I asked teachers to tell me how AI has changed how they teach.
The response from teachers and university professors was overwhelming. In my entire career, I’ve rarely gotten so many email responses to a single article, and I have never gotten so many thoughtful and comprehensive responses.
One thing is clear: teachers are not OK.
They describe trying to grade “hybrid essays half written by students and half written by robots,” trying to teach Spanish to kids who don’t know the meaning of the words they’re trying to teach them in English, and students who use AI in the middle of conversation. They describe spending hours grading papers that took their students seconds to generate: “I’ve been thinking more and more about how much time I am almost certainly spending grading and writing feedback for papers that were not even written by the student,” one teacher told me. “That sure feels like bullshit.”
Flipped classroom, the students are responsible for learning the content at home (use the assigned textbook, youtube, AI, who cares so long as you learn it), and the essays happen in the classroom where the teacher can help as they work and also ensure the students are the ones writing.
I don’t understand the concept of homework. School work is for school. And home is for home time. Why are teachers hellbent on assigning school work to be done at home?
Because you can learn more if you spend more time learning and ignorance is the greatest threat to humanity.
Exactly this. We need a shift in how teaching/education is handled. It’s similar to when calculators became common. You can use a calculator to get the right answer, but relying on it too much, or using it incorrectly will hamper your progress.
Teachers might have to start pointing out best practices for using LLMs. Ex: Don’t ask the LLM to write the essay for you, instead, write as much as you can, then use LLMs to evaluate what you have written. Ask it to poke holes in your arguments, or make suggestions on how it can be improved.
At universities you should have access to something like a “writing center” where tutors can help you with exactly that. Although those tutors would be ideal (and better than an LLM), sometimes there’s a wait to get access to a tutor, or they’re only open for certain times.
An LLM can definitely be a useful tool in the writing process, but the students of today need to learn how to use them properly as well as how to evaluate whether an LLM response is useful or even if it should be trusted.
Teachers will need to rely on in-class only work/tests/activities to help them actually evaluate a student’s progress instead of relying on homework to do that.
