I began my teaching career in 1968! Yikes! In the last 25 years I have seen a myriad of teaching tools and systems come and go. In the Us we are constantly looking for the easy way to do something and in terms of teaching there is no easy way. Most of my years teaching involved the lower grades K-5. Teachers at this level need to know how to teach mathematics. They need help in the classroom from a person who can both teach them and teach them how to teach their students. AI cannot do this. We need to put our energy and money into supplying trained PEOPLE at the elementary level to work side by side with teachers demonstrating, showing , supporting, and talking with them as they watch and see what happens as their children become engaged learners. This takes time. Lesson planning is time intensive and requires the planner to have intimate knowledge of each pupil in their class. This cannot be turned over to technology. As a math specialist who spent 95% of my time in classrooms working alongside teachers I KNOW this way produces the results we are looking for. My teachers became teachers who loved teaching math and their students became active and productive math learners.
I echo the other comments about content vs connection. I was working on the draft of a paper this weekend talking about that too often teaching is about slicing (thanks to behaviorism) and reducing. Reducing students to objects who behavior must be contained and controlled and rich content that must be sliced into "manageable" pieces.
Not meaning to flatter the host, but when I think of "students and teachers who return to use these tools week after week and day after day" I think of the Desmos graphing calculator, which gets a workout in every one of my classes, every day. And then what strikes me is the "toolness" of it, that it doesn't do a damn thing unless you pick it up, and then it only does what you tell it to do, whether "what you tell it to do" is what you *really need* it to do. Just like a hammer doesn't sit me down for instruction on how to build a house.
Dan, I enjoyed your newsletter this morning. I have a question. In it, you mentioned that you used AI to help with such things as writing the newsletter. My AI detector says that your newsletter is 100% AI generated. Is that accurate, or is my extension mistaken? (I am looking for some calibration here). Thanks!
Content vs connection is spot on. I often wonder if a part of the problem lies in the nature of the software creators. The industry seems to have a high proportion of neurodivergent people who, while very high functioning, may have more difficulty with human connections than neurotypical folks. I recognize the hazards of applying a stereotype here, but the factor should be considered.
This goes hand-in-hand with a recurring theme in MIT Prof. Justin Reich’s 2020 book Failure to Disrupt: Why Technology Alone Can’t Transform Education (p. 6):
“In the decades ahead, educators can expect to hear a new generation of product pitches about the transformative potential of new technologies for school systems: how artificial intelligence or virtual reality or brain scanners are the innovations that, this time, will actually lead to profound changes in education. These pitches will also be wrong—these new technologies will not reinvent existing school systems (though some of them may make valuable incremental improvements)—and this book is an effort to explain why.
I have two main arguments, corresponding to the two sections of this book. First, new technologies in education are not, in fact, wholly new; they build on a long history of education innovations. Second, there are certain basic obstacles that time and time again have tripped up the introduction of large-scale learning systems.”
The keyword from the book title is “alone”—it is technology *combined with* good teaching practices, passionate educators, forward-thinking policy makers, dedicated researchers, supportive parents and communities… that can, must, and I believe will transform education.
I’m fundamentally an optimist at heart, how about you?
I’ve spent some time probing ChatGPT and have decided that while it may be able to provide information in a more clever way than Google, it is not capable of leading students to new understanding. I found that by asking it to explain a concept. I used Newton’s second law because I have taught physics. What I got back was a description, not and explanation. I probed further looking to description vs explanation. The system told me it could only respond to my questions, but could not say more than that. I found it was not able to ask leading questions which could lead to better understanding. As such it is not a very good teacher.
By the way it is terrible at the New York Times Spelling Bee. You get nonsense.
I guess the futurists bet is that generating and delivering the right content to the right students will increase the engagement and create this connection by delivering more personalized (less alienating content). Timeline algorithms like TicTock and FB are already really good at hooking people for longer and longer periods of time to useless content, so why would they not have a chance to succeed in education?
Well I know it's unpolite to ask a chatbot its age, but I think in reality ChatGPT just turned...254! That is, if we trace its origins back to Wolfgang von Kempelen's chess-playing "Mechanical Turk." True, that device turned out to be a bit of a ruse, but perhaps that only underscores the through lines to today's AI efforts.
For a wonderful history of automatons that goes further back than Audrey Watter's (excellent) effort, I recommend historian Jessica Riskin's "The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Argument over What Makes Living Things Tick." Includes history of a defecating mechanical duck.
I began my teaching career in 1968! Yikes! In the last 25 years I have seen a myriad of teaching tools and systems come and go. In the Us we are constantly looking for the easy way to do something and in terms of teaching there is no easy way. Most of my years teaching involved the lower grades K-5. Teachers at this level need to know how to teach mathematics. They need help in the classroom from a person who can both teach them and teach them how to teach their students. AI cannot do this. We need to put our energy and money into supplying trained PEOPLE at the elementary level to work side by side with teachers demonstrating, showing , supporting, and talking with them as they watch and see what happens as their children become engaged learners. This takes time. Lesson planning is time intensive and requires the planner to have intimate knowledge of each pupil in their class. This cannot be turned over to technology. As a math specialist who spent 95% of my time in classrooms working alongside teachers I KNOW this way produces the results we are looking for. My teachers became teachers who loved teaching math and their students became active and productive math learners.
I have read quite a few takes on the one-year anniversary of ChatGPT and even written one myself. This is the best one by far!
>and for the new ideas to meet the student much more than halfway.
What does this mean?
I echo the other comments about content vs connection. I was working on the draft of a paper this weekend talking about that too often teaching is about slicing (thanks to behaviorism) and reducing. Reducing students to objects who behavior must be contained and controlled and rich content that must be sliced into "manageable" pieces.
Not meaning to flatter the host, but when I think of "students and teachers who return to use these tools week after week and day after day" I think of the Desmos graphing calculator, which gets a workout in every one of my classes, every day. And then what strikes me is the "toolness" of it, that it doesn't do a damn thing unless you pick it up, and then it only does what you tell it to do, whether "what you tell it to do" is what you *really need* it to do. Just like a hammer doesn't sit me down for instruction on how to build a house.
Nice spin on the all the birthday announcements! Well played!
Dan, I enjoyed your newsletter this morning. I have a question. In it, you mentioned that you used AI to help with such things as writing the newsletter. My AI detector says that your newsletter is 100% AI generated. Is that accurate, or is my extension mistaken? (I am looking for some calibration here). Thanks!
Excited to see what AI looks like in the Desmos Curriculum! 👀
Content vs connection is spot on. I often wonder if a part of the problem lies in the nature of the software creators. The industry seems to have a high proportion of neurodivergent people who, while very high functioning, may have more difficulty with human connections than neurotypical folks. I recognize the hazards of applying a stereotype here, but the factor should be considered.
This goes hand-in-hand with a recurring theme in MIT Prof. Justin Reich’s 2020 book Failure to Disrupt: Why Technology Alone Can’t Transform Education (p. 6):
“In the decades ahead, educators can expect to hear a new generation of product pitches about the transformative potential of new technologies for school systems: how artificial intelligence or virtual reality or brain scanners are the innovations that, this time, will actually lead to profound changes in education. These pitches will also be wrong—these new technologies will not reinvent existing school systems (though some of them may make valuable incremental improvements)—and this book is an effort to explain why.
I have two main arguments, corresponding to the two sections of this book. First, new technologies in education are not, in fact, wholly new; they build on a long history of education innovations. Second, there are certain basic obstacles that time and time again have tripped up the introduction of large-scale learning systems.”
The keyword from the book title is “alone”—it is technology *combined with* good teaching practices, passionate educators, forward-thinking policy makers, dedicated researchers, supportive parents and communities… that can, must, and I believe will transform education.
I’m fundamentally an optimist at heart, how about you?
Follow me on LinkedIn for more https://www.linkedin.com/in/haihaoliu (Substack content coming soon too! https://hhliu.online)
I’ve spent some time probing ChatGPT and have decided that while it may be able to provide information in a more clever way than Google, it is not capable of leading students to new understanding. I found that by asking it to explain a concept. I used Newton’s second law because I have taught physics. What I got back was a description, not and explanation. I probed further looking to description vs explanation. The system told me it could only respond to my questions, but could not say more than that. I found it was not able to ask leading questions which could lead to better understanding. As such it is not a very good teacher.
By the way it is terrible at the New York Times Spelling Bee. You get nonsense.
best,
joe
"this new fidget spinner"
Wow, judging from that slam, I'll bet Dan dealt out some harsh barbs when he was in the classroom. Just when you think you know someone . . . 😊
I guess the futurists bet is that generating and delivering the right content to the right students will increase the engagement and create this connection by delivering more personalized (less alienating content). Timeline algorithms like TicTock and FB are already really good at hooking people for longer and longer periods of time to useless content, so why would they not have a chance to succeed in education?
Well I know it's unpolite to ask a chatbot its age, but I think in reality ChatGPT just turned...254! That is, if we trace its origins back to Wolfgang von Kempelen's chess-playing "Mechanical Turk." True, that device turned out to be a bit of a ruse, but perhaps that only underscores the through lines to today's AI efforts.
For a wonderful history of automatons that goes further back than Audrey Watter's (excellent) effort, I recommend historian Jessica Riskin's "The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Argument over What Makes Living Things Tick." Includes history of a defecating mechanical duck.