Off My Chest
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Theres a huge yawning chasm between fact and lie, in most cases.
Besides which, learning isn't really about facts. Essays aren't a list of facts. Its the conclusions drawn from the facts.
The essays I contemplated will be knowingly and deliberately false. Learning the subject matter behind those essays is incidental to the core lesson. These students will be learning the ease with which we can be deceived, and the importance of skepticism.
This sort of skepticism is especially important in a world dominated by deceitful AI.
Kids using AI to generate the kind of meaningless busywork forced on my generation is no more worrisome to me than kids not being able to read cursive, or turning to a calculator rather than spending time on long division.
Adults trusting AI summaries terrifies me. Reminds me of the cops in Demolition Man, or Manna.
You’re projecting your own hang ups with school to be universal. Assignments are a part of learning, because practice is a part of learning. It is not “meaningless busywork” for a violinist to practice the same song for hours a day, any more than it is to have a child practice reading and responding to literature or drilling math problems.
This anti intellectual streak is showing up everywhere. “Flat earthers” are invading physics Facebook groups and anti vaxxers are being put in charge of health organizations. There’s are symptoms of a world where the desire to learn is absent.
Think about the immediate context of this conversation even - you are not an educator (abundantly clear from the assignment you proposed), and I am. I have taken multiple classes on child development and how to educate them, and have been in the classroom in several different environments across eight years.
Sometimes, it is important that we be confused for a minute in the learning process. Sometimes, it is important that we struggle a little bit. There is a peak level of “stress” for learning. There needs to be a supportive environment that goes with that challenge, but without a combination of practice and a little bit of challenge things don’t really stick.
AI is fundamentally against. Type in the question, get an answer. The answer could be true or not, nothing you did in imputing the question can really have an impact on that. No where to grow, nothing to improve or learn.
Cursive.
In my early language arts studies, cursive occupied a central role. Like that violinist or that math student, I had daily lessons on the necessity and importance of cursive, as I filled book after book with fancy curls.
Unlike that violinist or that math student, after completing half a decade of studies on the subject, no valuable skill had been acquired. Certainly nothing worth the time and effort I had put into my work.
That's not my personal hangup: The school recognized the topic had become obsolete, and stripped it from the curriculum entirely. They eventually figured out that the skills they were trying to impart were no longer valuable, and the diverted their efforts to more important areas of study.
As an educator, you do your field and your students a considerable disservice by failing to acknowledge either the pointlessness or the presence of busywork in the curriculum. Stress for the sake of learning is, indeed, important. Stress for the sake of stress is abuse. It is paramount for you to understand the difference, and it would be galling if you were to insinuate it doesn't exist.
You owe it to your students to actively discover what "cursive" you are teaching them today that will be rendered obsolete tomorrow. With AI in the picture, far less focus needs to be placed on generating a word count, and far more needs to be directed at fact checking.
Being able to research is not busy work. Being able to write an argument is not busy work. Being able to write a paper is an important skill that will not be made obsolete. Your inability to recognize the importance of these skills means your understanding of the world does not match reality, and your opinion on education is about as worthless as a $3 bill.
You have not taken any form of class on pedagogy. You do not know what you are talking about.
You are not an educator. You have not spent any time in education. You do not have the theory or the practice to know how students learn or what they need.
Of course not. I haven't argued that research is busy work. Quite the contrary, I have argued that it is the skill that should be targeted.
Writing a paper is not research. Writing a paper used to be evidence that the research had been done. The paper was where the researchers shared their work with the world. The paper was not the research.
Now, the paper is not sufficient evidence that the research has been done. ChatGPT is not capable of research. ChatGPT is plenty capable of writing papers.
Students do, indeed, need to be able to share their work with the world. That need hasn't changed. What has changed is that students no longer need cursive. That skill was seen as absolutely vital to academia a generation earlier; now it's a piece of ancient trivia. Likewise, the ability to form the structure of a paper is rapidly becoming obsolete. Students no longer need to be obsessed with fonts and margins and format and grammar and all the trivialities that were the focus of an earlier generation. Students today can largely ignore all the fluff that used to comprise the bulk of the work. Ideally, they can instead focus more time and energy on what is important: the subject itself.
ChatGPT is capable of writing an argument, but it is not capable of forming an argument. It can put words together in such a way that they appear to make an argument, but critical evaluation invariably demonstrates that argument lacks coherence and valid reasoning. Writing an argument has become busy work. Forming an argument is not. The problem arises when the teacher conflates the skills needed to write an argument with the skills needed to form one. Evaluating the writing of an argument is not evaluation of the formation of that argument. That distinction wasn't particularly important 10 years ago. Today, it is the crux of the matter.
The teachers having a problem with AI are the ones who want to continue using evidence of "hard work" as a proxy for actual study.
Ad hominem. Ignored.
Appeal to authority and ad hominem. Ignored.
Appeal to authority and ad hominem. Ignored.
I enjoyed reading that. I don't agree with all of what you wrote, but you wrote it well. Kudos.
I think there's something yet to be said about students doing pointless busy work - even if just a little. I can cite an example (actually, two - one medical, one martial) if you'd be willing to kick the can around with me a bit.
These are the exact same arguments given for the advent of writing. People like you have been making these complaints since we first learned to write anything down.
I see your point.
Certainly I think teaching skepticism and critical thinking should be part of any education, an ongoing theme.
I'm a fan of the skeptics guide podcast, and of identifying and challenging biases, including my own.
I remember as a child I went to a religious school, and they claimed that they focused on building "critical thinking" skills. Of course you were only allowed to criticise ideas and theories designated as wrongthink.
Anyhow, I think that learning skepticism and learning about cognitive biases is important, but honestly I think it's just education in general that has improved my own meager abilities. I'm no academic success story, I got a bachelor degree in my early 30s. In my 20s I had some weird ideas - just latching onto thoughts and phrases that resonated with me as beliefs and seeking evidence to support them.
It was really only long hours of struggling with learning that kind of helped me to kind of reason about things with a little more skepticism and humility.