A High Schooler Writes About AI Tools in the Classroom

Selfishness isn’t the solution try again

Yeah but "what are we going to do" is still a valid question

You _don't_ need to jump all the way back to paper and pencil. It's the internet that's the problem. Kids just need to do their work in class on a machine that is only connected to school network, not the wider internet.

Updated to say what I was trying to say. (Apologies)

"Prompt" is what I got, and this was way before LLMs

"Writing prompt" is definitely normal pre-AI schooling terminology.

I was given writing prompts in the 90s, and I’m sure many students long before me were as well.

This is not what's happening in these schools. Many children have no outside-of-school work -- at all. My two children have had many classes with no homework up through 8th grade. And this is in a highly regarded, very competitive school district.

From what I can tell, this is mostly a parent-led thing, well supported by overworked teachers who are more than willing to avoid even more work grading out-of-school assignments.

The problem with this strategy is that tons of kids just wont do the reading which derails the entire class period.

> I don't think I've ever seen a school essay back then that wasn't obviously written by a parent, i.e. the ye olde times version of "chatgpt write this for me"

man. this didn't really exist in my midwest USA public education in the 90s/00s, I felt like I had to work hard for all of my grades and the teachers were actively trying to derail me from my goals. there was never a sense of, this work is an example of "good enough".

it wasn't until college that I had teachers who weren't so adversarial and actually seemed to care about teaching.

What do they do in the flipped classroom when (not if :-) some students come to class having done absolutely nothing at home?

> For many/most students, the home is not particularly conducive for doing homework a variety of reasons.

I think this speaks to the parents and the type of home environment that they create. This is one of the major sources of disagreement between the right and the left, where the former (sometimes strongly) feel the parents bear responsibility for the type of environment their kids grow up in while the latter (equally strongly) feel that they can't really help themselves due to external factors (abuse, addiction, sickness, etc.).

  > Do you harbour beliefs that conflict with your values?

  > If there are no consequences, what is the incentive to bear responsibility?

  > Maybe their parents have a responsibility to do better, but if the parents are not delivering on their responsibility, should the children bear the consequence?

> For my personal experience, college was a time management joke after high school, mainly because I didn’t have to spend so much bullshit/wasted time in classes.

Same here. Junior high and high school especially were the least-flexible, strictest environments I’ve ever been in, including in work life. People (teachers, relatives) telling me things like “this is the best part of your life” and “they have to be tough on you because the real world is so much harder still”—luckily I got a job early in high school and started to get the sense they might all be wildly wrong about that, then went to college and instead of being harder, it was like a fuckin’ vacation. So much more flexible, humane, and chill.

And yeah, 8 hours at school and 2+ hours of homework every night… in hindsight, I have to not think about it too hard or I’ll get angry. I could have learned more putting in literally 1/4 the time, and not been constantly stressed out to a degree I wouldn’t realize until later was extremely unhealthy.

Not just a huge waste of time, but caused harm it took me more than a decade to mostly get over. And I wasn’t even seriously bullied or anything! I was even somewhat popular!

My kids (CA high school) were incredibly stressed with a heavy workload that seemed mostly pointless and specifically, teachers who didn't care and students who didn't care as a result and used AI and cheated whenever possible. Both opted out of high school after 2 years (GED-equivalent test, to junior college for 2 years). They were and are getting basically straight A/A+s. Older one just finished 2 years of JC with 2 associates degrees and 4 certificates, and transferred to state school for 2 years to finish BA.

My experience was wildly different. I was what was generally considered a middle-of-the-road high school in a good-to-great school district in Canada (the highest-performing one next to the university was a whole different level). I rarely had much homework other than writing a few essays - which I often printed on my dot-matrix printer (yes, this was in the 80s). I studied half an hour for my highest-level senior chem final and aced it. Maybe studied 1-2 hours for calc, etc. Computer labs were some of the best times - hacking Basic on PETs.

Got to university (computer engineering, just slightly below electrical engineering) and it was brutal. Dropped 25% from high school to 1A semester. Had no study habits, "just wing it" had worked just fine to this point - if anything, it had worked too well. Of course, basically everyone in my class of 80 had the same story: graduated #1 overall in their high school (just like me). Some had way better habits / discipline. We had one student who came back to school 10 years after trying to make it as a studio musician. I once asked him point blank: so, do you do 5 hours of homework a night (because he ALWAYS knew the answer, etc) - he looked at me straightfaced and said "I try to do 6". Eventually, I managed to graduate in the top 1/3 of my class, stay on to get an MASc and have had a ~30 year career in software, so I'm reasonably happy. But I've had a hard time identifying with my kids' experience - high school was a blast for me and super easy. University was not. It's the other way around for them.

My straight-As appeared and disappeared within a school year each of the time my family spent renting out an acquaintance's 4,000 square foot custom-built house. My bedroom had large, built-in desks (one for each occupant and a third for the computer) and a big window that looked out over the street. Light, fresh air, (relative) privacy, space. Every other house, I was doing work at the kitchen table or on the floor. It makes a huge difference.

After we had to move on from there, you'd have thought that moving away from the distraction of a neighborhood full of classmates whose houses I could bike to on a whim (homework done or not) would be helpful, but it turns out that replacing physical afterschool hangouts with AIM chats and early social media was not exactly conducive to the physical and social well-being that supports youth academics.

Yes, having these things straight is a massive privilege. And, even during the worst times, at least I was safe. I think a lot of Americans are clueless. Or, they prefer their kids competing against peers who are at a huge disadvantage. (One guess where the rampant prevalence of imposter syndrome comes from.)

Doesn't it swing both ways?

You view it as time wasted, another might view it as time socializing and self organizing -- primary school is there to teach people first and foremost how to integrate into society and be 'normal' citizens -- if we hyper-optimize it for academics something will be lost.

My uni performance would always drop whenever my parents would fight at home.

You aren't doing your homework when you're trying to not have a panic attack from shouting.

I don’t think the time in school will miraculously become more efficient bc of no homework.

Your second point… so what

> For k-12, getting the parent and the student to sit down outside of school and “cheat” by having the parent teach the kid is… victory! You’ve reinforced the idea that learning can happen outside schools.

I don't think they were trying to prevent parents from working with children; I think they were trying to prevent parents doing the homework for children, or the kids farming it out to someone else online, or getting someone else to do it for them, period.

Same with college; it wasn't exactly networking when someone I knew paid someone to do their homework for them.

> For college, having students get together and “cheat” by doing their homework together is… victory! You’ve gotten the students to network with their peers. That’s… like, the main value proposition of a university, to some.

This is a far too charitable interpretation of the problem. Students who cheat in these circumstances aren’t working together with their peers or LLMs to understand the subject matter.

They’re using the LLM to bypass the learning part completely. Homework problem gets pasted into ChatGPT. Answer is copied and pasted out.

This is analogous to a student who copies a peer’s homework answers without trying to understand them.

This isn’t “learning to collaborate” or networking. It’s cheating.

In practice, it catches up to students at test time. This is the primary problem for my friend who teaches a couple classes at a local community college: Students will turn in LLM work for the assignments and then be completely blindsided when they have to come in and take a test, as if they’ve never seen the material before.

One time he assigned a short essay on a topic they discussed with a generic name. A large number of the submissions were about a completely unrelated thing that shared the generic name. It would not be possible for anyone to accidentally make this mistake if they were actually parsing the LLM output before turning it in. They just see it as an easy button to press to pass the course, until it catches up with them later and they’re too far behind to catch up to people who have been learning as they go.

I barely made it out of high school because of homework. And flunked college mostly because of it.

What was going on with computers was far too interesting, I'd spend 10 hours learning to code or playing around with Linux, go to school the next day with 4 hours of sleep and missed homework. It worked out though, and I wouldn't do things any differently given the chance.

Do you happen to have any examples, if you're allowed to share and comfortable doing so?

Always found differences in teaching styles and curriculum interesting as is, but I am curious about how others are balancing the new additional challenges of combating LLMs without making the material significantly more difficult to understand.

And robs children of family and play time. Play is critical work for the child mind.

We're well past the point of AI being able to write better than the average highschooler. It's not even close. What I remember from my high school was that the average student could barely put together 3 coherent paragraphs.

You have severely overestimated most high-school students.

The whole reason that this is an issue is that LLMs have been able to match or beat student output since chatGPT 3.5.

> "whatever their tech giant of choice (and their advertisers)"

By that time it's highly unlikely they'll have any choice in the matter. ComcastMicrosoftDisneyPepsiTacoBell will make all their choices for them, including being their only provider of truth and knowledge.

I agree we should create the kind of society that allows kids to focus on learning in school. I think just giving up on learning in school and turning it into pretend time where teachers pretend to teach while students pretend to learn is not a solution to any problem

No one is going to be put on the streets because they lacked AI.

Bad teachers and a bad economy are no reason to let kids outsource all their thinking to a machine when they’re still learning to think themselves.

plenty of straight-A students are in those same classes with miserable explanations or have jobs. plenty of kids who flunk out of expensive private schools and don't work. always have been since long before AI. nobody "needs" these tools. they're conveniences. it sounds more like your issue is with the timing and structure of impersonalized childhood education.

I'm wondering why is this being published in the first place. It's not an interesting or illuminating perspective, it's a pretentious student telling us nothing new.

I gave no opinions on AI, yet I do think it's very much a problem. This article presents neither good ideas to tackle it, nor an insightful perspective on the problem.

Maths is probably the safest subject. Reading compression and writing is the dangerous stuff. Its arguably the most important subject in regular school, 2nd only to socialisation skills.

I was just talking to younger coworkers about this recently. Mid-90s to early 2000s: FORTRAN, COBOL, C, and C++ classes all had handwritten code parts for homework, handouts, exams, etc. This wasn't just pseudocode, you had to have full syntax, variable declarations, correct spelling of functions, etc. You frequently had to show code optimization, debugging, etc even on paper. Wild times!!

* All of those classes also had lab time (some dedicated, similar to a chemistry class), info on how to get the IDE if you had $ access to a computer at home, and alternatives as well.

Personally, I see more value in pseudo code (written or typed) and sketch type diagrams (analog or digital) than handwriting code. However, it was WILD and amazing to watch the gray-hairs of those days debug your code on paper!

In my Uni we still had some coding test done with pen and paper (2014-2018), and AFAIK, they're still doing them. I even done a part of an exam in assembly with a provided Xilinx PicoBlaze assembly mnemonics list.

I don't know why people demonize them. If you know the syntax you're asked for, you can write in that language, and if you were asked to write in pseudo-code some algorithms, you should be able without any additional computerize help.

My SO was a TA in college, so I can echo this.

You'd get a stack of 120 blue books to grade in a week's time a few times a quarter.

The grading was entirely just checking if the student used a set of key words and had a certain length. This was a near universal method across the University for blue book exams.

Honestly, an LLM would be a better grader than most stressed out grad students.

Everyone has been phoning it in for a few centuries now

> They don't want to grade papers by hand anymore.

This is only half correct. Grading by hand isn't an issue. Reading students' handwriting is the issue. Having to read the hurried scribbling of dozens of students is a huge challenge for teachers, who were already struggling grading typed papers on a deadline.

Doesn't France still do oral exams?

Bring back smaller classroom sizes.

My best experience for book reports was by oral exam in high school with a class of about 30.

Everyone has independent work and one by one you are called to the teacher's desk. He would take your book, open it up to a "random" spot and read a couple of sentences and then ask about what is going on in that scene. Hard to bull shit.

This could be modified to be like parent:teacher conferences where appointment slots exist while everyone else is doing something else (lunch, another class, maybe scheduled after hours)

This i could see work. Either white-list specific online resources or just full on local digital library of pdfs.

Phones still pose a problem. But asking for things on a phone and typing it back to a computer would be rather inefficient cheating.

Actually the experience with calculators portends a dismal future.

Before calculators, i.e. slide rules, log tables, hand arithmetic: by the time engineers completed their university education most could approximate relevant parameters in their work to +/- 5% or the actual value. Slide rules would give you a result to 3 (rarely 4) significant decimals, but you needed to know the expected result to within half an order of magnitude.

After calculators, many graduate engineers will accept erroneous results from their calculations without noticing orders of magnitude discrepencies.

We constantly hear of spreadsheet errors making their way into critical projects.

With AI the risk is that even currently levels of critical thinking will be eroded.