THANKS VERY COOL GOOGLE I’LL JUST LET THE PLAGIARISM MACHINE THAT TELLS PEOPLE TO EAT GLUE AND BURNS DOWN THE RAINFOREST TO DESIGN MY CURRICULUM
ACTUALLY WE PROBABLY DON’T EVEN NEED TEACHERS WHEN WE CAN JUST SIT STUDENTS DOWN IN FRONT OF A CHROMEBOOK AND FEED THEM AI SLOP ALL DAY AND THEN THEY CAN USE AI TO ANSWER THE QUESTIONS
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
As a teacher, the only things I’ve found AI to be useful are:
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“Give me ten ideas for X”. Example: “give me twenty fun ideas for finishing a lesson on volcanos for 13 year olds”. Maybe one of those ideas is good and I can adapt it.
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“Write an explanation of X and be sure to include the key terms A, B, C, D, etc. Make sure the text is fitting for 14 year olds.” Then I’ll fix up the explanation because it’s still not exactly what I want. I’ll delete the key terms and make it into a cloze worksheet.
My school district back in CA was so standardized that I didn’t have much room to write my own material because there was almost always another fucking standardized test coming up, often with motivational banners and other nonsense to try to stir engagement and interest from burned out students already tired of the fucking things.
Oh, terrifying thought: what happens when the standardized test corporations start using treat printers to produce the standardized tests and their prep materials?
I was looking into becoming a high school math teacher and the curriculum here for math is so overspecified that I can’t imagine ever having to plan a lesson.
If it is anything like my old state, NY, you can ignore a lot of the standards. Over specificity means extremely low number of test questions on that standard and low variety in the test questions when they show up.
Boy do I have some news for you: https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/ai-may-be-coming-for-standardized-testing/2024/03
“This could be a step towards figuring out how AI can help educators achieve a long-elusive goal: Creating a new breed of assessments that actually helps inform teaching and learning in real time, he said.”
Creating a new breed of assessments that actually helps inform teaching and learning in real time, he said."
Complete word salad. What, in this person’s mind, does teaching look like when it’s not “in real time?” Does he mean having up-to-date information? Because almost everything you learn in K-12 is so foundational it hasn’t changed in decades (if not centuries). High school sophomores are not learning about arguments between mathematicians over Newtonian physics and changes to calculus as a result. They’re still trying to figure out fucking algebra and geometry.
The information I learned in school that was out of date was mostly in history and economics, which has more to do with state ideology. We were learning what is now considered Holocaust denial as fact. I had to unlearn it as an adult paying attention to what various organizations and experts are saying is current. Adding “”““AI””“” isn’t going to fix problems problems like this. It could even (and by “could,” I mean “100 billion percent will”) make things worse.
It seems like what they want is to have AI-generated “tasks” that students have to complete to gauge their level of knowledge so that the AI can then generate tests that are more specifically tailored to what that student’s trouble spots are. I already hate this, and this is the promise they’re leading with, meaning it’s the most benign possible application that is the face of the actual terrible ways they will algorithmically decide students’ academic potential.
Should make sure the lathe is away from me when I say this, but: I think it means daily or weekly quizes, potentially given to random students that will probably somehow get tied to school funding. Maybe teacher compensation.
Just trying to think of what’s the most evil thing a management consultant would think of.
Should make sure the lathe is away from me when I say this, but: I think it means daily or weekly quizes, potentially given to random students that will probably somehow get tied to school funding. Maybe teacher compensation.
Just trying to think of what’s the most evil thing a management consultant would think of.
“No Child Left Behind” from
was bad enough but then 
made it worse with “Race to the Top.” It’s getting worse from here; I’m not regretting early retirement.No child left behind Race to the top
Framing education as a competition with winners and losers is derply fucked. That’s not how you learn stuff.
That’s not how you learn stuff.
After my years as an educator experiencing increasingly worse learning environments, I have concluded that learning isn’t even a priority for the ghouls that command these so-called reforms. It’s about obedience training.
Have you ever considered running education like a business? Obviously market solutions are what we need, and that means competition!
Testing random students daily would be a lower workload than what was expected the previous school I worked at where I had to test all students daily.
I put in random because testing all students daily is obviously a dumb waste of time, so of course that’s a thing.
I would assume that the big “real-time teaching” thing is meant to imply something like “latest trends/research in teaching”, which does sound nice and efficient, but we all know it’s a lie.
“latest trends/research in teaching” often simply means whatever buzzwords and fads the higher-ups in the school system are fawning over at the moment. This semester its one thing, next semester its something else. It’s most direct material consequence is how it acts as a justification for bothering teachers and undermining their professional judgement by imposing inflexible and unwieldy methods and curricula on them.
oh yeah absolutely, what I meant is that it is meant to sound like some scientific new way of doing education
“Give me ten ideas for X”. Example: “give me twenty fun ideas for finishing a lesson on volcanos for 13 year olds”. Maybe one of those ideas is good and I can adapt it.
This would have been so much more useful than the solution my boss and coteacher gave when i said I didnt know how to come up with ideas for activities at the old after school program which was “just go on pinterest” which was WAAAAAAY to broad of an answer lmao. OK go on pinterest and start… where?
Yeah as a former teacher I can imagine ai at actually being useful for putting together some slop for admins to use since they made us produce class scripts every day to submit to school admin that never actually read it, adding like an additional 8 hours of work every week on top of the 80 hours I was already working. Maybe use AI for that and then teach what you wanted to teach.
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Hey teachers you know that thing you’re telling all your students off for using and has been actively ruining your ability to teach because students that use AI to do work don’t actually learn anything? You should use that thing already ruining education to plan your lessons!
AI student essays written to AI teacher prompts
Graded by AI
i’m unironically in a uni class where our weekly discussion posts (ie have to write 3 short paragraphs a week) are graded by AI. professor says the system should give full credit if it can tell what you’re saying has some substance and is relevant to the weekly text, but it often seems like when i write something original it gives my reply a C and when i say anything buzzwordy and devoid i get an A
but it often seems like when i write something original it gives my reply a C and when i say anything buzzwordy and devoid i get an A
Working as intended for techbro ideology: they want obedient workers that can recite pre-determined answers and repeat cliches.
This is malpractice. Disgusting
The results it gives will be based on the patterns of the training material. If your response says a lot of the common words that the A* essays in its training material commonly use then it’ll give A*. If it doesn’t have a lot in common with them then it won’t.
You can probably write literal garbage that a human being can’t read but get an A* from the machine because it sees a lot of the same words that are in high graded training papers.
The entire thing is automated at every level at the low low price of burning the fucking planet to ashes.
Someone should be in prison for having this idea.
“Heh, you sound emotional about this. This is the future; China does it in some way too which means anything goes with LLMs. You can’t stop this so you may as well get in on the ground floor and find a real job that won’t be replaced by LLMs. I am very leftist.”
Yes, there’s a few totally-leftist bootlickers here that have this take and I have a few names in particular I’m keeping to myself.
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That’s good because anyone defending this shit is my mortal enemy
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You know I did block you
Continue blocking me then.
but it makes it impossible to use this site
That’s a you problem and you know it.
What I actually said was that the left should prepare for this tech to proletarianize the jobs of labor aristocrats who work at a computer.
That’s a retcon of what you said, especially because you used the entire checklist of techbro smug phrasing, and of course you’re conveniently placing responsibility and regulation of the planet-burning treat printers into the vague far future, kicking the can down the road.
Again, continue to block me because I am not going to stop talking about these sorts of things, no matter how that upsets you.
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It’s funny to me.
Which is why you posted a
announcement in badposting recently.
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Labor aristocrat is when computer?
Anyway, this shit doesn’t really work and fundamentally can’t because of the way LLMs function.
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You let me know know their names and I will hound them until the end of the earth
I messaged you one. That user already blocked me but may show up here anyway because this wasn’t my thread.
I don’t teach K-12, but isn’t the main challenge not lesson planning, but like a lot of crowd control. At least like K-9 I imagine it’s a nightmare just keeping kids seated and paying attention.
Your mileage may vary, but lesson plans ARE classroom management. Yes I’ve seen classrooms that absolutely refuse to learn or do any work, but most classes will do work if it’s engaging. Engaged classes manage themselves. If they have no interest in doing their work or the work is too easy for them or the work is so hard they can’t even start it, then they start distracting themselves and others.
Any support or materials that can be offered to teachers make their lives easier and then they can tailor it to their class.
That’s fair, but while an LLM might be good at giving you a list of topics, or even a loose script for a lecture, coming up with content that keeps a class of children engaged seems like the type of task it won’t currently or ever do reliably.
Oh yeah obviously AI can’t do that for shit. When I mean support or resources, I mean lesson plans and activities that have been designed and tested by teachers then shared with other teachers.
It would probably be able to do a decent facsimile from all the data it’s nicked on what an engaging lesson plan is
Nope, the classroom part is easy. Even if the kids are annoying, most of them will learn. But most importantly the amount of energy you can spend in each class is capped. It is, at worst, 45 minutes of walking and yelling. And admin very rarely watches the classes. They are out of their element in the classes. They just want to see the lesson plans and their expectations for those lesson plans are infinite and bizarre, 6+ pages per 45 minute class, timed to the minute, all content squeezed into a spreadsheet where most columns only have one word and one column has paragraphs, mandatory template looks like shit so they always have something to complain about.
That’s sounds maddening, I go through about a page per 10 mins of lecture time at the college level and that obviously moves through at a faster pace.
Speed running the collapse
they keep trying to shove it down my throat, too, and I’m just doing small engine repair paperwork
your stupid fucking AI can’t respond to Farmer Jane about her Gravely’s weird intermittent electrical problem, stop offering to “help”
Try it for free!
guess “free” is the new term for the low low price of trading hours of my time and frustration for some asshole’s training algorithms. what a deal! 🤩
If we have the teachers use AI and the students use AI then the AI can talk to the AI and we can finally get on with our lives.
Using the internet to find resources is hard too because so many sites are paywalled. I somehow doubt that “teachers pay teachers” actually gives much money to teachers.
The fact that TPT exists in the way that it does is baffling. We spend so much on education, the federal government or a large state could just buy TPT, run it at cost. New teachers are swamped by the need to develop a curriculum, lesson plans, and make materials and those are all things a government would be good at providing. Why does every teacher need to reinvent the wheel.
AI, how comes it here? What madness or devilry is this? Death, death, death! Death take us all!
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I’ve had some luck using geerative AI in exactly one situation, which is with kids with such severe reading/writing difficulties that getting them to attempt to write a prompt of any kind is a victory in itself. The charm wears off pretty quickly, but it can be used to get them to write a few single words. That is enough utility to justify a nation spending hundreds - or maybe even thousands - of dollars on the technology.
