As a college student I can tell you that I write my papers without AI, however, when I turn them in, Turnitin the tool that professors use to detect antiplagiarism and AI generated papers I usually get at least 10-20% of "AI generated" content which I think is not right.
As a professor, I've tried using some AI detectors and gotten completely opposite results when plugging the same text into them - one might say 100% written by a human and another will say 80% (or something like that) written by AI.
For writing, every college student should be required to read Strunk & White's "The Elements of Style." Seriously, it's still the best book out there on how to write clearly.
Wow, Lloyd. This is sobering. Depressing. That video is . . . Big sigh. AI baffles me, as an architect and educator. Why are we in such a hurry to replace the most rewarding, engaging, creative and fun aspects of design? Let’s get AI to do code reviews and CD quality control / coordination. But leave the creative ideation to humans — after all, we’re designing FOR humans (and, ideally, other beings with whom we share this planet). I’m going to be collaborating with John Lovie (Substack “Mostly Water”) on a piece about the environmental effects of using AI. Any suggestions?
Lloyd, everyday architects who have been practicing for a while don't need the threat of AI to be more than skeptical of "time-saving" technological innovations. The adoption of CAD drafting, and subsequent BIM modeling and database management tools saw productivity of individual architects skyrocket. Concurrently, however, since the late 70s, architects have experienced a 17% decline in real wages, along with ever greater workloads, and longer work days.
Students should absolutely be asking, who benefits from these "gains"? They should also be aware of organized labor's power, historical and potential, to control the adoption of new tech in the workplace.
Average architect salaries are still 33% higher than median US household incomes, though. Everyone's real wages have declined since the 1970's because the world IS NOT THE SAME as it was in the 1970's—from global trade, to e-commerce, to the ubiquitous adoption of personal computing, to mobile phones, advances in construction materials and tools, techniques, and more, to a bunch of other things.
I taught for 25 years at a university. Only in my last year, the last semester of teaching, spring of 2024, did I have an assignment turned in by a student that was totally done using AI. It was not cheating because I did not state in my syllabus that students could not use AI. It was a bland paper, not sloppy or shitty, just blah. I suspect Greta Thunberg's statement about COP 26 "blah, blah, blah", fits for AI papers. Good student papers, good student design, includes their own thoughts and their own quirks. Quirks are creative. AI, well, the hammer is a good tool. Of course I am writing this on a computer. Am I a hypocrite? Is AI compared to good writing and good design similar to ultraprocessed food compared to fresh kale? Just a thought.
Require them to hand-write any assignment or paper and require a citation page of all works used before an electronic copy is submitted. Also require them to include photos of said written works and attach them to the final copy so you could compare original to the final submission. It's what my girlfriend does at the high school senior level, and she has ~130 students as well.
It's not so much that you would go over the handwritten portions with a fine-toothed comb, it's to ensure that if your students *ARE* using AI to write their papers, that they then have to spend the time transposing the electronic copy into written word and then back again. It's about the process, ensuring that some kind of actual learning is going on—which handwriting excels at accomplishing because it slows down one's thoughts and also merges fine motor skills to neural link development.
Regarding the loss of 50% of jobs to AI:
Won't happen. Either AI-based work will be taxed by politicians in response to voter unrest so as to limit the corporate profiteering it produces, OR there will be such societal unrest as to cause a revolution and bloodshed of the egalitarian bourgeoisie who would—voluntarily or involuntarily—return us to a fiefdom.
Teaching school, I always liked reading book reports by high schoolers. Lately (within a couple of years) the reports read like they have been written by professional book reviewers. The kicker is, most of these kids cannot spell and (after talking to them) has not read the source material. So, I have started giving them split grades: One dependent on a test they take on the subject matter, and one for presentation (on the report); that is, the closer to how the students normally writes and spells gets a higher grade than one that reads like a professional paper.
AI is fancy copy-paste to a student. They simply do not look beyond "I turned in my assignment, gimme my 'A'!" but when they have to take a test and they fail because THEY DIDN'T CARE ENOUGH TO LEARN WHAT THEY WERE BEING TAUGHT, then suddenly the whining is deafening as though we (teachers) are cheating THEM!! It'd be funnier if not for the fact they're going to be one day responsible for my senior care.
I think there is a place for AI, certainly. But this conundrum exists for all sorts of validation processes in education. I have chatted with teachers in high schools who faced this dilemma and many have decided to go to oral exams. This may appear to take longer, but reading essays or evaluating open-ended questions can be just as time consuming.
I still remember the days in a college auditorium when we were all issues those hardcopy "blue books" to either take the exam manually with a pencil or write the essay.
Well, the topic du jour, for quite some time, has been about degrowth.
And now it has arrived at your door. Like most of Life, however, it isn't always the orderly and controlled entrance by the front door.
Creative Destruction, my man!
However, it will create (I hope) NEW jobs just like how other advances have done in the past. As Bob Baal points out, it is completely changing software engineering. Well, my programming skills are a tad rusty (go ahead, pick some languages) but my ability to architect solutions via decomposition and see insights on how to quickly modularize the building blocks to make a "new whole" have not. I no longer need a cadre of outsources Asian programmers - I can do it myself and get it right faster than I ever could before. If you have that capability, you will still have a career.
After all, while a bulldozer operator put tons of shovel wielding laborers out of business because of his far superior productivity with his machine, so too will other industries have similar opportunities.
Excellent article Lloyd. I think a good application of AI would be reviewing Policy for 'conflicts' - of which there are many - particularly in urban planning and the entire development process. This also applies to the many versions of the Building Codes - by province. AI/Tech/Digital Twins would be very useful for 'As-built' drawings and managing maintenance changes over time - especially for infrastructure - 'out-of-sight/out-of-mind'. I find it startling the number of cities & municipalities without accurate documentation of infrastructure. Could the use of AL create more inclination to work as teams? This part is up for debate.
This reminds me of the fact that I seem to have been through this before.
When I was 12 the question was "Do we allow Students to use Electronic calculators - after all if they cannot do it in their heads or pencil and paper how will they ever understand maths"
The class was in awe of my friend Tony - he had bought one - four functions!
When I was at University the question was "Do we allow Students to use Calculators in Exams and how many functions can that calculator have"
We survived. Pretty soon not using AI will seem like not using a calculator.
As a funny aside, when I learnt to fly, we had to do all calculations on paper/in our heads under the assumption that that was all we would have in the cockpit. Panic resulted in the class as half of them had never been taught how to do division by hand. But they learnt and we all passed.
At the moment AI is very very immature, so we are seeing the normal sorts of issues when something is in that state. We will get over it and we will still have jobs. Different jobs done different ways but still jobs.
I think this is different than a calculator or a computer. I used to spend days setting up a rendering of a building or pay thousands for it, and for 20 years now they have been done by the draughting programmes automatically. But I still had to design the building! Now the computers can do that, albeit badly still.
AI is different from a calculator or computer; the former is meant to REPLACE humans, the latter is meant to ASSIST humans. If a computer can do all the "thinking", writing, creating, publishing, etc. and do it in a fraction of the time a human could do it, how does a human compete? And why would anyone preferentially prioritize human-made [read: error prone] results to the output of AI? These are the kinds of questions not asked before we've run headlong into the abyss of adopting a technology we genuinely do not understand how it works.
But how much of it was repetition? How much of it was actual creativity rather than extracted from a library?
People underestimate how much of their jobs are just variants of doing the same thing over and over again. That is why AI is having so much effect on programming.
AI can look at every block of code ever written and understand it enough to point out that what the programmer is trying to do, has already been done.
I used AI to decode log messages coming out of a very complex system and it identified things I had missed or not fully understood.
An AI architect could look at every plan for every building and derive common elements from them. (I could not remember how to spell architect- asked Alexa)
I'm the proud parent of a teenager, who I introduced to AI in the fall of 2022... :-) I might have been just ahead of the curb, but when she asked me to help her with an assignment that was due just hours later, that she had put off too long (she didn't actually put it off, she had to read 5 books for it which she had done), and was quite challenging for a 14 year old anyways. (She was asked to compare all kinds of things between the five books and draw correlations etc.) I started helping her with her work, panic started setting in with me. Impossible for me to help her within the time we had left. Until I remembered that new AI thing a friend had shown me.
Access was still very restricted, and I understood the moral dilemma I found myself in. In the end, we tried out ChatGPT, turned out to be very helpful. My daughter was able to determine quite quickly, what AI slop was created. Amongst it were some gems though too. So we used the gems and went on the finish the assignment on time.
At that time, the discussion about AI had not even broken out in schools yet. But it was 100% clear to me: we would never put this cat back in the bag (is that just a German saying?). Teachers could jump up and down and scream against it, nothing they can do. And if they just forbid it, then they are not living in reality. It's like refusing to accept internet in 1999... ever! My take was: teach kids how to use it intelligently. Even give them homework to use AI with, and show them how to use it well.
I've come to see it just like any other tool out there. No point in forbidding a nail gun and sticking to the hammer. But we need to claim our turf: human soul and thinking is ours. As the internet meme says "I don't need AI to do my art, while I wash my clothes. I want it to wash my clothes so I can do more art."
PS: sorry, I'm probably preaching to the choir, still had the urge to put that out there, but I think its exactly what you said too, Lloyd :-) Cheers
Very good points. I would advise Lloyd to once or twice sacrifice 5 minutes at the end of a lecture to have everyone handwrite what they have gotten from it. It would be illuminating to the students not only to express what they learned but how legibly they are able to present it without machine support.
>>"And if they just forbid it, then they are not living in reality."
Actually, they can and do. It's called plagiarism. You are not doing your own work, you're allowing a computer programme do it for you, and if you stamp your name to it under the assumption that yes, you did the work, you understand what the AI wrote, and could replicate it, you've committed academic fraud.
Find out how well AI will work when you have to take a written exam if you as a student have never had to connect neurons together long enough beyond writing an AI-generative prompt.
>>"No point in forbidding a nail gun and sticking to the hammer."
But we still manufacture, sell, buy, use, and care for hammers—and always will, because if that Li-ion battery runs down and you have a task to finish, you'd better know how to hammer and hammer quickly. We're not going to throw them away in favor of the shiny new technology either, are we? Imagine if, in another generation or two, no one knew how to use a hammer anymore because, well, "we have AI for that." Then a Carrington-type solar flare hits and takes out every object on the planet with a computer chip on it. Good luck pounding those nails in with a dead nail hammer! LOL
My point is, If the goal of education is to teach HOW to think, why would you want AI in schools that removes that singular component of educational purposefulness? You want masses that are uneducated and unable to think for themselves because a computer algorithm says this is what they should believe, and with NO accountability held to its use?
Yeah, no. I don't want to live in that kind of a world. People would be rendered useless and redundant, ripe for being turned into Soylent Green.
"My point is, If the goal of education is to teach HOW to think, why would you want AI in schools that removes that singular component of educational purposefulness? You want masses that are uneducated and unable to think for themselves because a computer algorithm says this is what they should believe, and with NO accountability held to its use?"
Nailed it, perfectly. Teachers and professors would be wise to go back to Socratic teaching methodologies for EVERY class. I always picked on students without asking for raised hands. It made them DO the homework, STUDY the materials, and be ABLE to defend their answer each and every day. Sure, I probably spent more time than the students did for lecture prep but I will never forget the highest complement I ever received from a student:
"You make us work harder and longer than any other professor we have had. But I know, at the end of the day, I will have learned something".
That was now 6 years ago - and I will never forget it. Make them work and work hard - they'll hate you at the time but it will, as VB points out, teach them HOW to think a solution through to the end.
Not here to prove anyone wrong. I like the debate and I really appreciate your input. "Teach them how to think" is great and a noble cause.
Unfortunately, I don't necessarily see that being the intention of (some of) the teachers of our kids. Our oldest daughter (16yo) routinely stays up after midnight just to get home work done. That by itself seems to me like a bootcamp and certainly doesn't give her the headspace to think on her own. I get your point about making them work hard, which is different than grinding them down. I wouldn't want to be at the gym 8 hours a day either. But that's somewhat of a reality that our kids face with (some of) their teachers. I'd welcome quality (hard) thinking, over sheer quantity.
I wonder how things are going to be with a new generation of teachers coming up with AI.
(on a side note: I'm very surprised how easy and quick teachers get through teachers college here. My sister is an elementary teacher in Germany; it took her much longer until she got her degree. Eventhough she teaches math at an elementary school level, it seemed like she studied to become a mathematician. I'd like to see the education for our teachers increase in quality here again.)
It's because America, and Americans in general, don't value education the way they do in Germany and most other places. We have ~75% national high school graduation rates and many of those are illiterate upon graduation, which isn't just a travesty but begs the question, "How did they graduate if they can't read or write?" The whole of the American education system is as broken as is the national healthcare system.
My fear with AI is that teachers being churned out today (in limited quantity, I should add) don't value the profession the way previous generations of teachers did, and see it more as just a job, a means to an ends, than a calling.
We were recently given a draft floor plan of a daycare to redesign and make in to a buildable facility. It was supposedly done using AI.
The plan had all the pieces there, washrooms and classrooms but it was a mess.
There's always a job for creativity.Just because it can generate a picture doesn't mean it will be a real building that can be built.
As a college student I can tell you that I write my papers without AI, however, when I turn them in, Turnitin the tool that professors use to detect antiplagiarism and AI generated papers I usually get at least 10-20% of "AI generated" content which I think is not right.
As a professor, I've tried using some AI detectors and gotten completely opposite results when plugging the same text into them - one might say 100% written by a human and another will say 80% (or something like that) written by AI.
For writing, every college student should be required to read Strunk & White's "The Elements of Style." Seriously, it's still the best book out there on how to write clearly.
agreed! Grammarly doesn’t compare.
Thanks for the tip!
I still have my copy and occasionally reference it. I find I reference it more often the older I get.
Wow, Lloyd. This is sobering. Depressing. That video is . . . Big sigh. AI baffles me, as an architect and educator. Why are we in such a hurry to replace the most rewarding, engaging, creative and fun aspects of design? Let’s get AI to do code reviews and CD quality control / coordination. But leave the creative ideation to humans — after all, we’re designing FOR humans (and, ideally, other beings with whom we share this planet). I’m going to be collaborating with John Lovie (Substack “Mostly Water”) on a piece about the environmental effects of using AI. Any suggestions?
Have a look at what Suchir Balaji had to say about AI.
AI is lazy. How did our ancestors create such works of wonder without AI? Soon, with AI, everything is going to look the same.
Lloyd, everyday architects who have been practicing for a while don't need the threat of AI to be more than skeptical of "time-saving" technological innovations. The adoption of CAD drafting, and subsequent BIM modeling and database management tools saw productivity of individual architects skyrocket. Concurrently, however, since the late 70s, architects have experienced a 17% decline in real wages, along with ever greater workloads, and longer work days.
Students should absolutely be asking, who benefits from these "gains"? They should also be aware of organized labor's power, historical and potential, to control the adoption of new tech in the workplace.
And those tools did not "design"
Average architect salaries are still 33% higher than median US household incomes, though. Everyone's real wages have declined since the 1970's because the world IS NOT THE SAME as it was in the 1970's—from global trade, to e-commerce, to the ubiquitous adoption of personal computing, to mobile phones, advances in construction materials and tools, techniques, and more, to a bunch of other things.
I taught for 25 years at a university. Only in my last year, the last semester of teaching, spring of 2024, did I have an assignment turned in by a student that was totally done using AI. It was not cheating because I did not state in my syllabus that students could not use AI. It was a bland paper, not sloppy or shitty, just blah. I suspect Greta Thunberg's statement about COP 26 "blah, blah, blah", fits for AI papers. Good student papers, good student design, includes their own thoughts and their own quirks. Quirks are creative. AI, well, the hammer is a good tool. Of course I am writing this on a computer. Am I a hypocrite? Is AI compared to good writing and good design similar to ultraprocessed food compared to fresh kale? Just a thought.
Regarding how to use AI with your students:
Require them to hand-write any assignment or paper and require a citation page of all works used before an electronic copy is submitted. Also require them to include photos of said written works and attach them to the final copy so you could compare original to the final submission. It's what my girlfriend does at the high school senior level, and she has ~130 students as well.
It's not so much that you would go over the handwritten portions with a fine-toothed comb, it's to ensure that if your students *ARE* using AI to write their papers, that they then have to spend the time transposing the electronic copy into written word and then back again. It's about the process, ensuring that some kind of actual learning is going on—which handwriting excels at accomplishing because it slows down one's thoughts and also merges fine motor skills to neural link development.
Regarding the loss of 50% of jobs to AI:
Won't happen. Either AI-based work will be taxed by politicians in response to voter unrest so as to limit the corporate profiteering it produces, OR there will be such societal unrest as to cause a revolution and bloodshed of the egalitarian bourgeoisie who would—voluntarily or involuntarily—return us to a fiefdom.
As good as AI may become, there will always be blindsides for it and VB has pointed out exactly how to get rid of AI Dribble for papers and exams.
It will require more time by professors and teaching assistants to do the grading.
As in everything, everything is always a set of tradeoffs.
Teaching school, I always liked reading book reports by high schoolers. Lately (within a couple of years) the reports read like they have been written by professional book reviewers. The kicker is, most of these kids cannot spell and (after talking to them) has not read the source material. So, I have started giving them split grades: One dependent on a test they take on the subject matter, and one for presentation (on the report); that is, the closer to how the students normally writes and spells gets a higher grade than one that reads like a professional paper.
AI is fancy copy-paste to a student. They simply do not look beyond "I turned in my assignment, gimme my 'A'!" but when they have to take a test and they fail because THEY DIDN'T CARE ENOUGH TO LEARN WHAT THEY WERE BEING TAUGHT, then suddenly the whining is deafening as though we (teachers) are cheating THEM!! It'd be funnier if not for the fact they're going to be one day responsible for my senior care.
I think there is a place for AI, certainly. But this conundrum exists for all sorts of validation processes in education. I have chatted with teachers in high schools who faced this dilemma and many have decided to go to oral exams. This may appear to take longer, but reading essays or evaluating open-ended questions can be just as time consuming.
I couldnt possibly do oral exams for 140 students!
Make them hand write it. I'm sure "back in the day" you used paper exams, yes? This would be a 360° return to sanity.
I know. For a high school class it may make sense. Not for an auditorium. A different solution obviously.
I still remember the days in a college auditorium when we were all issues those hardcopy "blue books" to either take the exam manually with a pencil or write the essay.
Slide rules were allowed.
Enslopification is accurate 😕
We are so fucking doomed in so many ways.
Well, the topic du jour, for quite some time, has been about degrowth.
And now it has arrived at your door. Like most of Life, however, it isn't always the orderly and controlled entrance by the front door.
Creative Destruction, my man!
However, it will create (I hope) NEW jobs just like how other advances have done in the past. As Bob Baal points out, it is completely changing software engineering. Well, my programming skills are a tad rusty (go ahead, pick some languages) but my ability to architect solutions via decomposition and see insights on how to quickly modularize the building blocks to make a "new whole" have not. I no longer need a cadre of outsources Asian programmers - I can do it myself and get it right faster than I ever could before. If you have that capability, you will still have a career.
After all, while a bulldozer operator put tons of shovel wielding laborers out of business because of his far superior productivity with his machine, so too will other industries have similar opportunities.
Excellent article Lloyd. I think a good application of AI would be reviewing Policy for 'conflicts' - of which there are many - particularly in urban planning and the entire development process. This also applies to the many versions of the Building Codes - by province. AI/Tech/Digital Twins would be very useful for 'As-built' drawings and managing maintenance changes over time - especially for infrastructure - 'out-of-sight/out-of-mind'. I find it startling the number of cities & municipalities without accurate documentation of infrastructure. Could the use of AL create more inclination to work as teams? This part is up for debate.
This reminds me of the fact that I seem to have been through this before.
When I was 12 the question was "Do we allow Students to use Electronic calculators - after all if they cannot do it in their heads or pencil and paper how will they ever understand maths"
The class was in awe of my friend Tony - he had bought one - four functions!
When I was at University the question was "Do we allow Students to use Calculators in Exams and how many functions can that calculator have"
We survived. Pretty soon not using AI will seem like not using a calculator.
As a funny aside, when I learnt to fly, we had to do all calculations on paper/in our heads under the assumption that that was all we would have in the cockpit. Panic resulted in the class as half of them had never been taught how to do division by hand. But they learnt and we all passed.
At the moment AI is very very immature, so we are seeing the normal sorts of issues when something is in that state. We will get over it and we will still have jobs. Different jobs done different ways but still jobs.
I think this is different than a calculator or a computer. I used to spend days setting up a rendering of a building or pay thousands for it, and for 20 years now they have been done by the draughting programmes automatically. But I still had to design the building! Now the computers can do that, albeit badly still.
I agree with you, Lloyd.
AI is different from a calculator or computer; the former is meant to REPLACE humans, the latter is meant to ASSIST humans. If a computer can do all the "thinking", writing, creating, publishing, etc. and do it in a fraction of the time a human could do it, how does a human compete? And why would anyone preferentially prioritize human-made [read: error prone] results to the output of AI? These are the kinds of questions not asked before we've run headlong into the abyss of adopting a technology we genuinely do not understand how it works.
But how much of it was repetition? How much of it was actual creativity rather than extracted from a library?
People underestimate how much of their jobs are just variants of doing the same thing over and over again. That is why AI is having so much effect on programming.
AI can look at every block of code ever written and understand it enough to point out that what the programmer is trying to do, has already been done.
I used AI to decode log messages coming out of a very complex system and it identified things I had missed or not fully understood.
An AI architect could look at every plan for every building and derive common elements from them. (I could not remember how to spell architect- asked Alexa)
I'm the proud parent of a teenager, who I introduced to AI in the fall of 2022... :-) I might have been just ahead of the curb, but when she asked me to help her with an assignment that was due just hours later, that she had put off too long (she didn't actually put it off, she had to read 5 books for it which she had done), and was quite challenging for a 14 year old anyways. (She was asked to compare all kinds of things between the five books and draw correlations etc.) I started helping her with her work, panic started setting in with me. Impossible for me to help her within the time we had left. Until I remembered that new AI thing a friend had shown me.
Access was still very restricted, and I understood the moral dilemma I found myself in. In the end, we tried out ChatGPT, turned out to be very helpful. My daughter was able to determine quite quickly, what AI slop was created. Amongst it were some gems though too. So we used the gems and went on the finish the assignment on time.
At that time, the discussion about AI had not even broken out in schools yet. But it was 100% clear to me: we would never put this cat back in the bag (is that just a German saying?). Teachers could jump up and down and scream against it, nothing they can do. And if they just forbid it, then they are not living in reality. It's like refusing to accept internet in 1999... ever! My take was: teach kids how to use it intelligently. Even give them homework to use AI with, and show them how to use it well.
I've come to see it just like any other tool out there. No point in forbidding a nail gun and sticking to the hammer. But we need to claim our turf: human soul and thinking is ours. As the internet meme says "I don't need AI to do my art, while I wash my clothes. I want it to wash my clothes so I can do more art."
PS: sorry, I'm probably preaching to the choir, still had the urge to put that out there, but I think its exactly what you said too, Lloyd :-) Cheers
Very good points. I would advise Lloyd to once or twice sacrifice 5 minutes at the end of a lecture to have everyone handwrite what they have gotten from it. It would be illuminating to the students not only to express what they learned but how legibly they are able to present it without machine support.
interewting idea George
>>"And if they just forbid it, then they are not living in reality."
Actually, they can and do. It's called plagiarism. You are not doing your own work, you're allowing a computer programme do it for you, and if you stamp your name to it under the assumption that yes, you did the work, you understand what the AI wrote, and could replicate it, you've committed academic fraud.
Find out how well AI will work when you have to take a written exam if you as a student have never had to connect neurons together long enough beyond writing an AI-generative prompt.
>>"No point in forbidding a nail gun and sticking to the hammer."
But we still manufacture, sell, buy, use, and care for hammers—and always will, because if that Li-ion battery runs down and you have a task to finish, you'd better know how to hammer and hammer quickly. We're not going to throw them away in favor of the shiny new technology either, are we? Imagine if, in another generation or two, no one knew how to use a hammer anymore because, well, "we have AI for that." Then a Carrington-type solar flare hits and takes out every object on the planet with a computer chip on it. Good luck pounding those nails in with a dead nail hammer! LOL
My point is, If the goal of education is to teach HOW to think, why would you want AI in schools that removes that singular component of educational purposefulness? You want masses that are uneducated and unable to think for themselves because a computer algorithm says this is what they should believe, and with NO accountability held to its use?
Yeah, no. I don't want to live in that kind of a world. People would be rendered useless and redundant, ripe for being turned into Soylent Green.
Prove me wrong.
Prove you wrong?
"My point is, If the goal of education is to teach HOW to think, why would you want AI in schools that removes that singular component of educational purposefulness? You want masses that are uneducated and unable to think for themselves because a computer algorithm says this is what they should believe, and with NO accountability held to its use?"
Nailed it, perfectly. Teachers and professors would be wise to go back to Socratic teaching methodologies for EVERY class. I always picked on students without asking for raised hands. It made them DO the homework, STUDY the materials, and be ABLE to defend their answer each and every day. Sure, I probably spent more time than the students did for lecture prep but I will never forget the highest complement I ever received from a student:
"You make us work harder and longer than any other professor we have had. But I know, at the end of the day, I will have learned something".
That was now 6 years ago - and I will never forget it. Make them work and work hard - they'll hate you at the time but it will, as VB points out, teach them HOW to think a solution through to the end.
Not here to prove anyone wrong. I like the debate and I really appreciate your input. "Teach them how to think" is great and a noble cause.
Unfortunately, I don't necessarily see that being the intention of (some of) the teachers of our kids. Our oldest daughter (16yo) routinely stays up after midnight just to get home work done. That by itself seems to me like a bootcamp and certainly doesn't give her the headspace to think on her own. I get your point about making them work hard, which is different than grinding them down. I wouldn't want to be at the gym 8 hours a day either. But that's somewhat of a reality that our kids face with (some of) their teachers. I'd welcome quality (hard) thinking, over sheer quantity.
I wonder how things are going to be with a new generation of teachers coming up with AI.
(on a side note: I'm very surprised how easy and quick teachers get through teachers college here. My sister is an elementary teacher in Germany; it took her much longer until she got her degree. Eventhough she teaches math at an elementary school level, it seemed like she studied to become a mathematician. I'd like to see the education for our teachers increase in quality here again.)
It's because America, and Americans in general, don't value education the way they do in Germany and most other places. We have ~75% national high school graduation rates and many of those are illiterate upon graduation, which isn't just a travesty but begs the question, "How did they graduate if they can't read or write?" The whole of the American education system is as broken as is the national healthcare system.
My fear with AI is that teachers being churned out today (in limited quantity, I should add) don't value the profession the way previous generations of teachers did, and see it more as just a job, a means to an ends, than a calling.