cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/31251815
I asked teachers to tell me how AI has changed how they teach.
The response from teachers and university professors was overwhelming. In my entire career, I’ve rarely gotten so many email responses to a single article, and I have never gotten so many thoughtful and comprehensive responses.
One thing is clear: teachers are not OK.
They describe trying to grade “hybrid essays half written by students and half written by robots,” trying to teach Spanish to kids who don’t know the meaning of the words they’re trying to teach them in English, and students who use AI in the middle of conversation. They describe spending hours grading papers that took their students seconds to generate: “I’ve been thinking more and more about how much time I am almost certainly spending grading and writing feedback for papers that were not even written by the student,” one teacher told me. “That sure feels like bullshit.”
This is pretty much the only way to verify knowledge. And it’s kind of what interviewers do when they’re thinking about hiring someone for a job, right? Same goal.
One potential avenue that schools have, especially in college, is to let the students know that. You’re not up against the school; you’re up against the interviewer.
This academic year I’m going to try to set up a thing where we do mock interviews with students, hopefully with real interviewers from real companies. I want to show the students where they’re going, and what they really have to get ready for.
In my dream world, we wouldn’t even have grades or diplomas. After all, when we’re learning things on our own we don’t have those and yet somehow we manage to get the job done. But not having grades comes with its own set of problems in this academic structure we’ve set up.