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- Hacker News
- I’m learning French and I’ve tried both AI and a remote tutor from Cameroon.
The tutor from Cameroon is much better.
She tells me when I’m getting the basics wrong and designs lessons to go back and fix the basics.
AI loves to tell me how great I am and do lessons at the frontier of what I understand to make me feel good about how much progress I’m making.
by sjducb - The way to use AI to learn is not to ask it for the answers. Read a book, make notes about how the things you learn in that book relate to other things you know. Describe those connections as if you were teaching the topic to an interested friend and ask an AI to critique the descriptions. That'll tell you which parts of your textbook to reread, or which other books to read. It'll also give you the confidence to teach the topic to an interested friend, if you have one.
It has to be a second step, a critic. If it's the first step you don't end up with any way to know when it's being crazy.
- Tutoring is another situation where it can succeed wildly or fail miserably, and it will depend more on the harness than the model.
Tutoring is a process, and the end result is that the student gains a demonstrable new capability. The how isn't as important as the end result. If we end up with a bunch of people with increased personal capabilities, it's a win. If we're lazy and we end up with a bunch of people leaning on crutches, we failed.
Time will tell, I guess. Could be a surprise answer to Bloom's 2 sigma problem or a very stunted generation, or a mix of both.
- A calculator, Youtube and iPad tried to replace teachers. They all failed but this time it's different.by glitchc
- I'm all for saving money where you can, but these models really aren't great for learning because they love giving you answers and it's so easy to get an answer, but the process to get to the answer is how you actually learn. Unless you put guardrails in place to actually learn, I don't think this advice is good.by saadn92
- A friend of mine put his kid into a school called Alpha [1]. It has no teachers, only guides (?), who are well paid grads but not formally teachers. Kids go in in the morning, do two hours of computer study with an AI program, and the guide only steps in if the kid has a question or doubt the system cannot answer.
Then there's recess and afternoon is all taken up with "Life Skills" classes such as entrepreneurship and the likes.
Kids are tested weekly and progress through grades at will. For example, his kid would officially be in 3rd grade, but she's doing 3rd reading, 5th grade math, and 4th grade writing. She can easily test 3rd grade topics now.
I am ambiguous about this model. Love the "learn as much as you want" even if it means learning 2, 3 grades ahead, but the no-teacher rule and so much computer use seems a little strange. Also if the kid is not extremely self-motivated, they will be left by the side of the road by the school.
[1] - https://alpha.school/
Edit: It's 40k a year.
- This isn't binary, teachers have limited bandwidth and supplementing real teaching with AI supported research can work.
Students need to understand what AI is and is not.
Something got lost as we transitioned from parents telling their kids to 'go play and do not come back until dinner is ready' to us handholding & driving our kids from one social/sport activity to the next.
While it causes fights with my kids, I blank refuse to do certain things for them (fix their internet connection, repair a toy or bike) I'll give them the tools and they know to ask when they get stuck.
The act of learning through failure is a dying art these days. It's 'teach to the test', stressed out teachers, parents having too much to do compounded by taking on second, third jobs in this economy.
Teaching our kids how to leverage AI is something parents should invest in. Its part of a broader education landscape.
by radiorental - Non-paywall link: https://archive.is/W15Hgby ivansavz