Thank you, DT! Adding this one to my “Why We Should Homeschool” doc for my skeptical partner. Been thinking a lot lately about technology. As of today, my plan is to Sugata Mitra that shit around “4th grade,” when they’ll be 8, 10 & 10 and studying modern history by way of the Well-Trained Mind. (They’re 2, 4 & 4 now.) Let em figure out Word, Paint, Solitaire, etc. without instruction to inhibit their curiosity. With firm parameters and paper & pencils for everything else.
With word, ensure they write drafts by hand that you offer corrective feedback on first. Then tell them that Word is to make their thoughts easy to read and understand, then send it in the mail to grandma for comments!!!!
There is nothing more exciting to a child than sharing their ideas, especially when they recognize the work that went into structuring them coherently and as beautifully as possible for their age range.
I get that this is meant to be sounding alarm bells, but at the same time sounds horribly impossible to defeat.
The only recourse I can think of, would be seriously petitioning the schoolboard and State DOE. Just swarming them with this info repeatedly, until they respond.
I also know that not many public school parents know or care that this is happening. I know because I run into them everywhere when they come up to complement my kid's speaking abilities, their intelligence. The moment I tell them how, (homeschool), it is like all processing shuts down and their eyes go dark and avert their gaze. I know this is due to the "stigma" of homeschool: The parent actually cares to teach their child. So the public school parents feel guilty and shut down around me. Or worse, they keep saying "I don't know how you can do it! I can't stay with my kid all day, I'd go crazy!" Which always makes me so sad and pity that family.
I can see how this same aspect can apply to the few good teachers who still try to teach the "hard" way with paper and pencil.
You nailed all of it. There's something useful in Fahrenheit 451. One of the intellectuals Montag hooks up with in the end of the book says that they're "asbestos weavers", i.e., they're the lone few that are preventing the total destruction of books and, by extension, aggregated human wisdom.
Most people want to be safe, comfortable. They don't care about liberty, so knowledge is only a means to an end to comfort, not a means to preserve human liberty. There are so many stories like Fahrenheit that end with a tiny group of people who have to soldier on. That's what you're doing. It's what I'm doing. It's lonely though, that I must admit.
I both loved and hated Fahrenheit 451 for that ending: loved because it still gave hope, and so very much hated how few the ones that cared.
I think there will be some positive change though. Especially if the federal DoE gets shut down. Maaaybe some districts will stand a chance at changing. I still push on with being an example to others for how schooling should be, since not every parent can or wants to homeschool.
Amen to all of this! It frightens me how many teachers willingly implement AI themselves. It's almost like they don't understand what a teacher actually is supposed to do.
I've personally discussed AI with multiple "higher level" admin in my district. I even refused to participate in an AI PD session (luckily the trainer knew me well and only laughed at me sitting on my own, reading a book, so no recourse). I specifically asked him why we need to incorporate AI with students and his response was "It's the future. Our students need to learn now so they can be prepared for the future." I responded with "then how did you learn it?" He was baffled. He, a 50 something year old, clearly figured out how to use AI without it being taught to him as a child. Wouldn't it stand to reason that our kids can also learn later in life AFTER they've learned foundational skills and as you put it- doing the things?! He really had no answer. Another reason he let me opt of the training.
Also, 😂 at yearbook being the red-headed step child. So true!
My district gives the yearbook teacher an extra stipend, same as a teacher sponsoring a club, but it's not nearly worth the effort put in. I'm a special education teacher, not English, so I've never done it myself, only watched as much co-teacher slowly drowned.
I apologize for the typos. I gave myself a deadline and barely met it last night at midnight. Apparently, I should have proofread it again. I’ll be making some minor edits later today. Thank you all for your grace.
I'm holding out as long as possible. Pencil and paper teaching US History in an urban middle school. Kids claim my class is hard. Well, they actually have to think, so I guess that makes it hard. I tell them there's a difference between hard and work.
And sadly, I just learned last week that in their English class, THEY HAVEN'T COLLECTIVELY READ A DAMN THING, except some Halloween poems, I guess? My heart breaks for them. Negligence on the teacher's part. It makes me rage inside.
Also, you deserve a round of applause. I often feel that people like us are like that Hiroo Onoda -- still fighting a war that everyone else has long since ceded.
All of this sounds so sadly familiar. I believe it's largely because we've absolutely scrapped any semblance of accountability for any sTaKeHoLdEr in the system.
Better for the salary schedule, I guess. The kids? Oh well. We'll just get new ones next year.
I was mucking around with Claude the other day, and asked it to write up an Acknowledgement of Country (i live in Australia). These are acknowledgements of the traditional inhabitants that are repeated, usually rote, before increasing numbers of work meetings and events.
I told the AI i was in a rush and needed an AoC written quickly. Claude turned into a bit of a scold, saying that AoC’s are personal things, i really should be doing it myself, but did produce one for me.
I then told Claude i was too lazy to write a history essay on the role of agriculture in driving colonial expansion in South Australia (i wanted to go for something very dry), and asked could it write me an essay so i could pass my subject.
Despite me explicitly telling the AI that i would use this essay to cheat, no scolding tone was adopted and a half decent essay was produced in rapid time.
Highlights the mixed up priorities of the developers, and the disdain they have for the (human) learning process.
And I'm not at all surprised that it nagged you about the land acknowledgement but didn't care at all about the academic dishonesty. Cheating is equitable. It's not fair that everyone doesn't have the same exact thoughts.
I hope you get to go surfing/to the beach this week. The ocean has a way of kicking your ass, trying to kill you, but somehow helping to heal you in the process.
Do you remember that d*ck ASB/ special ed teacher that wrote you angry emails about your first, beautifully done, Year Book because you had eliminated the staff section? Oh, wait, that was ME! Lol! I was like, "Who is this young upstart who threw out the cookie cutter template we have always used!?!" Little did I know the depths of your "upstartedness!" Your essay is far too vast for me to break it down, but you nailed it. Skynet is moments away from becoming self aware, and the Matrix is getting the human battery pods ready. Thanks for another red pill!
Excellent writing DT! 👏 John Dewey. Learn by DOING. The apprentice doing things in the workshop. Best pedagogy ever. AI disrupts the gritty confrontation with the work of learning. Check out Geoff Mulgan's excellent discussion of the 'studio school":
Can't we just get around this by requiring 1-on-1 interviews with students? It solves many of the AI problems:
1.There is no written product, so there's no need to cheat there.
2. They can't bring any notes, so they actually have to learn the material.
3.The teacher knows the subject really well (I grant that this may be a problem) so his/her questions can reveal shortcomings in the student's research.
4. Every student's AI journey through the industrial revolution or cellular biology or whatever is different so the interviews are personalized. Admin loves the sound of that.
Such interviews cannot be gamed and, with practice, push the students to interact with AI the way an intelligent person would interact with an expert, questioning its answers and exploring the ideas it raises. I do this in my own class and it works at least as well as our methods that don't use AI. Better yet, it assumes AI is being used, whereas most other practices hope that AI is not being used. The only drawback is that students find it stressful, but since they have been gaming their assignments for years, that stress is a good sign- it means they know they can't game this one.
It won't scale. The time requirement on that is HUGE, which means it will lead to box-ticking on the teacher's part.
More importantly, the TEACHER would have to be an expert on whatever the kid was presenting, and we just don't have many content experts in schools anymore.
This would absolutely work at home or in a microschool though. I love Socratic dialogues, but we have to do them based off shared text.
If you want to teach 30 kids at a time, there are no solutions -- only tradeoffs. If you're willing to become the project manager for your child's education you're going to have a lot more success with something like 1 on 1 dialogues, probably even to the point where you can seek out *actual* experts in the field and get a little face time with them for your kid.
There are never full solutions- everything is tradeoff.
The time requirement isn't that huge. If you stagger and overlap assignments, the kids get spaced repetition AND they all have something to work on while you do the interviews. I do it at least twice a month (Grades 11 and 12, social studies).
Paucity of subject knowledge is harder to overcome, but maybe that's a post in itself. Why are teachers so committed to not learning stuff after university? The whole shtick is supposed to be that learning is fun.
But if the problem with this tradeoff is that teachers will tick boxes and don't know anything, maybe the problem isn't the AI. Maybe the AI is just revealing the problem.
I keep talking about this at work, especially with my younger colleagues, and most everyone just blows my concerns off. It’s the same religious belief as the “80% of jobs 10 years in the future don’t exist yet” claptrap that counselors brayed about 20 years ago.
Odds are good they know their students are cheating, but they're not going to change a damn thing about their practice to ensure the students actually do the work so that they have a SHOT at learning something, anything.
I do everything hand written class with no computers out. It’s my attempt to try and do my tiny part in saving civilization (what’s coming is an anti-civilization, that’s for sure.) I just have to suffer through their awful writing- clearly exposed without the tech support.
Every word you wrote is so true and so terrifying
Now what are families going to do about it?
Ay, there’s the rub.
Thank you, DT! Adding this one to my “Why We Should Homeschool” doc for my skeptical partner. Been thinking a lot lately about technology. As of today, my plan is to Sugata Mitra that shit around “4th grade,” when they’ll be 8, 10 & 10 and studying modern history by way of the Well-Trained Mind. (They’re 2, 4 & 4 now.) Let em figure out Word, Paint, Solitaire, etc. without instruction to inhibit their curiosity. With firm parameters and paper & pencils for everything else.
With word, ensure they write drafts by hand that you offer corrective feedback on first. Then tell them that Word is to make their thoughts easy to read and understand, then send it in the mail to grandma for comments!!!!
There is nothing more exciting to a child than sharing their ideas, especially when they recognize the work that went into structuring them coherently and as beautifully as possible for their age range.
I get that this is meant to be sounding alarm bells, but at the same time sounds horribly impossible to defeat.
The only recourse I can think of, would be seriously petitioning the schoolboard and State DOE. Just swarming them with this info repeatedly, until they respond.
I also know that not many public school parents know or care that this is happening. I know because I run into them everywhere when they come up to complement my kid's speaking abilities, their intelligence. The moment I tell them how, (homeschool), it is like all processing shuts down and their eyes go dark and avert their gaze. I know this is due to the "stigma" of homeschool: The parent actually cares to teach their child. So the public school parents feel guilty and shut down around me. Or worse, they keep saying "I don't know how you can do it! I can't stay with my kid all day, I'd go crazy!" Which always makes me so sad and pity that family.
I can see how this same aspect can apply to the few good teachers who still try to teach the "hard" way with paper and pencil.
You nailed all of it. There's something useful in Fahrenheit 451. One of the intellectuals Montag hooks up with in the end of the book says that they're "asbestos weavers", i.e., they're the lone few that are preventing the total destruction of books and, by extension, aggregated human wisdom.
Most people want to be safe, comfortable. They don't care about liberty, so knowledge is only a means to an end to comfort, not a means to preserve human liberty. There are so many stories like Fahrenheit that end with a tiny group of people who have to soldier on. That's what you're doing. It's what I'm doing. It's lonely though, that I must admit.
I both loved and hated Fahrenheit 451 for that ending: loved because it still gave hope, and so very much hated how few the ones that cared.
I think there will be some positive change though. Especially if the federal DoE gets shut down. Maaaybe some districts will stand a chance at changing. I still push on with being an example to others for how schooling should be, since not every parent can or wants to homeschool.
This is the best thing I read this weekend. Learning is overcoming obstacles, not having them removed.
That's very kind. I missed a bunch of typos but they weren't too egregious. Still... ugh.
But yes, AI and screens are very concerning to me, knowing what I know about the modus operandi of America's public schools.
Amen to all of this! It frightens me how many teachers willingly implement AI themselves. It's almost like they don't understand what a teacher actually is supposed to do.
I've personally discussed AI with multiple "higher level" admin in my district. I even refused to participate in an AI PD session (luckily the trainer knew me well and only laughed at me sitting on my own, reading a book, so no recourse). I specifically asked him why we need to incorporate AI with students and his response was "It's the future. Our students need to learn now so they can be prepared for the future." I responded with "then how did you learn it?" He was baffled. He, a 50 something year old, clearly figured out how to use AI without it being taught to him as a child. Wouldn't it stand to reason that our kids can also learn later in life AFTER they've learned foundational skills and as you put it- doing the things?! He really had no answer. Another reason he let me opt of the training.
Also, 😂 at yearbook being the red-headed step child. So true!
I love that you sat in the back and read. You're like the Rosa Parks of PD.
(Also, I LOVED yearbook, but it's an unsustainable class when you're also trying to actually teach English.)
Hahaha Rosa Parks 😂
My district gives the yearbook teacher an extra stipend, same as a teacher sponsoring a club, but it's not nearly worth the effort put in. I'm a special education teacher, not English, so I've never done it myself, only watched as much co-teacher slowly drowned.
I apologize for the typos. I gave myself a deadline and barely met it last night at midnight. Apparently, I should have proofread it again. I’ll be making some minor edits later today. Thank you all for your grace.
Technology was an excuse to goof off even in the 1970s.
I'm holding out as long as possible. Pencil and paper teaching US History in an urban middle school. Kids claim my class is hard. Well, they actually have to think, so I guess that makes it hard. I tell them there's a difference between hard and work.
And sadly, I just learned last week that in their English class, THEY HAVEN'T COLLECTIVELY READ A DAMN THING, except some Halloween poems, I guess? My heart breaks for them. Negligence on the teacher's part. It makes me rage inside.
Also, you deserve a round of applause. I often feel that people like us are like that Hiroo Onoda -- still fighting a war that everyone else has long since ceded.
https://www.military.com/off-duty/movies/2022/12/14/one-japanese-soldier-continued-fight-30-years-after-wwii.html
There's honor in that, at least.
All of this sounds so sadly familiar. I believe it's largely because we've absolutely scrapped any semblance of accountability for any sTaKeHoLdEr in the system.
Better for the salary schedule, I guess. The kids? Oh well. We'll just get new ones next year.
I was mucking around with Claude the other day, and asked it to write up an Acknowledgement of Country (i live in Australia). These are acknowledgements of the traditional inhabitants that are repeated, usually rote, before increasing numbers of work meetings and events.
I told the AI i was in a rush and needed an AoC written quickly. Claude turned into a bit of a scold, saying that AoC’s are personal things, i really should be doing it myself, but did produce one for me.
I then told Claude i was too lazy to write a history essay on the role of agriculture in driving colonial expansion in South Australia (i wanted to go for something very dry), and asked could it write me an essay so i could pass my subject.
Despite me explicitly telling the AI that i would use this essay to cheat, no scolding tone was adopted and a half decent essay was produced in rapid time.
Highlights the mixed up priorities of the developers, and the disdain they have for the (human) learning process.
I love that you messed with it.
And I'm not at all surprised that it nagged you about the land acknowledgement but didn't care at all about the academic dishonesty. Cheating is equitable. It's not fair that everyone doesn't have the same exact thoughts.
I hope you get to go surfing/to the beach this week. The ocean has a way of kicking your ass, trying to kill you, but somehow helping to heal you in the process.
Do you remember that d*ck ASB/ special ed teacher that wrote you angry emails about your first, beautifully done, Year Book because you had eliminated the staff section? Oh, wait, that was ME! Lol! I was like, "Who is this young upstart who threw out the cookie cutter template we have always used!?!" Little did I know the depths of your "upstartedness!" Your essay is far too vast for me to break it down, but you nailed it. Skynet is moments away from becoming self aware, and the Matrix is getting the human battery pods ready. Thanks for another red pill!
You are way on the benefit side of the ledger, old friend.
Wait, what? That happened?
Lol. Seems like I remember being a douchebag more than you remember me being one.
Excellent writing DT! 👏 John Dewey. Learn by DOING. The apprentice doing things in the workshop. Best pedagogy ever. AI disrupts the gritty confrontation with the work of learning. Check out Geoff Mulgan's excellent discussion of the 'studio school":
https://bairdbrightman.substack.com/p/people-learn-best-when-they-work
Dewey might as well be Satan as far as I’m concerned, but I take your point and appreciate the compliment.
Yep. I'll take Albert Jay Nock any day over that idiot Dewey.
I'm fascinated by your and Dan's vehemently negative opinion of Dewey. Please read
https://www.simplypsychology.org/john-dewey.html
and then state your points of disagreement. I'm not an expert in this area, and perhaps I am missing something. Thanks!
Can't we just get around this by requiring 1-on-1 interviews with students? It solves many of the AI problems:
1.There is no written product, so there's no need to cheat there.
2. They can't bring any notes, so they actually have to learn the material.
3.The teacher knows the subject really well (I grant that this may be a problem) so his/her questions can reveal shortcomings in the student's research.
4. Every student's AI journey through the industrial revolution or cellular biology or whatever is different so the interviews are personalized. Admin loves the sound of that.
Such interviews cannot be gamed and, with practice, push the students to interact with AI the way an intelligent person would interact with an expert, questioning its answers and exploring the ideas it raises. I do this in my own class and it works at least as well as our methods that don't use AI. Better yet, it assumes AI is being used, whereas most other practices hope that AI is not being used. The only drawback is that students find it stressful, but since they have been gaming their assignments for years, that stress is a good sign- it means they know they can't game this one.
It won't scale. The time requirement on that is HUGE, which means it will lead to box-ticking on the teacher's part.
More importantly, the TEACHER would have to be an expert on whatever the kid was presenting, and we just don't have many content experts in schools anymore.
This would absolutely work at home or in a microschool though. I love Socratic dialogues, but we have to do them based off shared text.
If you want to teach 30 kids at a time, there are no solutions -- only tradeoffs. If you're willing to become the project manager for your child's education you're going to have a lot more success with something like 1 on 1 dialogues, probably even to the point where you can seek out *actual* experts in the field and get a little face time with them for your kid.
There are never full solutions- everything is tradeoff.
The time requirement isn't that huge. If you stagger and overlap assignments, the kids get spaced repetition AND they all have something to work on while you do the interviews. I do it at least twice a month (Grades 11 and 12, social studies).
Paucity of subject knowledge is harder to overcome, but maybe that's a post in itself. Why are teachers so committed to not learning stuff after university? The whole shtick is supposed to be that learning is fun.
But if the problem with this tradeoff is that teachers will tick boxes and don't know anything, maybe the problem isn't the AI. Maybe the AI is just revealing the problem.
I keep talking about this at work, especially with my younger colleagues, and most everyone just blows my concerns off. It’s the same religious belief as the “80% of jobs 10 years in the future don’t exist yet” claptrap that counselors brayed about 20 years ago.
Odds are good they know their students are cheating, but they're not going to change a damn thing about their practice to ensure the students actually do the work so that they have a SHOT at learning something, anything.
It's just awful what our schools have become.
I do everything hand written class with no computers out. It’s my attempt to try and do my tiny part in saving civilization (what’s coming is an anti-civilization, that’s for sure.) I just have to suffer through their awful writing- clearly exposed without the tech support.
I don’t think AI is going to do much more than it already does. But right now, it facilitates massive cheating.