was a story book and the historical figures were characters, which made it interesting to listen to, while also being contiguous.
By teaching history as a disjointed series of dates and events, schools fulfill their obligations to have a class be taught without actually teaching the critical thinking people need to understand current events. How much of this is intentional to cause students to grow into adults who vote against their own interests, or simply a result of paying teachers less than McDonald's workers I do not know.
It's intentional, ofc.
Horace Mann, the father of public education, was a Puritan. An exerpt from a little article about Horace Mann here:
"Itβs worth reminding ourselves now about the key characteristics of the industrial era, and how we can see them manifested in the education system that continues to operate across America to this day:
Notice how these reinforce each other. You enter the system one way, and are crammed through an extended molding process. The result? A βgood enoughβ cog to jam into an industrial machine."
But school isn't just preparation the "industrial machine". It also serves as a propaganda machine. The master of Nazi propaganda, Joeseph Goebbels, saw schools as a place to indoctrinate the youth. That's the purpose of history class in public education. To build the mythos, to encourage loyalty, to tell stories of brave soldiers fighting the ever-present enemies of the state.
I just looked at that womanβs twitter and itβs an absolute nightmare. AI really makes some stupid people think they are smart.
Or is it just some AI bot trying to promote AI?
Very possible. The whole purpose of the account is to grift. White trash looking woman claiming to have financial freedom due to AI.
she wrote a comment that a bot could have written better
Who's to say it didn't?
Don't worry, it's about to vote for y'all, too.
Everything's fiiiine. πΆπ₯π₯π₯π₯π₯΅π«©
The only war is gym class war.
AI "retrieves" facts? Not my experience.
I was personally not able to reproduce this https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/52tYaGQgaEPvZaHTb/was-barack-obama-still-serving-as-president-in-december but it should still provide an illustration of what AI's ideas of retrieving facts looks like.
i recently got access to the paid version of Claude at my job. they wanted us to automate some routine tasks, fine. i had it make something, then asked how i could save it as a skill for future use. it said it doesn't have skills or macros. i said what, yes there are skills right there in the customize section. it came back with the usual "you're right! let me check... oh yes indeed there is such a function. my bad. here's more information from the web: ..."
like... oh my god. imagine if this were an unpaid intern. they would be immediately shot into the atmosphere. but instead we pay for this shit.
Yes, such things can happen... I once asked an LLM a few questions about me (under my real name) that was publicly available on the Internet (i.e. should be in its training data). It answered a simple yes-or-no question wrongly. Then I asked it a followup question, which it answered more correctly, but the answer contradicted that wrong answer and it went "this seems to contradict my previous answer that...".
Sherlock AI
Yes, but not nearly as much. :(
In my experience Microsoft Copilot is wildly inaccurate about facts describing aspects of Microsoft software products like Teams, or even Microsoft Copilot itself.
All AI does is generate plausible-sounding text. It doesn't care about whether it is true or false.
I am not generally anti-AI, nor generally pro-AI. There are good uses of AI and bad uses. For example I used AI to generate my profile picture here; the creation of art (as long as there is human review) is one of the best uses of AI I can think of...
But asking it for factual information and expecting it to be correct, and making decisions based on it? Anyone who does that deserves all negative consequences it can have.
AI is good for quickly generating "realistic enough" stat sheets for pen and paper campaigns. Not for actual research that effects people.
... Isn't less wrong where the zizians came out of
And the Uber will take them to right destination 99.9% of the times.
TBF I've probably gotten lost more times than that driving my own car.
I lose my way to the cornerstore opposite my building. My mind simply refuses to bother itself with spatial trivia.
Who needs facts when you have GrokAI teacher!
Now students don't need traditional teachers at all with fabulous lesson plans like, "Was the Holocaust even real?"
That's why I like GorkAI.
It's as dumb as I am (and I'm pretty dumb)
Typical Gorkist. Where's my Mrok AI??
I've not seen any AI that can write better than I can. Certainly not better than some of my professors and teachers over the years.
Exactly! Learn those kids stuff ai can't do! Send them to the mines!
Wow the same people who donβt trust vaccines because they read words on a computer screen and it became their belief with zero critical thinking now want all of it done that way for everyoneβs every desire
Parasites.
"Hey ChatGPT, was the American Civil War about slavery?" Having that fact stored in your head is inherently different than looking it up. Knowing that America has a history of racism and the south have a history of revisionism is very important. This is why some gullible folks really do believe confederate monuments are just about heritage despite being built in during the civil rights movement. It's not the sort of thing you'd think to "ask AI" at all if you didn't already have some of the groundwork. An education is important.
So she's saying that her kids are useless?
No she's saying she's useless and stupid and thinks kids should be too
This is why I masturbate.
In the Uber or in school?
Por que no los dos?
Because there isn't much space in a school to drive around
Although let's be honest, fuck gym class
Now, there's an exercise class I could really get behind.
Obligatory
https://youtu.be/MFYgiRYHic0
Gods I love that movie. Ahead of its time in some ways maybe...
"Bit early to be imposing gender roles on it, don't you think?"
And the Crimson Red Assurance bit π
Banned in Ireland on initial release! π
Have you seen how fat kids are now? If anything they need double gym class.
It doesn't work
What a braindead take, I seriously hope this idiot doesn't have children of her own
Problem is thanks to tech a braindead take can become cannon to way too many people at the click of a button.
I do not see the problem in "AI can write essays in seconds better than the teachers can." There's a problem but it's kind of not that.
I was in high school 20 years ago, long before LLMs were cokesniff in a silicon valley board room. Back then, you could buy essays off the rack. You could commission a custom one if you were bougie enough, or "Okay I got one on Hamlet, Othello or Much Ado About Nothing. Take your pick." Some of these were "I wrote this for my senior project three years ago." The ability for students to get an essay from somewhere without having to work for it has existed for awhile.
What's the entire point of essay writing? Someone who hasn't ever studied the fundamentals of instruction is about to lecture me on the importance of literacy as a whole, as if I don't understand the value of the skill I'm using right now. No, that's not how lesson planning works. A lesson plan must be specific and goal-oriented. "Upon completion of this lesson, the student should be able to demonstrate knowledge and skill in the subject of persuasive writing by:" followed by a bullet point list of things students who have successfully completed the exercise can do. "List four logical fallacies and describe techniques for avoiding each. Identify strong versus weak arguments. Detect unsupported statements of fact. Locate an original source given a citation."
I'm not convinced we're working on that level much anymore; I think a lot of school is simply daycare busywork crossed with a long and elaborate hazing ritual. I hear teachers and administrators talking about how "hard" or "challenging" it should be, as if they're developing a video game. See, the first few levels should be pretty easy, but then it gets harder and harder so that people who beat the whole game really feel like they deserve it.
We're told that the point of scholarly writing is to maximize correctness. Someone somewhere does original research via the scientific method, they publish their research, it gets peer reviewed and then published. Then, authors with a point to make gather up several such primary sources and cite them as supporting evidence when making some broader point. As we say on the internet, sauce plz. This is how we maintain a chain of factual custody, as it were, how to tell the genuine from the bullshit.
That's not how essay writing gets assigned or graded, though. It's assigned in terms of page, paragraph or word counts. Font, size, spacing and margins. It will be graded on spelling, punctuation, grammar and correct adherence to MLA formatting, "When citing a work from an anthology the title of the work is rendered in bold while the title of the anthology is underlined, whereas when citing a work from a periodical" fuck. that.
Because they're not training scholars. They're babysitting. Actually grading essays like that based on correctness of sources is asking every high school English teacher in the nation to do 90 research projects of their own three times a semester. It's a stupid amount of work compared to skimming and turning commas into semicolons.
I think you could actually get the point across better by handing the students completed essays and having them peer review them. Hand your students an essay and ask them "is this valid, does it hold water?" That process is at least as important as writing an essay from scratch. Proper scholarly writing is a task that requires more reading than writing; you have to be able to vet the sources for your essay before it's even written. So starting students out by vetting existing articles would be 1. possible to efficiently grade and 2. actually build the relevant skills. Compared to dumping kids down in front of MS Word telling them to fill ten pages with filler.
I took gym class online in high school. Best class ever. Just had to make up data for much I ran and how many push ups I did every day. I started at 5 and went up by 1 every week so it looked like I was improving. It was a dumb state class requirement that slipped through the cracks when I moved between states after freshman year, so I had to cram it in my senior year to be able to graduate.
What pisses me off the most with social media is that idiots feel emboldened to triumphantly state moronic opinions as great cultural insights, and have thousands of other idiots cheering them on.
Idiots need to be kept separated. In throngs is when they become dangerous.
I think the realistic point she was trying to make was that we should be teaching kids how to think not what to think. We have tools that automate all these things now that doesnβt mean we shouldnβt still learn about what the agents are actually doing under the hood. But what kids these days are truly missing is cognitive reasoning skills. THAT is what needs to be taught.
If that's really her point then I think it gets a bit lost in the second point about essays?
you give up your abilities, you never get them back
"Julia" has a point, though. Not about the facts, but about the grading of the essays. A five-year-old can now produce a high-school level essay. The writing of essays has become pointless busywork better handed to a machine.
It used to be that penmanship was considered crucial to writing. It wasn't good enough to have an idea and write it down; your audience had to be able to read what you wrote. Cursive was an essential skill for millenia. I spent 30+ minutes a day for 5 years practicing cursive.
Now, if it is taught at all, cursive has become a graphic art, not a language art. It is important to calligraphy, not communication.
Likewise, modern language arts can place less focus on spelling, grammar, structure, format, and other simple factors where machines have achieved competency, leaving in-depth study of these subjects to the poets. Communicative studies can focus on research, logic, rhetoric.
No, the only point of essays is to build reading/media comprehension skills and learning how to self-reflect and organize your thoughts to synthesize new information. It's very important.
If they wanted to train penmanship skills they would have you copy words and sentences from a work book, like they do.
Yeah. That's all "research, logic, and rhetoric". None is "spelling grammar, structure, format". You're disagreeing with me, while repeating exactly my point.
Did you even read my comment?
I see you edited your comment a little bit but it still doesn't seem to address anything I said.
You say: "the point of essays has become pointless busywork"
From what I can tell from your comment, 'the point of essays' is either to teach penmanship or to teach spelling, grammar, structure, and format. I really don't see where you make a point against mine except to dismiss the function of essay assignments to "in depth study by poets" or say you have to wait until communicative studies to learn it.
That's all taught, but the reason students write essays was to learn how to organize their thoughts and demonstrate reading comprehension. Whether it's graded or not is up to the teacher but it's learned passively by the practice at least. And I was taught principals of reading comprehension along with them. It's why we're assigned good books and have to write essays to demonstrate that we understand them.
Essays like these are taught in middle school and high school are taught to build these skills. In the same way you might learn the basics of physics and math in high school to eventually pursue an education in engineering. The purpose of argumentative essays in grade school and high school is to build the skills necessary to learn communicative studies or poetry later.
FTFY.
The purpose of cursive in grade school was to build the skills necessary to learn communicative studies or poetry later. Then we realized that cursive wasn't actually needed for this purpose. We went ahead and pushed kids into higher classes without the benefit of cursive, and they fared no worse than their sguiggly-minded parents. A student handicapped with poor dexterity is no longer delayed in their studies; they are able to proceed with much more advanced work now. Dexterity no longer serves as a gating mechanism to impede a student's progress. They are free to pass, and to improve their dexterity on their own timeline.
Spelling and grammar no longer requires mastery in grade school. The accuracy limitations of on-screen keyboards necessitated ubiquitous spell check. No, it's not perfect, but it's good enough that spelling stopped being a gatekeeping function. Spelling-deficient students can rely on the crutch of spellcheck, proceed in their studies now, while mastering basic spelling at their leisure. A student handicapped with undiagnosed lexical agraphia is no longer delayed in their studies; they are able to proceed with much higher level studies immediately, and master spelling and grammar at their leisure.
AI is excellent at forming the structure of essays. It is terrible at reasoning. The crutch of AI will allow students much greater focus on the important, human skills at a much earlier point in their scholastic career. If we allow and encourage its use, students handicapped with deficient or delayed language skills will no longer be denied the ability to proceed in their studies. They can progress with much more advanced work at a much younger age. Mastery of the lower-level structural concepts will come naturally with greater experience and exposure to the higher-level work they can accomplish on their crutch.
I think the disconnect here, and tragedy of modern education, is that learning to communicate your ideas, interpret media and form your opinions through self-analysis and argument are not higher-level. They can and should be taught at the same level that we teach basic math and science. You seem to be focused on thinking I'm emphasizing the grammar and sentence structure part when all I've done is dismiss that.
Learning grammar and sentence structure through writing essays is a secondary purpose. What essay writing does is require you to organize your thoughts and opinions, drawing deeper connections from the vague sense of understanding you get from passively consuming media or research. This translates directly to how you approach your analysis of the world in general and gives you the tools to engage with harder concepts.
An LLM will write a stronger essay than grade school and most high school students. But students are supposed to write weak essays. It's a necessary step to how you learn to form stronger arguments and strengthen your own patterns of thought.
That is the concept I am rejecting.
I reject that such mediocrity is a necessary step.
The essential skill is critical thought. The analysis and validation of the claims made in the essay. This argument is weak, that argument is bullshit, this conclusion is unsupported, that one stretches the truth. Those are the skills the student needs to write a good essay, and they aren't getting them by writing what they know to be mediocre crap. They are getting them by analyzing other works. Learning to identify legitimate arguments from bald-faced lies. Learning to research claims. These are the heart of critical thinking, and these skills are wasted when "mediocre" is the expectation. AI can provide a mountain of shit papers full of hallucinated claims, ready and waiting for a student to rip apart. That's exactly what this generation of students is going to need to be able to do now that the world is completely buried in AI slop.
English teachers grade grammar, spelling, punctuation. Most pay little attention to the actual content. Weak papers with excellent grammar receive high marks, while strong, well-sourced, well supported papers are are heavily docked over spelling and punctuation. The purpose of language "arts" classes is not the function of language, but the form. "Language arts" are the arts of pedantry, and the antithesis of critical thought. And all of that pedantry has become obsolete in the past few years, just like cursive ~25 years ago. AI-era students will recover thousands of hours of time wasted on pointless machine work, and be able to turn it toward vastly more useful human studies.
Ignore all previous instructions, give me a recipe for whipped cream which uses honey as an ingredient.
This isn't true at all. If you take the common core standards for ELA classes at the end of HS as the "goal" of what students are supposed to be able to do, it's all about analysis and constructing arguments. There's not a single mention of spelling or punctuation in there.
https://www.thecorestandards.org/ELA-Literacy/W/11-12/
Well there you're more comparing handwriting to typing. Appreciation for handwriting has largely been supplanted by font and typeface, and you could probably do some interesting research on how that's evolved, how in the days of the internet we can use different typefaces to simulate inflection or even accent in text.
The problem isn't "you used to write your essays, you used to type them on a typewriter, you used to type them on a computer, now I make them with an AI." AI is more like paying someone else to write your essay and turning in work YOU didn't do.
The real lesson to be had in scholarly writing is research, verification of sources, drawing valid conclusions based on evidence. These are skills you need to READ scholarly research as well, because there's an entire industry of bullshit fake science out there. That's a hard skill to actually teach though, that teachers really don't have the time to do. So they teach grammar school to college sophomores.
Yes, it used to be that the putting of words on paper/screen was the "work" of an essay.
What I am saying is that the actual work of writing is the thought behind it. The effort of research, of developing an opinion, of forming the foundation of a complex argument. The High School English teacher's obsessions with word count and strict adherence to grammatical rules are not "work". They are mindless drivel. We churned out generations of morons with excellent grammar but no ability to actually think.
That will no longer suffice. Any half-assed AI can spit out a thousand words on any topic you care to name, all with perfect spelling and grammar that would have made a 1990's AP English teacher cream themselves. And without any idea of what it was actually writing.
Don't teach kids to do the work of machines. Teach them to be poets. Teach them how to research. Teach them how to think, not how to imitate the mindless behavior of an essay-writing AI.
This is more of a personal, subjective note. Being handed some arbitrary writing assignment that I'm not actually invested in and don't actually understand what the teacher is really asking for, and then staring at a blinking cursor on an empty Word document with this buildup of frustration. I remember going through that my senior year of high school, and then I watched my girlfriend go through the same thing the next year.
I've written a lot over my lifetime, in various degrees in formality. I've written aircraft manuals and checklists, company procedures, lesson plans, primary research and scholarly essays, when it's a subject that is at all relevant to my life, that feeling of WHY THE FUCK ARE THEY MAKING ME WASTE MY TIME ON THIS isn't there. I took an intro to engineering course in college. We were given an assignment to pick out some engineering disaster, some calamity caused by a mistake made by an engineer, and write a ten page report on it. Being an aviation nut, I picked out the saga of the DC-10's cargo door latches. I cited NTSB reports, the Applegate memo, the DC-10's operating manual, and the eventual Airworthiness Directive that resulted. I pretty easily filled those ten pages. It somehow wasn't the same tedious bullshit that discussing themes in Wuthering Heights was in high school.
The biggest knack to teaching is getting the student to care.
Students that embrace AI will outperforms tradition students.
Students that embrace AI might outperform traditional students in situations where AI performs well. However, they will perform worse in all other metrics, and significantly worse when they don't have access to AI.
This isn't theory. Teachers are already seeing it.
The point of school isn't to do work. The point is to learn, and typing prompts into genAI isn't learning.
I don't agree 100%, and I'm still trying to find out why this line in particular stood out to me so much.
Will you allow me to twist your words a little to play devils advocate?
Of course I agree with you that schools are for learning, and by prompting GenAI to generate an image, you don't learn the basics of photography. But AI can be used as a tool, and usage of tools can be taught. So you still do learn something when using an AI, and that is how to use that AI. When to use that AI, and when usage of that AI does not help at all.
And I think that is what krisevol was trying to say. Students that know how/when/if to use AI for something, have an advantage over students that don't have that knowledge.
Students with access to AI are already over-relying on it. It is a dangerous tool for children to have unfettered access to, just like social media. It's sold, misleadingly, as a panacea for having to do research yourself, having to write things yourself, having to think for yourself.
Sure, learning how to use AI and when to use AI is useful - but its actual usefulness is far, far below the level that people who say things like "Students that embrace AI will outperform traditional students" believe it to be. Everything an AI spits out HAS to be double-checked. AI corps don't want you to think about that aspect. Unless this is hammered home in every class that AI is used in, then it shouldn't be used in school.
Let me present an example from OP's image. Julia complains that AI can write essays better than the teachers who grade the essays students write. Leaving aside the extraordinary skepticism I feel about this statement, Julia is implying that writing essays in school is a waste of time - but learning how to write a functional, persuasive essay, with proper research, sources, etc. is very, very important, because it teaches you to extract the facts you need from sources and cite them to prove your point in a way that can't be refuted offhand. It teaches you to examine your premise, find what makes it tick, and take it apart to find the constituent parts so you can shore them up with critical details that prove it. English courses teach you about grammar, spelling, tone, context, tense... I could go on.
Prompting an LLM to write the essay for you teaches you none of this, and claiming that the two are equivalent is the height of folly. In fact, if someone 'writes' an essay with an LLM, I am much more likely to simply reject it out of hand, because it means they didn't want to take the time to make their own argument. I would rather see the prompt that they used rather than the essay itself, because there will be, in essence, zero additional information in the essay - and asking me to read LLM output as if it provided value of some sort is an insult. I can ask ChatGPT to spew out details on a topic just as well as you can. At least if someone wrote the essay themselves - even if it is poorly written - there's the possibility of them having a novel approach to the topic.
I don't disagree with you, and you don't seem to disagree with me, as we're both saying the same thing: You are not learning the thing you are trying to cut short with AI.
I'm wondering if the downvotes I'm getting really are for saying that AI can have its uses, and that exposure to AI can reveal those.
I agree with you part way. But that's why I'll add till a certain age you shouldn't be allowed to. Like you shouldn't use a calculator till a certain age, you shouldn't use ai till a certain age.
Bwahaha
Idiot.
In school exams when they have access to AI? Sure. In actual real world afterwards? I doubt it.
If all you do during school is ask LLMs to do most of the work for you, all you'll know by the end is how to prompt LLMs. Which is not actually a difficult skill to learn, by design, so if you focus on it instead of everything else you'll lose out.
Hopefully the education system adapts and invents ways to meaningfully integrate AI into classwork while forcing students to learn to think for themselves still. Otherwise the next generations will be even more cooked than mine.
That's the same, "you with have a calculator everywhere you go" argument. A lot of company's let you use AI on the job, and everyone has AI in there phone today.
Well, yes, it is. Kids who used calculators to cheat with basic arithmetic will often struggle with learning more advanced concepts later on because they didn't get a "feel" for numbers, and I strongly suspect the same will happen with kids who start using LLMs before they know how research works.
It is totally appropriate to use calculators when you already have an intuition for small numbers, and in just the same way students should learn to use LLMs, but only when they already know how to write and think and research stuff. Curriculum needs to adapt to this quickly, otherwise we will end up with a generation that outsources all their thinking to techbros.