THANKS VERY COOL GOOGLE I’LL JUST LET THE PLAGIARISM MACHINE THAT TELLS PEOPLE TO EAT GLUE AND BURNS DOWN THE RAINFOREST TO DESIGN MY CURRICULUM
ACTUALLY WE PROBABLY DON’T EVEN NEED TEACHERS WHEN WE CAN JUST SIT STUDENTS DOWN IN FRONT OF A CHROMEBOOK AND FEED THEM AI SLOP ALL DAY AND THEN THEY CAN USE AI TO ANSWER THE QUESTIONS
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
As a teacher, the only things I’ve found AI to be useful are:
“Give me ten ideas for X”. Example: “give me twenty fun ideas for finishing a lesson on volcanos for 13 year olds”. Maybe one of those ideas is good and I can adapt it.
“Write an explanation of X and be sure to include the key terms A, B, C, D, etc. Make sure the text is fitting for 14 year olds.” Then I’ll fix up the explanation because it’s still not exactly what I want. I’ll delete the key terms and make it into a cloze worksheet.
My school district back in CA was so standardized that I didn’t have much room to write my own material because there was almost always another fucking standardized test coming up, often with motivational banners and other nonsense to try to stir engagement and interest from burned out students already tired of the fucking things.
Oh, terrifying thought: what happens when the standardized test corporations start using treat printers to produce the standardized tests and their prep materials?
Boy do I have some news for you: https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/ai-may-be-coming-for-standardized-testing/2024/03
“This could be a step towards figuring out how AI can help educators achieve a long-elusive goal: Creating a new breed of assessments that actually helps inform teaching and learning in real time, he said.”
Complete word salad. What, in this person’s mind, does teaching look like when it’s not “in real time?” Does he mean having up-to-date information? Because almost everything you learn in K-12 is so foundational it hasn’t changed in decades (if not centuries). High school sophomores are not learning about arguments between mathematicians over Newtonian physics and changes to calculus as a result. They’re still trying to figure out fucking algebra and geometry.
The information I learned in school that was out of date was mostly in history and economics, which has more to do with state ideology. We were learning what is now considered Holocaust denial as fact. I had to unlearn it as an adult paying attention to what various organizations and experts are saying is current. Adding “”““AI””“” isn’t going to fix problems problems like this. It could even (and by “could,” I mean “100 billion percent will”) make things worse.
It seems like what they want is to have AI-generated “tasks” that students have to complete to gauge their level of knowledge so that the AI can then generate tests that are more specifically tailored to what that student’s trouble spots are. I already hate this, and this is the promise they’re leading with, meaning it’s the most benign possible application that is the face of the actual terrible ways they will algorithmically decide students’ academic potential.
Should make sure the lathe is away from me when I say this, but: I think it means daily or weekly quizes, potentially given to random students that will probably somehow get tied to school funding. Maybe teacher compensation.
Just trying to think of what’s the most evil thing a management consultant would think of.
“No Child Left Behind” from
was bad enough but then 
made it worse with “Race to the Top.” It’s getting worse from here; I’m not regretting early retirement.
Framing education as a competition with winners and losers is derply fucked. That’s not how you learn stuff.
Have you ever considered running education like a business? Obviously market solutions are what we need, and that means competition!
After my years as an educator experiencing increasingly worse learning environments, I have concluded that learning isn’t even a priority for the ghouls that command these so-called reforms. It’s about obedience training.
Testing random students daily would be a lower workload than what was expected the previous school I worked at where I had to test all students daily.
I put in random because testing all students daily is obviously a dumb waste of time, so of course that’s a thing.
I would assume that the big “real-time teaching” thing is meant to imply something like “latest trends/research in teaching”, which does sound nice and efficient, but we all know it’s a lie.
“latest trends/research in teaching” often simply means whatever buzzwords and fads the higher-ups in the school system are fawning over at the moment. This semester its one thing, next semester its something else. It’s most direct material consequence is how it acts as a justification for bothering teachers and undermining their professional judgement by imposing inflexible and unwieldy methods and curricula on them.
oh yeah absolutely, what I meant is that it is meant to sound like some scientific new way of doing education
I was looking into becoming a high school math teacher and the curriculum here for math is so overspecified that I can’t imagine ever having to plan a lesson.
If it is anything like my old state, NY, you can ignore a lot of the standards. Over specificity means extremely low number of test questions on that standard and low variety in the test questions when they show up.
Yeah as a former teacher I can imagine ai at actually being useful for putting together some slop for admins to use since they made us produce class scripts every day to submit to school admin that never actually read it, adding like an additional 8 hours of work every week on top of the 80 hours I was already working. Maybe use AI for that and then teach what you wanted to teach.
This would have been so much more useful than the solution my boss and coteacher gave when i said I didnt know how to come up with ideas for activities at the old after school program which was “just go on pinterest” which was WAAAAAAY to broad of an answer lmao. OK go on pinterest and start… where?