Rhymes with Turkey

RE: https://types.pl/@krismicinski/116168700399750708

As a former high school teacher I see this moment with LLMs and education as both dreadful but also potentially liberating if we could take the opportunity to do away with rote and dull aspects of secondary and post-secondary ed.

Mar 6 at 4:42pmWeb
Show threadGeorge HotellingMar 6
@samfirke paraphrasing something I heard: “there are jobs and there are gyms. At your job, if you can get a machine to pick stuff up and put it down, that’s great. At a gym, it’s pointless.”
Show threadJim JonesMar 6

@samfirke My oldest daughter is taking CS classes with Java, Python, and C# in high school. She doesn't use AI tools because she has found that they don't help her to actually struggle through and learn how the languages work.

She said that you can tell which students in her classes use AI to do their assignments and which don't because the one's who are reliant on AI can't explain how their programs work or fix implementation bugs pointed out by the instructor.

Show threadJim JonesMar 6
@samfirke She acknowledged that struggling sucks, but she has learned from experience that she will eventually figure it out and will get through it. The AI dependent students often give up very quickly.
Show threadRhymes with TurkeyMar 6
@GreatBigTable this is so encouraging to hear ❤️ Shout-out to her and other students who choose the more difficult path here.
Show threadJim JonesMar 6

@samfirke we read NutureShock by Po Bronson & Ashley Merryman when our kids were little. It had a big effect on our parenting.

One of the (simplified) key takeaways was to praise effort & not intelligence or results. The idea was that they can better weather the struggle of taking on new concepts and skills.

We do have smart kids, but we would consciously praise the work that they put into a subject & encourage them to struggle & fail & ask for help.

Thankfully, it has served them well.

Show threadJoe Dohm (he/him)Mar 7
@samfirke do you think the rote and dull aspects of education are separable from the useful parts? I have my doubts.
Show threadRhymes with TurkeyMar 7

@ThunderDohm if we dream big I think absolutely! A program I have admired since I taught HS is Iowa BIG high school in Cedar Rapids: https://iowabig.org/

Attached is "how it started". The "kids are bored" and "almost all work in school is 'fake'" really hit home for me.

My daughter (current 9th grader)'s world history class is mostly them taking guided notes while the teacher talks, then trying to remember facts for a test. So boring!

Show threadRhymes with TurkeyMar 7

@ThunderDohm now, things like project-based, student-driven learning do not scale easily. Likely requires more teacher capacity and thus more $. I think the current HS model is pretty cost-optimized.

100% pure "unschooling" is a little too much for me - though I find it fascinating as an idea - but I'd love to send my kids to somewhere closer to that end of the spectrum.

All tough to pull off but it would be largely LLM-proof because there's no rote exercise to cheat on anymore!

Show threadJoe Dohm (he/him)Mar 7
@samfirke I don’t think that boring is necessarily good, but I think that writing a lot, even when it’s been excruciating, has really helped my son. I’ve also seen people move on too quickly in math-each subject needs to be truly mastered before you can move on. For instance, trying to learn division without mastering your multiplication tables will result in a poor understanding of division.