AI, ChatGPT, and LLMs "have absolutely blown up what I try to accomplish with my teaching."

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.”

  • Aquila@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    7·
    1 day ago

    It was pretty obvious during the pandemic teachers weren’t ok. It hasn’t improved since then

  • irotsoma@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    45·
    1 day ago

    This sounds like the same complaints math teachers had when pocket sized books or calculators or web search or many other technologies started becoming ubiquitous. And the same answer is true, these are tools they will have in the real world. It’s just as useful to learn to use tools as it is to learn to do the thing without tools. Test them without the tools available for those things they need to know from memory and with the tools for everything else. Make the tests, essays, etc. so the tools aren’t able to do the entire set of work in the test.

    Wasn’t as big of a problem when text books helped with this like making lots of math problems that calculators couldn’t solve in a dongle step. The real issue is that textbook manufacturing consolidation has made text books fairly useless, so teachers are left to craft their own lessons if they want them to be worthwhile. And they don’t have time to create their own lessons from scratch because of some aspects of our education systems that are too much to go into here.

  • gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    27·
    1 day ago

    Well i think that western society has a lot of problems, and one of the grave ones is the moralizing stance that “knowledge is good” that was taken over from christianity. In christianity, the bird represents knowledge, and in the story of the world’s creation, the snake (which represents lust) walks up to the human, scares the bird sitting in the holy tree away, and that causes disaster. Ever since then, christianity has condemned lust and favoured knowledge.

    We still have that attitude in our society. Children are trimmed into going to school, after that going to more school, after that going to even more school. Young people spend 18 years of their life in school. Children are told as long as they study, they’re going to have good prospects on the job market. And now all of that comes crashing down when AI replaces white-collar workers. That’s part of the crisis.

    The solution would of course be to develop true (proper) far-sightedness and develop plans and lifestyle for the next 10000 years.

    • Jax@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      2·
      24 hours ago

      condemned lust and favored knowledge

      Well, at least in the U.S. - what you’re saying is fucking dumb. If anything, the exact opposite has been shown with sex becoming more and more shared and knowledge/wisdom being attacked at every vector.

      The solution would of course be to develop true (proper) far-sightedness and develop plans and lifestyle for the next 10000 years.

      I must be misunderstanding something, please explain how you get to ‘true far-sightedness’ without knowledge? Because your words imply that you think it’s lust.