Books will soon be obsolete in school
shkspr.mobi
shkspr.mobi
That is, a huge part of the job is dealing with unruly behavior and bullshit and not even instruction. If AI is going to make a positive difference in education it’s going to have to take a bite out of that!
I would put the AI in juvenile hall to teach the violent kids. It will be a dystopian environment but they earned it and can earn their way out of it.
[Edit] - I learned today that school districts have been lazy and using "zero tolerance" to even include defending ones self vs instigation of violence. This is indefensible. I will be encouraging POTUS to end all pax payer funded education and federal funding to states if schools and states can not get their act together and change verbiage to be zero tolerance for instigators of violence.
It's not very clear cut but sometimes it seems like kids just end up being punished for having bad parents.
Yeah, hard to make the right call, depends on the age and maturity of the kid I guess. I myself is a product of "bad parents", and it was reflected in my own behavior up until I was 15-16 years old, when I started realizing what I was doing really had an impact on my fellow humans, so at one point I started consciously working on myself to not be like that anymore.
So a 6 year old will most definitely just be a product of how the parents act, but once you get older you need to also take responsibility for how you yourself are as a person. What exact age that is seems to differ by country.
Not even a good solution, the amount of good people we'd be missing out on would be huge. Plenty of great people come from shit parents/backgrounds.
Which it has, in the past, multiple times. But how would we know if we're better off with those "decimation events" or not? Kind of hard to know without some alternative reality where those didn't happen.
I feel that this would only further embitter the violent children and would cause more problems than it would theoretically solve.
So only the working poor have to suffer. But at least they’re told it is a righteous suffering.
This has been the status quo in many schools for a while now. Whether or not it helped is unclear and a subject of ongoing debate. If you want things to change, you need a novel intervention.
As for zero tolerance policies, they are exhausting to implement and feel deeply unjust to everyone involved. Having to suspend or expel a student for defending themselves never feels good. But if one doesn’t, the policy is no longer zero tolerance.
If they are expelled for defending themselves the policies need to change. The cameras should provide evidence they were defending themselves. When enough violent kids are removed the incidence of having to defend one's self should be reduced with time.
Your definition of zero tolerance does not align with mine. Mine is that there is the instigators are removed from the picture without question or debate and everyone else continues on with their education in a safer space. When a school also punishes those defending themselves they and their board members must be sued.
Allowing violent instigators is one of the many ways we end up with mass shooters. That and bad diets, off label prescription drugs.
I might even push for creating curriculum for teaching how to deal with violent and/or unstable people both online and in person and grade people on how well they defend themselves online and in person.
> A zero-tolerance policy is one which imposes a punishment for every infraction of a stated rule. Zero-tolerance policies forbid people in positions of authority from exercising discretion or changing punishments to fit the circumstances subjectively; they are required to impose a predetermined punishment regardless of individual culpability, extenuating circumstances, or history.
If you use "zero tolerance" to mean "zero tolerance for starting a fight" you need to make that very clear, because that's not how it's used in schools currently.
That's school districts being lazy. That is clearly the first thing that need to be prioritized and resolved nation wide in all first world countries. The instigators must be removed from the picture without debate.
The phrase is "normal, non-zero-tolerance policy"
Zero tolerance denotes a policy where the root causes do not affect the consequences.
There’s no zero tolerance policy where “providing evidence” is an effective defense.
Children didn't "earn" being born to shit heads. Fuck off.
No thanks. If it can be proven the parents are negligent or responsible there are processes in place for this too. Whether or not a state or provincial government has the wherewithal to invoke the process is another question.
As long as teachers can’t say or do anything without parents rushing to the school and threatening with lawsuits, nothing will change, no matter how much surveillance tech we throw at the problem.
Also it should legally be allowed to whack a parent, as long as it is justified.
I'd be not against the idea of teacher-whaking feature. Also, if there is a kid who bullies my kid, I'd not be against the idea to whack a parent of that kid, if nothing else works.
Obviously everything should be at the reasonable level.
I am heavily against the idea that certain powers should be centralized into a single entity.
Why do you think kids should be punished for getting bullied?
Taxing people to fund education seems to be reducing the product to glorified day care.
Those with means (and I would be one) send their kids to private schools for a variety of reasons.
This deserves more analysis.
I don't think this is true at all. There are plenty of areas where the public schools do a fantastic job, and plenty of people "with means" sending their children there.
I repent of my heathen unbelief.
I am completely convinced by the arguments for individual tutoring. I got some in languages and I liked the outcome (it was also a fun social thing to do with my parents). It would have saved a lot of time to also get it in maths, physics, chemistry and biology.
The untold truth about teaching is that it’s equal parts social worker as educator.
Not just with bad behaviour, but with diagnosing child with needs, identifying domestic abuse, and so on.
It’s heart breaking some of the shit they need to do and which any normal person wouldn’t even consider as part of the job.
My wife has had to handle more than one incident with serious child sexual abuse. This isn’t something teachers expect to do when they apply for their jobs.
My spouse also taught and heard some difficult stories of home troubles. But she did have school counselors she could recommend.
I'm not sure there is a better alternative. Someone has to be on the front lines with kids. Perhaps all kids should have to talk to a (school?) counselor or social worker periodically? It would certainly be money better spent than burning money on crypto mining, AI, or cutting taxes of the top 10%.
Second, there exists a basic "least common denominator" existence that has held since farming was invented: we are born, we live and work, we die, and between that time we live in a house, go to school, fall in love, eat, sleep, and (more recently) read. These features of human life don't change much since they are tied to our biology, which is in turn tied to the time and place of our emergence. Books are wonderful inventions - they are low cost, require no power to operate, have a very high information density, can be shared and reused over many generations of humans. They fit us so well, we will probably never "transcend" them, just like we'll probably always have diapers and pillows, no matter how far we go. And honestly, what's wrong with that?
Are LLMs actually capable of re-producing a good-enough simulation of the Oxford model? Will this simulation of the Oxford model produce better educational outcomes at scale - something that has been theorized but was of course far too expensive to prove - when deployed to the masses through public education? Maybe? Who knows? Time will tell.
For what it's worth - I don't think books will become obsolete, either in schools or anywhere else. Paper books might become obsolete, but there is no option on the table that proposes to completely replace the art of science of having life experience and committing it to longform. As long as copyright protects its commercialibility, it will continue.
Physical books can be totemic symbols of learning. Just having them around is a reminder of what you've learned, or what you've been putting off if they remain unread.
Physical books are also wonderful gifts that digital can never replicate. A wise old man once gave me a book that he cherished and had been given to him in commemoration of his contribution to its production (it was a very important book). Every one of the hundreds of pages was filled with many of his annotations. Whenever I read from it, I am connected to him and his study. What would be the equivalent for digital? Giving someone a used phone?
Modern kids can have access to a wealth of information. AIs doing what teachers don't have time to do might actually be an improvement. I had some great teachers that went above and beyond, and also quite a few burned out not so great ones too. Modern schools weren't created to enlighten people but to turn kids into productive factory workers meeting bare minimum standards. Historically, there always was a big difference between the rich and the poor on this front. And whisking away the few smart kids and training those up properly was something left for higher education.
Modern tech creates potential for more bespoke and tailored teaching but also lots of challenges for teachers.
A lot of projections for future trends are made using isolated contexts, as if the world around them is not moving or changing.
For the past year or so, whenever I’ve wanted to learn something from a book, I’ve downloaded the Kindle edition, converted to plain text, given it to Claude, and asked it to tutor me chapter by chapter.
Anyone who's had the misfortune of graduating college in the past ten years and experiencing the detritus from Pearson students are forced to pay hundreds of dollars for knows this is actually a massive regression.