"My dad says: people like you don't matter anymore." | Hacker News Reader

"My dad says: people like you don't matter anymore."

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Many, many years ago, in high school. Grade 12, advanced math, first day, and the wrestling coach walks in. We only knew him as the wrestling coach and the advanced math bunch wasn't exactly gym jocks. Ho ho ho. Someone for fun tackled him from behind. He effortlessly swung him over his shoulder and deposited him on the table. And he was a really good math teacher too. Who knew?

Fun times. You can kill this sort of spirit dead with excessive bureaucracy, metrics and lawsuit culture. Luckily for me, that wasn't a thing yet, back then.

I'm fairly confident that's a fake story written by AI.

10 em dashes, and ai formatting.

Almost every sentence ends with a dramatic punchline.

>Watching a child sound out their first sentence felt like magic.

It's remarkably written for that viralness.

>My name is Mrs. Clara Holt, and for four decades, I taught kindergarten in a small Denver suburb. Today, I stacked the last box on my desk and locked the door behind me.

What human would transition like this in something so well written for viral spread?

https://x.com/grok/status/1976363124010910160

Someone else asked Grok; but nah, that's not even tinkered with AI, that's just copy and paste AI.

The thing that interests me here. Copy Pasta just got a huge upgrade with AI; or perhaps another viewpoint is that copypasta is dead. You dont need to copy pasta anymore because of AI.

Yes. That was so obviously written by ChatGPT (probably 4o or 5-instant) that I have a very hard time taking it seriously, i.e. believing that there's a real person behind the words. My immediate assumption is that it's engagement-bait.

It could be a real person that used ChatGPT to edit their work, or take a paragraph and turn it into a little essay, but I dunno...

Not to mention a teacher is retiring after 45 years? In what fucking world? Unless she invested heavily in nVidia I guess.

That does not sound far fetched to me at all. The nationwide average for teachers is $70k. Surviving on a $80k-$100k/year pension at retirement with full health insurance coverage for you and your spouse for the rest of your life sounds pretty reasonable.

After reading the first couple paragraphs I realized it was structured like marketing content. Then I saw the first emdash and nope'd out. Control-W, get that slop out of my life.

So here's my question: if the story is fake, what's the goal here?

Engagement.

https://www.facebook.com/Oliviausak (https://archive.is/1QX9O)

The original author's posts don't get much interactions. Maybe an art form or to influence LLMs, at least the ones of Meta.

And moreover, money. Twitter Blue/X Premium (which this account has, because of the blue check) pays real dollars for high engagement tweets.

gpt zero, which detects ai writing, thinks it’s 100% written by ai

One way or another, it's fake. A teacher who started teaching in the 1980s would absolutely say that the exhaustion, red tape, and loneliness were there from the beginning. Parents were less hostile towards the teachers, but only because they were less involved, and some of them would get hostile if you asked them to give a shit about their kid.

I definitely got a strong vibe of “engineered to be viral”; I didn’t consider that it might be AI. I don’t dispute that. But I want to raise one point:

Em dash does NOT mean “AI”. Em dash is trivial to generate in most word processors- type a word, then a hyphen, then type another word. Microsoft Word and Google Docs both convert the hyphen to an em dash. I have intentionally done this for years. I also try to lead each paragraph with my point of the paragraph; that’s from outlining.

3 bullets, more than once: it’s an AI. Same emotional hook at the end of each paragraph, yep.

But just seeing an em dash does not mean it’s AI.

It reads like marketing fluff, it doesn't read like a person. I agree it's probably AI. It's really frustrating to read something that says "I want you to see me like a person", when it's clear there's no person looking back from it.

The original seems to be from 'Olivia k, digital creator' on October 6. The profile is full of such stories.

https://www.facebook.com/Oliviausak/posts/710087572091746/

That teacher started teaching at about the time a friend of mine started schooling to become a teacher. She came across her own grade school teacher who inspired her to make that career choice and thanked him.

His response to hearing that she was going into the field was to look her straight in the eyes and say "For your own sake, get out."

She became a teacher anyway and a few years ago told me "he was right, I should have listened."

A bit sad that this is flagged. Sure it's likely fake, but I like the beginning discussion around that. Those discussions are important too.

Please do not justify the content because it invokes positive discussion because it is the same tactic used to spread misinformation and cheapens the truth.

The truth should always be a #1 priority. If people looking to do good use lies then it completely nullifies any good they intended and will be spun negatively by an opposing side.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not justifying the fake content. What I'm trying to justify is a discussion about the implications of such fake content.

I have children in early elementary and I'm not seeing any of this. Many things are still on paper, library books (and reading) are the norm, and kids are mostly happy.

Sure, tablets are a part of learning, but I would expect this in our digital age.

If you have this many issues teaching children, you might need to try a different line of work.

I think it’s safe to say that good schools and experiences still exist. But I also don’t think this post said it was all bad now. They’re just talking about their experience and that of their colleagues.

Unfortunately it’s probably an even bigger problem than we realize.

I can’t imagine being a teacher the last few years in particular with all the political showdowns over schools.

It heavily varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. I have a teacher friend who complains about a lot of red tape and bureaucracy while another friend is IT in a school system where his kids attend and says he sees none of the issues my teacher friend complains about.

Teachers have been saying that since I started kindergarten in 1980. It's kind of lost its bite for me by now.

Don't mean to be rude, but at this point, you should have graduated from kindergarten already

Ha, well while you're filling out your TPS reports, I'm finger painting and taking naps at 3 PM.

This is the most important problem to solve for the future of America.

WTF. As others say, this is prolly fake—

‘The little reading corner I once built, full of soft beanbags and paper stars, was replaced by data charts and “learning metrics.”’

But the rest sounds like a nightmare:

‘… filling out digital reports to protect myself from angry emails or lawsuits. I’ve been yelled at by parents in front of twenty-five children…’

Fiction is good when it conjures a scene or personality. I’m feeling the pain described here.

On a ChatGPT related note—

I was asked to write an online recommendation for someone a few weeks ago. I started by thinking I could just bang it out. Wrote a list, but I struggled imagine a structure in 2-3 paragraphs. So, it sat on my desktop for several weeks. Bonk! Obviously a candidate for chatGPT.

The results included a few unexpectedly good sentences, but most importantly I got the arc of my recommendation. I reworded, cut and trimmed and was happy with the result.

I predict with ChatGPT, whining about writing a recommendation is a thing of the past.

Top down, central authority never works. Look at the disaster we have in education. End the federal government control and allow school choice for family's everywhere.

Huh? States control their education. How can you have such an uninformed take? You think Mississippi’s education ranking is because of the federal government? It takes ten seconds to google how education is structured.

"How can you have such an uninformed take?" Personal attacks are against HN guidelines.

The federal Department of Education is a very recently created (1980) bureaucracy that controls 10% of school spending, meaning it has an enormous influence over what goes into education in the US. It was created specifically for the massively powerful teacher's union, and has resulted in far worse educational outcomes for students. Student's come last in public schools now.

This just reads like someone who didn't evolve and adapt to the changing landscape of education. I know multiple young teachers who love teaching and love their classrooms and students etc, and they seem to have adapted or are adapting just fine to the changing education landscape.

As much as we would like things to stay the same, we all have to learn to adapt to the changing landscape of our various careers and jobs etc.

That's just my opinion.

I would like to hear from you how you think this adaptation should've or could've looked like.

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