wow, I love this! I've had the pleasure of having had some really good teachers in the last year and it makes such a big difference! that's when you can start coming up with your own exercises specific to your needs because you have understood the principle of how learning the skill in question might work...
Yes, exactly! Reality becomes your teacher. You can trust your own interest to draw you into what's good for you to learn. A good teacher will help this happen more for you. I'm glad you've gotten some really good ones recently!
I recently wrote a very similar mini-rant response to someone complaining about high-schoolers cheating at essays using Chat GPT.
> 1) Learning to WRITE well is a primary way people learn to THINK well.
That's true, but I don't think it supports your point. What makes you think the... THING most English classes teach has anything to do with writing WELL? Writing is for communication. That means good writing is a form of self-expression. You can't even practice that unless you have something *you* actually want to say. This means asking the student to fill some pages to prove they read whichever random book you assigned them this week mostly fails to work out that muscle. Actually it's a bit worse than merely wasting their time if they're effectively being trained to bullshit.
I think I'm missing your point. Forgive me if I'm not speaking to it. But to maybe clarify: I don't mean to claim that writing well teaches good thinking (though like you I suspect that's true). My point is more that there's presumably SOME REASON English teachers want students to learn to write well. So if they want students to WANT to learn to write well, they need to sell the students on the REAL REASONS for learning to write well, whatever those might be. Instead of using coercion to try to force learning.
And yeah, I think the result of not building the material on students' desires is much worse than just wasting students' time. It's hard not to train a mind to practice BSing when it's given coercion-based incentives.
Ah, right, the pronouns are confusing. The ">" was someone *else*'s words and the stuff below it was my response to that person, not you. I thought the first line would convey that context, but I guess it didn't.
I agree that AI can have potentially negative effects on how students learn, but all I ever see is people stating this without elaborating, or making any suggestions for a workaround. It really is refreshing to see such a well put together essay on what's going on, why, and what we can do to make a change. This made me realise that the teachers I've always liked are the ones who guided me into a healthy relationship with the subject itself, without the use of blind devotion to coerce me into following exactly what they do. And their influence still sticks with me to this day. Thanks for sharing, I found this super interesting :)
I think bad teaching can be (and often is) worse than no teaching. Much like an abusive relationship is usually worse than being single even if you're lonely.
People are very good at learning if they both (a) care and (b) have an opportunity to learn. For the most part we could improve teaching by offering access to things and getting out of the way.
It'd also help if we stopped insisting that we know better what others need to learn than they do. Even when we're right, I'm pretty sure that overall social & mental health is much better served by earning learners' trust that we know what they should learn. Instead of using coercion to force them to learn against their will.
Basically none of that requires having an abundance of good teachers. It just requires that we develop some sincere respect for students. Let them live their lives.
For instance, I really do believe that the world would be much better off if everyone were much more skilled in math. I have quite a few reasons to think this. But I also would rather math education were completely dropped than that educational coercion continue. I'd rather we didn't teach math than that we keep inflicting math trauma on children.
Well, I’m now invested in knowing the answer to why you teach math!
I feel like, the biggest problem is students not fully knowing what their ‘why’ is. Especially, with social media occupying most of their headspace. I quit social media (except substack :)) for some time and that was the first time i started to elaborate my ‘why’ in everything i do. Liberating, but frustrating at times. Thank you!!!
I just finished a piece partly answering why I teach math! Coming out tomorrow.
I get the impression that people are quite good at knowing their "why" if we don't block their interests with irrelevant social problems. And yeah, I can imagine social media inducing a lot of irrelevant social problems!
“It maybe made sense mid 20th century when conformity helped a functional culture support nearly everyone.”
It’s never acceptable to allow a so-called authority figure to impose something on you. The excuse that’s usually used is that it’s beneficial or something but that’s not always true. We are all individuals with our own will that should be respected. Coercion isn’t worth it anyway and as you can see it breaks down over time.
Moreover, people should not rely on society or culture or government to support them. In this world, the strong survive and the weak die. But today the weak are supported by welfare and therapists. Lions usually target vulnerable, weak, sick, young, or old prey. The strong don’t have to worry.
I agree with a lot of this in principle, however, as someone who taught at the university level (religious studies and philosophy), I’m not sure the system is set up to “coerce” anyone to learn, precisely. The deeper problem is standardization, which is a result of having the university function as a business rather than an institution of learning. In fact, most profs I knew and especially the younger generation instructors, were deeply engaged in pedagogy. Most of us tried to structure material that would engage the students, and make them consider the subject matter deeply. That said, I never had the power to make courses pass/fail in the interest of cutting needless marking (I don’t think even full profs can do that without the department and the dean approving), and in a room full of 60-70 students who aren’t all speaking up and participating, writing is one of the few remaining options to test whether they’re in fact reading, thinking, and digesting the material. I suppose we could do away with testing altogether! But that would require a very different university indeed, and, I suspect, not all students want that. Some want to be recognized for their achievements… plus, the data on the success of no testing/ no grading teaching styles is pretty mixed.
A second factor that the cultural pressure for having a diploma of some sort in order to get a better paying job made a lot of university disciplines—particularly in the humanities—into an expensive daycare for young adults. I’ve had a lot fo students who were neither majoring nor particularly interested in a specific course but who take it anyway, because they thought it’d be easy or it fit into their schedule or because it sounded cool (“Karma and Dharma”, “South Asian Goddess Traditions”, and “Art and Religion” tend to draw a good crowd). Some of these I taught, others I was a TA for, but I’ve spent over a decade watching cohorts of undergrads pass through, so I think I have a reasonable sample size to reflect on. And, often, the challenge in teaching such courses is twofold: make it interesting/ engaging/ useful for the majority of non specialists in the room, while also giving enough “meat” to the few religion or area studies students who are there presumably bc they genuinely want to learn about the field as a whole. That’s a pretty tough balance to strike tbh, because you find yourself needing to navigate very different levels of familiarity with the subject matter in the limited time allotted.
Finally, students—at least at university level—might cheat for any variety of reasons, including being fatigued and working two jobs and needing a good grade to keep their GPA up for a scholarship, etc. But even before the advent of GenAI I saw a dramatic reduction in writing and oral communication skills, over my own time as a grad student, in the incoming cohorts of undergrads. That means they’re missing valuable foundational learning from high school. And that, frankly, is much more of a problem than college kids submitting slop essays. Because writing really is one of those ways in which we hone thinking, voice, habits of mind and reflection, etc. It’s also a great way to learn about something! One of the reasons to assign an essay or a report is to allow the student to explore a certain topic in depth—to give them a chance to read the sources, mull things over, construct an argument, try their hand at presenting that argument in a coherent way, etc. All of that requires deeper familiarity with a subject matter than rattling off some data points for a test. But if they can’t focus long enough to read or write, if they don’t see the value of that work, that’s certainly a problem! Not just for the students, but on a societal scale. And I believe it’s something to address far earlier than the university level.
I don’t know much about what is currently happening at high school or grade school level, but I’m worried there’s too much ideological warfare being fought over kids heads and too little attention paid to actual fundamentals of learning well, learning to figure things out, being ok with boredom, getting creative, taking their time. At least, that’s how it seems to me.
I think I mostly just agree with you! I'm also under the impression that in some places we're describing the same thing from different angles. E.g., you say that you think one problem is standardization rather than coercion, whereas I'd say that standardization is one way we incentivize coercion. You even hint at it in your own example: some instructors want to MAKE the students consider the subject matter deeply. Why is that necessary? Why wouldn't students just want to do that if it's actually good for them? My guess is that we're institutionally very used to revealing the value to students because we force them to meet the material in some deep way and then they discover why it's so precious. That makes for a quick way around having to do basically good marketing for the material. My main point is something like, we can't standardize and then require anymore. It just doesn't work. And I think that's a good thing. It'll force the system to change in a direction I think is ultimately more considerate and smooth.
I completely agree with you about the diploma thing. I used to teach various kinds of math in university. I think I saw less of a variety than you did with humanities, but a lot of what you're talking about is very familiar. I saw some interesting crowds around topics like the math of persuasion and propaganda, basically because they found the title interesting and it sounded like an easier way to knock off some required math credits for their degree.
And yes, I think there are earlier steps of education that are falling short too. I think the whole educational model is failing. It was built for a very different world. That's kind of my point: I think we can get to much more healthy and robust forms of education if we put in the effort to entice rather than trying to preserve a dying model.
wow, I love this! I've had the pleasure of having had some really good teachers in the last year and it makes such a big difference! that's when you can start coming up with your own exercises specific to your needs because you have understood the principle of how learning the skill in question might work...
Yes, exactly! Reality becomes your teacher. You can trust your own interest to draw you into what's good for you to learn. A good teacher will help this happen more for you. I'm glad you've gotten some really good ones recently!
I recently wrote a very similar mini-rant response to someone complaining about high-schoolers cheating at essays using Chat GPT.
> 1) Learning to WRITE well is a primary way people learn to THINK well.
That's true, but I don't think it supports your point. What makes you think the... THING most English classes teach has anything to do with writing WELL? Writing is for communication. That means good writing is a form of self-expression. You can't even practice that unless you have something *you* actually want to say. This means asking the student to fill some pages to prove they read whichever random book you assigned them this week mostly fails to work out that muscle. Actually it's a bit worse than merely wasting their time if they're effectively being trained to bullshit.
I think I'm missing your point. Forgive me if I'm not speaking to it. But to maybe clarify: I don't mean to claim that writing well teaches good thinking (though like you I suspect that's true). My point is more that there's presumably SOME REASON English teachers want students to learn to write well. So if they want students to WANT to learn to write well, they need to sell the students on the REAL REASONS for learning to write well, whatever those might be. Instead of using coercion to try to force learning.
And yeah, I think the result of not building the material on students' desires is much worse than just wasting students' time. It's hard not to train a mind to practice BSing when it's given coercion-based incentives.
Ah, right, the pronouns are confusing. The ">" was someone *else*'s words and the stuff below it was my response to that person, not you. I thought the first line would convey that context, but I guess it didn't.
Ah! I see, you were kind of copying your reply to THE OTHER PERSON whom you were quoting! Sorry I missed that, and thanks for clarifying!
I agree that AI can have potentially negative effects on how students learn, but all I ever see is people stating this without elaborating, or making any suggestions for a workaround. It really is refreshing to see such a well put together essay on what's going on, why, and what we can do to make a change. This made me realise that the teachers I've always liked are the ones who guided me into a healthy relationship with the subject itself, without the use of blind devotion to coerce me into following exactly what they do. And their influence still sticks with me to this day. Thanks for sharing, I found this super interesting :)
Thanks for sharing your experience! I'm glad this resonated with you.
I think this is a beautiful ideal but might ask too much of many teachers. do many of us not agree how hard it is to find "a good teacher"?
Then if so, what happens in the absence of a good teacher? What should the mediocre case look like?
I don't think anyone contests that a great human expert is still better than an LLM. Unfortunately that's what's in short supply.
I think bad teaching can be (and often is) worse than no teaching. Much like an abusive relationship is usually worse than being single even if you're lonely.
People are very good at learning if they both (a) care and (b) have an opportunity to learn. For the most part we could improve teaching by offering access to things and getting out of the way.
It'd also help if we stopped insisting that we know better what others need to learn than they do. Even when we're right, I'm pretty sure that overall social & mental health is much better served by earning learners' trust that we know what they should learn. Instead of using coercion to force them to learn against their will.
Basically none of that requires having an abundance of good teachers. It just requires that we develop some sincere respect for students. Let them live their lives.
For instance, I really do believe that the world would be much better off if everyone were much more skilled in math. I have quite a few reasons to think this. But I also would rather math education were completely dropped than that educational coercion continue. I'd rather we didn't teach math than that we keep inflicting math trauma on children.
At least, that's my take so far.
Well, I’m now invested in knowing the answer to why you teach math!
I feel like, the biggest problem is students not fully knowing what their ‘why’ is. Especially, with social media occupying most of their headspace. I quit social media (except substack :)) for some time and that was the first time i started to elaborate my ‘why’ in everything i do. Liberating, but frustrating at times. Thank you!!!
I just finished a piece partly answering why I teach math! Coming out tomorrow.
I get the impression that people are quite good at knowing their "why" if we don't block their interests with irrelevant social problems. And yeah, I can imagine social media inducing a lot of irrelevant social problems!
You mention it's frustrating at times…? How so?
AIs too! "The models—they just want to learn." — Dario, quoting Ilya:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/CM_DP7pkJQk
“It maybe made sense mid 20th century when conformity helped a functional culture support nearly everyone.”
It’s never acceptable to allow a so-called authority figure to impose something on you. The excuse that’s usually used is that it’s beneficial or something but that’s not always true. We are all individuals with our own will that should be respected. Coercion isn’t worth it anyway and as you can see it breaks down over time.
Moreover, people should not rely on society or culture or government to support them. In this world, the strong survive and the weak die. But today the weak are supported by welfare and therapists. Lions usually target vulnerable, weak, sick, young, or old prey. The strong don’t have to worry.
I agree with a lot of this in principle, however, as someone who taught at the university level (religious studies and philosophy), I’m not sure the system is set up to “coerce” anyone to learn, precisely. The deeper problem is standardization, which is a result of having the university function as a business rather than an institution of learning. In fact, most profs I knew and especially the younger generation instructors, were deeply engaged in pedagogy. Most of us tried to structure material that would engage the students, and make them consider the subject matter deeply. That said, I never had the power to make courses pass/fail in the interest of cutting needless marking (I don’t think even full profs can do that without the department and the dean approving), and in a room full of 60-70 students who aren’t all speaking up and participating, writing is one of the few remaining options to test whether they’re in fact reading, thinking, and digesting the material. I suppose we could do away with testing altogether! But that would require a very different university indeed, and, I suspect, not all students want that. Some want to be recognized for their achievements… plus, the data on the success of no testing/ no grading teaching styles is pretty mixed.
A second factor that the cultural pressure for having a diploma of some sort in order to get a better paying job made a lot of university disciplines—particularly in the humanities—into an expensive daycare for young adults. I’ve had a lot fo students who were neither majoring nor particularly interested in a specific course but who take it anyway, because they thought it’d be easy or it fit into their schedule or because it sounded cool (“Karma and Dharma”, “South Asian Goddess Traditions”, and “Art and Religion” tend to draw a good crowd). Some of these I taught, others I was a TA for, but I’ve spent over a decade watching cohorts of undergrads pass through, so I think I have a reasonable sample size to reflect on. And, often, the challenge in teaching such courses is twofold: make it interesting/ engaging/ useful for the majority of non specialists in the room, while also giving enough “meat” to the few religion or area studies students who are there presumably bc they genuinely want to learn about the field as a whole. That’s a pretty tough balance to strike tbh, because you find yourself needing to navigate very different levels of familiarity with the subject matter in the limited time allotted.
Finally, students—at least at university level—might cheat for any variety of reasons, including being fatigued and working two jobs and needing a good grade to keep their GPA up for a scholarship, etc. But even before the advent of GenAI I saw a dramatic reduction in writing and oral communication skills, over my own time as a grad student, in the incoming cohorts of undergrads. That means they’re missing valuable foundational learning from high school. And that, frankly, is much more of a problem than college kids submitting slop essays. Because writing really is one of those ways in which we hone thinking, voice, habits of mind and reflection, etc. It’s also a great way to learn about something! One of the reasons to assign an essay or a report is to allow the student to explore a certain topic in depth—to give them a chance to read the sources, mull things over, construct an argument, try their hand at presenting that argument in a coherent way, etc. All of that requires deeper familiarity with a subject matter than rattling off some data points for a test. But if they can’t focus long enough to read or write, if they don’t see the value of that work, that’s certainly a problem! Not just for the students, but on a societal scale. And I believe it’s something to address far earlier than the university level.
I don’t know much about what is currently happening at high school or grade school level, but I’m worried there’s too much ideological warfare being fought over kids heads and too little attention paid to actual fundamentals of learning well, learning to figure things out, being ok with boredom, getting creative, taking their time. At least, that’s how it seems to me.
I think I mostly just agree with you! I'm also under the impression that in some places we're describing the same thing from different angles. E.g., you say that you think one problem is standardization rather than coercion, whereas I'd say that standardization is one way we incentivize coercion. You even hint at it in your own example: some instructors want to MAKE the students consider the subject matter deeply. Why is that necessary? Why wouldn't students just want to do that if it's actually good for them? My guess is that we're institutionally very used to revealing the value to students because we force them to meet the material in some deep way and then they discover why it's so precious. That makes for a quick way around having to do basically good marketing for the material. My main point is something like, we can't standardize and then require anymore. It just doesn't work. And I think that's a good thing. It'll force the system to change in a direction I think is ultimately more considerate and smooth.
I completely agree with you about the diploma thing. I used to teach various kinds of math in university. I think I saw less of a variety than you did with humanities, but a lot of what you're talking about is very familiar. I saw some interesting crowds around topics like the math of persuasion and propaganda, basically because they found the title interesting and it sounded like an easier way to knock off some required math credits for their degree.
And yes, I think there are earlier steps of education that are falling short too. I think the whole educational model is failing. It was built for a very different world. That's kind of my point: I think we can get to much more healthy and robust forms of education if we put in the effort to entice rather than trying to preserve a dying model.
Thanks for offering your thoughts!