The world is changing, and children should change with it. Learn and understand technology, and the benefits of where modern machine learning is taking us.

But you cannot unironically think we can substitute fundamental skills like essay writing and critical thinking for a degree in 'prompt engineering'?

> 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 select the most efficient tool available for a task.

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.

Without a consequence, it’s in one out ear, out the other. Plus we have had the talk about actually reading several times.

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.

Parenting decisions are not isolated "best practice" moments, but the culmination of many conversations, events, interpersonal dynamics, and changes.

I don't know what the best practice is. I'm not a parent yet but I'm studying to be an elementary school teacher, so these sorts of questions are very much on my mind.

Essay writing has already become an old world archaic skill in my mind, like a seamstress or blacksmith. People still produce clothing and metal tools, but with 1000x fewer labor hours for the same amount of output and the process looks completely different. Even most of my personal messages get LLMed if they need to be very long or have to explain something complicated.

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.

You forgot “and drawbacks” after “And the benefits”.

"How about accepting new realities and changing homework assignments instead?"

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.

Have students work with ChatGPT and let them spot / mark where the AI is hallucinating or wrong? Might translate well to general competence wrt working with any kind of source online.

So they Google it?

So? Don‘t know what kind of homework you‘re thinking about. But using Google to do research doesn’t exactly sound like a problem to me.

It is more so the fact that someone takes something from ChatGPT, and then just feeds potentially contentious assertions into Google to see if they are true or not.

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?

If someone plugs math into a calculator, are they really learning something when it spits out an answer?

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?

You can't type your homework into a calculator and get the answer out (at least not after basic arithmetic).

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.

> You can't type your homework into a calculator and get the answer out (at least not after basic arithmetic).

But we can? Students using ChatGPT to get homework answers is the whole thing we are talking about.

I don't know how calculators are used in classrooms today, but when I was going through school, the general idea was that we could use calculators to do tasks that we had already learned to do.

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 forgot the part where the Google results that the student double-checks against are actually SEO blogs written with the help of ChatGPT...

I don't think Google in 2024 is guaranteed to be the critical-thinking tool that 2004 Google might have been.

1. As you note, consider eliminating it, or replacing it with in-class or lab work if it's absolutely necessary.

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.

This might be the single most tedious idea on hackernews. You of course know that learning how to formulate your own thoughts in writing is important, you know that zero learning is taking place when chatgpt writes the answer. Everybody fucking knows wolfram alpha can crush most grade school math, would you let your child answer every grade school math assignment using wolfram instead of their own brain? Why say what you said then? I really think you should have your account banned for engaging in bad faith.

It’s also acceptable for a kid to lean to read a book. She’s behind on reading and comprehension. Getting the summary isn’t helping to solve that.