What am "I" doing to solve this? For both me and my children.
Taking responsibility for my continuing education, for one. Locate interesting curricula and pursue them.
Now, I'm thinking that was pretty much they only way they could think of to ensure kids were doing things themselves.
I know it was a rough transition for my nephew, though, and I don't know that I would have handled it very well either. I'm not sure what would be a better option, though, given how much of a disservice such easy access to a mental crutch is.
Combined with a complete lack of textbooks, college is going to be quite a surprise!!
Oddly, English teachers tell students to use Grammerly and standardized tests use AI for grading student essays.
For writing assignments, students are given a “prompt”. Never heard it called such in my schooling…
I personally had some teachers apply this 10 or so years ago, and I assume the idea existed prior to them. Though, I'm not sure exactly what age range this would work best with.
It's probably either that or ban it and do everything in-person, which might have to be the stopgap solution.
These are highschoolers, still learning to write - their output won't be the best. It won't be long at all until AI can write as well as the average (honest, pre-AI) highschooler, if we're not past that point already.
A quite possible future: you're surrounded by dead-eyed humans with AI implants who mindlessly repeat whatever the chatbot tells them.
Is this what The Atlantic has come down to, publishing a complain-y piece by the class president?
EDIT: For anyone struggling with my criticism of the article, I very much agree that there is a problem of AI in education. Her suggestion which is "maybe more oral exams and less essays?" I'm sure has never been considered by teachers around the world rolls eyes.
As for how to tackle this, I think the only solution is accept the fact that AI is going nowhere and integrate it into the class. Show kids in the class how to use AI properly, compare what different AI models say, and compare what they say to what scholars and authors have written, to what kids in the past have written in their essays.
You don't have to fight AI to instill critical thinking in kids. You can embrace it to teach them its limitations.
All the stuff you see in this thread about how kids are going to use AI to bootstrap an education for themselves even better than what their teachers give them (not sure why there's so much hostility towards teachers) is a fantasy.
HN obviously overrepresents kids who were interested in tech things who may do something like that. The vast majority of kids will use AI as a tool to blurt out essays and coursework they don't read, so that they can get back to their addiction to TikTok and Instagram.
As will, of course, everyone using it at work. This is already the case. This is what AI is for. "Do this for me so I can scroll more".
Later in life, when their life is more stable, these same kids will be the first to actually use AI to learn the then necessary concepts properly.
Bad teachers and a bad economy are no reason to let kids outsource all their thinking to a machine when they’re still learning to think themselves.
The lack of imagination in CS is stunning and revolting. Symbols and causality are broken records, chuck them asap and move onto the next idea of what a PC is. It ain't binary.
* We should dismiss the concerns in TFA because the author is... A good and conscientious student? Who is both unpopular and also the class president?
* The students who are outsourcing their thinking, or at least their work, to LLMs, have good reasons for this and the reasons are not addressed in the piece
The first point is at best a pure ad hominem and at worst a full blown assault on conscientiousness and actually doing the work. I think the class president and good student is a better authority than the cheater. I'm very disturbed by the recent trend on HN and the wider world to justify any shortcut taken for personal advancement. We need people to value substance, not just image...
The second point is irrelevant -- we don't have do both-sideism in every piece. But also even if they do have good reasons to cheat, this creates an instant race to the bottom where now everyone must cheat. This is why they do doping checks in professional sports, except this is much higher stakes
I gave no opinions on AI, yet I do think it's very much a problem. This article presents neither good ideas to tackle it, nor an insightful perspective on the problem.
What I'm saying is precisely that the take of a more genuine, less pretentious kid, would be far more insightful.
It's a weak editorial choice.
There will be interviews done with non A+ students.
Phones shouldn't be in the classroom, and devices used in the classroom shouldn't have any access to AI.
Students shouldn't really have homework anyway so I think it's completely reasonable to just have kids doing work on pen and paper in the class for the most part.
Banish tech in schools (including cell phones) (except during comp classes) but allow it at home
Ie in high school only allow paper and pencil/pen
Go back to written exams (handwriting based)
Be lenient on spelling and grammer
Allow homework, digital tutoring AI assistants and AI only when it not primary- ie for homework not in class work
Bring back oral exams (in a limited way)
Encourage study groups in school but don’t allow digital tech in those groups in class or libraries only outside of campus or in computer labs
Give up iPads and Chromebooks and Pearson etc
I just tutored my nephew through his college intro to stats course. Not only are calculators allowed, but they had a course web app so that all they did was select a dataset, select columns from those datasets, and enter some parameters. They were expected to be able to pick the right technique in the app, select the right things, and interpret the results. Because of the time savings, they covered far more techniques than we did in my day because they weren't spending so much time doing arithmetic.
Despite lots of cries about "who will know how to make calculators?", this transition to calculators (and computers) being allowed was unavoidable because that's how these subjects would be applied later on in students' careers. The same is true of AI, so students need to learn to use it effectively (e.g., not blindly accepting AI answers as truth). It will be difficult for the teachers to make their lesson plans deeper, but I think that's where we're headed.
Another lesson we can draw from the adoption of calculators is that not all kids could afford calculators, so schools sometimes needed to provide them. Schools might need to provide access to AI as well. Maybe you are required to use the school's version and it logs every student's usage as the modern version of "show your work"? And it could intentionally spit out bad answers occasionally to test that students are examining the output. There's a lot to figure out, but we can find inspiration in past transitions.
The lesson isn't that we survived calculators, it's that they did dull us, and our general thinking and creativity are about to get likewise dulled. Which is much scarier.
dougb5•3h ago