this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2025
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Don't be mean. I promise to do my best to judge that fairly.
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Is this supposed to be an actual quote? Like, someone said this unironically?
"what did students do before smartphones/tablets?"
"what did students do before laptops?"
"what did students do before the internet?"
it's not at all weird to me that this could have been uttered fully seriously.
Edit: only difference are those other technologies still requires critical thinking and won't magically write your assignments. Unless plagiarized.
Grew up before the internet.
One thing I have come to realize is how much of history I learned passively from movies and comic books. The first time I saw Edgar Allan Poe was in an The Atom comic, and Julius Cesar was in a cartoon. Pretty much everyone I knew first hear classical music when they played it behind Bugs Bunny.
These days, there's a tiny handful of historically based shows and movies compared to earlier times.
'... and Julius Cesar was in a cartoon.'
Asterix taught me a lot of history too 😁
It was wrong but the vibes were there!
Not only that, but it sparked the interest. I lost count of how many things I saw in cartoons, comics, movies and TV shows that I simply had to know more about.
Another bygone method of learning things was by thumbing through the pages of an illustrated encyclopedia, like Golden Book Encyclopedia.
I have no doubt about it...
Yep.
Parts of Gen Z, and a lot of Gen A, will 100% seriously tell you that learning basically anything other than how to prompt ChatGPT is a stupid waste of time.
They'll all go feral when they can no longer afford it or the power goes out or the system crashes for a significant amount of time, as they've never learned how to think, nor anything useful to think about.
Well of course. LLMs have been able to automate so many bullshit assignments for students. I am not talking about the ones where they actually have to learn about a subject that is important to things in life. But the ones where the entire point of the assignment is to write pages.
Education still hasn't caught up with the many technological advances in the latest years. Some still act like it are the 1950's.
Did you read the OP? The point is, writing pages of bullshit is how you get better at writing. It's like saying "Oh yeah I don't want to do all these bullshit exercises at the gym too build muscle I should just sit at home and let a robot do them for me" the whole point is building the skill not producing the assignment.
Yes I read it, and what I am saying is that modern day users don't need to be able to write bullshit because of all the advances in technology.
Give purposeful assignment instead. You still get people to write and they learn something as well. 2 birds with 1 stone.
It is like forcing students to come to school using a steam train because they will know how to keep a steam engine working so it makes them better at shoveling.
The ability to construct a logical argument is useful not just for communicating with others, but also for structuring your own thoughts.
It’s also useful for learning. Turns out writing stuff down makes stuff go into your memory better.
I never had a single assignment in college where the only point was to write pages.
Cringe