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.
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.
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.
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.
Wow the same people who don’t 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 everyone’s every desire
Parasites.
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 doesn’t mean we shouldn’t 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.
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.
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.
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.
So she's saying that her kids are useless?
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