Huge percentage of the teenagers at her school are using it to do their assignments.
Later I her to read a few chapters of her book for summer reading. When I quizzed her it, she got it right.
Found out later she used ChatGPT to give her a summary of the first chapters. She did not enjoy having first weeks of summer without a phone.
School is having to change all assignments to be written in class on paper. No phones allowed.
They never should have moved away from this if they are worried about cheating.
But if students are using ChatGPT to summarize/prep for stuff at home, fine. No different from the Cliff Notes I used when I was that age.
Honestly, the pupils of my generation had other sources for finding summaries of the books to read for school (e.g. on the web, or in form of other books that contain a summary of the book to read (the respective pages were copied and these copies were passed among classmates).
Thus: just the methods change over generations, how pupils behave is much more constant.
Good for you. I know that kind of situation is not fun for a parent either.
AI tools exist, we should be encouraging our kids to learn how to exist in a world with them, not some nostalgic extinct world without.
Yes, but other than being conditioned to believe the experience of reading is superior, why are we striving for that experience?
Doing the square root of 147 by hand is a more educational experience than using a calculator, but I can understand the concept of a square root without having to factorize 147 (the same cannot be said of my pre-calculator ancestors).
It also saves me from having to remember the decimal representation of sqrt3.
With math, when you are first learning the very basics it helps to do a few problems by hand to get a feel of things. Sure if you have a degree in STEM have have deal with advance math you can probably get away with just reading the theory only.
We just built a very strong culture encouraging it because for a long time it was the most efficient way to do both things.
Now it’s not, but the tradition of it being important is hard to shake.
The closest analogue in my mind is how the classics in their original Greek were considered the only true way to learn for a very long time (even once most of the important knowledge had been translated to English very well).
Most of the things a kid does on a computer in 2023 are actively geared toward not using your brain in any way.
This is more analogous to a parent in 1985 taking away both the phone and the TV from their kid.
Eye of the beholder, I guess. I certainly see people struggle to use LLM's so I disagree with the implication that it's a zero-skill activity.
How about accepting new realities and changing homework assignments instead?
But you cannot unironically think we can substitute fundamental skills like essay writing and critical thinking for a degree in 'prompt engineering'?
Personally, I don't think that. However, I also think it's logical and good for a child to consider the task at hand and select the most efficient tool available.
I am not this girl's parent, and I'm not sure how I would have handled the situation if I was. However, I worry that simply taking away her phone may have been counterproductive. I would have erred toward some sort of open conversation about the purpose of the assignment and what she is hoping to learn.
Phone is her currency.
A warning on losing it will usually fix any behavior problems.
After one really bad episode of mouthing off to her mother, it sat in the blender for a week.
There was a firm understanding that it was being turned on if she didn’t correct herself.
She’s still a mouthy teenager, but she’s learned to keep it at a playful level and not getting out of hand.
Critical thinking is still a skill, but even there GPT-4 is great at giving suggestions and ideas when you're not sure what to do. I got into a long recurring argument with extended family members at an event last month. I pulled out my laptop and dropped in everyone's complaints into GPT and asked the best way to move forward. An argument that normally would have gone on for hours was over in 20 minutes, and we actually felt a sense of mutual understanding for once.
The world is changing very rapidly right now.
Suggestions for how to change homework assignments? It seems like a difficult problem, so reverting to hand writing things with no phones is probably the best option for now...in my opinion.
2. Consider making it non-graded (optionally providing feedback if desired that will not be counted in course grading.)
3. Require oral/in-person explanation of homework to paid peer assistants recruited from the previous cohort.
4. For writing, change to a writing workshop model where ChatGPT is a permitted tool that is incorporated into the workshop and students can learn how it can be helpful and how it can run astray. Help students to find and write in their own distinctive voice, even if they are assisted by ChatGPT.
What does someone learn from doing this? What happens when they actually have to use their brain to do something hard?
At this point, why bother?
I don't think Google in 2024 is guaranteed to be the critical-thinking tool that 2004 Google might have been.
Of course! How to apply the calculator to problems, and how to discern if a problem is calculator-solveable. We've decided as a society it's better for students to use calculators as a tool in mathematics, why is chatGPT different in literature?
E.g., we could not use a calculator at all when learning arithmetic.
Once we learned arithmetic and were learning (say) algebra, we could use the calculator to do arithmetic, but not to compute the algebra for us.
While learning trigonometry, we could use the calculator for arithmetic, but not for computing sines and cosines.
While learning calculus, we could use the calculator for arithmetic and sines and cosines, but we could not use it to perform integration or differentiation for us.
And so on.
You have to understand the problem and how to use the tool.
If one's understanding of how to use the tool is limited to "access the tool and dump in the question, then blindly paste the response into my homework document", I'd say you are not learning much. It's obvious that every contemporary teenager can learn that in a few minutes. That's not giving us the capabilities to move forward as a society.
But we can? Students using ChatGPT to get homework answers is the whole thing we are talking about.