Courtney Milan: We have access to an extraordinary amount of materials that will explain the same concepts in twenty different ways. What most people often need is to listen to the person in question to figure out what you’re missing.

So a thing about AI is that, not understanding the material itself, it cannot understand what the gap is in someone else’s understanding. Students already have access to materials that will repeat important points over and over. They don’t need more.

Also known as “training your replacement.” 😩

Morehouse to be the first university to use virtual AI teaching assistantswww.axios.com The Atlanta HBCU will have AI teaching assistants this fall.

They particularly don’t need a thing that will repeat important points incorrectly.

As a chem TA, one of the most valuable things I ever did with struggling students in office hours was have them narrate for me how they would solve a problem, and then figure out what it was they weren’t getting. That’s how you get the lightbulb moments.

We have access to an extraordinary amount of materials that will explain the same concepts in twenty different ways. What most people often need is to listen to the person in question to figure out what you’re missing.

This will also makes graduate school much, much less accessible—because teaching helps students finance their education—and less effective, because teaching the basics patiently, over and over again, and figuring out the pitfalls, really helps cement your own understanding.

But the idea behind this—that the robot can convey information—fundamentally misunderstands what is being taught in those core classes. You’re teaching people how to do problems: how to check your work, how to solve problem sets, how to generalize solving problem sets to other problems…

Most people will forget 80% of the information they learn in these classes. The real learning is teaching people how to tackle problems.

For a lot of students, it’s also about identifying gaps in their high school learning and (hopefully) helping them close the gap before classes get harder. Chemistry is a lot harder if your high school algebra teacher was the football coach.

He was pre-calculus, actually.

So many college-level topics become much, much harder if your high school or middle school algebra and trig classes weren't up-to-snuff. (I know, not your point, but it's what I remember from my time as a TA: people would manage to fail high-school algebra in first- or second-term calculus)

Or this: www.dallasnews.com/news/educati...

Texas kids lose up to 4 months of learning with new uncertified teachers, study findswww.dallasnews.com Students with new uncertified teachers lost the equivalent of about four months of learning in reading and three months in math, the Texas Tech study found.

I can attest to this with a silly anecdote. When I was a freshman I had a history teacher who was young & enthusiastic, who gave students fun projects that allowed creative application of the content. When I was a senior I had the same teacher after he became the assistant football coach...

Wherein his classes became mostly watching boring ass videos and filling in worksheets to prove we were paying attention, while the teacher sat at his desk watching replays and writing up football plays, etc. I didn't even need another history credit. I took the class expecting the fun guy.

Agreed! I also think the attention from a human instructor plants or firms up a self-concept as a problem-solver & thinker, which is a giant part of what education really offers. (And I wish I’d been in your class — what a gift you gave those students 💚)

And memory is contextual! You don't get to choose what you remember, so information seems like it's missing until a moment arises when you need it. So much of what people know was taught to them by an elementary school teacher but they think they just know it through life experience.

Do people really think one day they just kind of figured out the water cycle and how tectonic plates create earthquakes? I would say I know very little algebra, but my kid brings home an algebra assignment and suddenly everything comes back to me. I know algebra, I just need context to remember.

I really really wish more emphasis was put on *why* there's so much repetition. Like, maybe everyone else got it. Or just didn't care. But it never really clicked that repetition was so eventually you don't have to stop and think at every step. Mostly because there's no sense of progress.

It's probably a good thing that most kids have experience with video games that do the "this is how repetition makes you better" really explicitly. Because it would have been nice for that lightbulb moment to have happened a lot earlier.

One of the best professors I ever had was laser focused on teaching us *how* to learn. Passing quizzes was just a side-quest.

It's almost like most of the industries/services that are rolling out AI have suffered from decades of not being led/managed by someone who is a subject matter expert in the related fields, but instead someone who passed an MBA course.

Likely they didn't even pass an MBA class, or they would realize they're not building a sustainable business.

I'm not sure many MBA programs focus on "the long game" (or Infinite Game to use the title of a recent business book). True story, when I rebooted my career the choice was Rad Tech or MBA. MBA was the easy choice. Talking with many senior executives, I choose Rad Tech.

But then, I didn't attend any MBA program and so can only infer from the numerous graduates I've encountered. I should note, the majority of senior execs I talked with said that the MBA was pointless at my career stage. If i were still 20, sure. But >30 it's worthless.

Got mine in 1999 and admittedly I went into it with a "maximize society's utility" mindset but the professors I had really did think ethics > profit. So the execs we're talking about would have dropped out or flunked my MBA program.

MBAs don't seem to be learning that anyway

I have heard it said that the main thing college teaches you is how to learn.

Yep, so much of the point of these classes is teaching you how to make observations, ask questions, do research, write clearly, etc. The facts you learn may be forgotten (or proved wrong!) after the class, but the SKILLS hopefully stay with you!

I remember when a Lexis AI contractor breathlessly informed us about how AI could replace research assistants! Neat, right? NO. First of all, students find actual stuff. Second, being an RA is a valuable career development skill for them and helps them earn $$. Just. These fuckin' people.

AI is going to kill entry level jobs

Not for long it won’t.

I sincerely would like to hope that

I mean if they hand all the entry-level jobs to an AI it’s an attempt to kill the whole profession or the organization whatever budget they commit to this is _gone_ and everything that cohort of TAs would do is gone too

The only person it benefits is the owner of capital.

It doesn’t actually do that.

You’re probably right. All monopoly rent goes to the AI provider, devaluing professional skills of the individual. Anything other than that is a transitional teaching exercise for the machine?

First the jobs, then the jobseekers

From this thread, it seems like the main effect will be to derail academic careers. No $$$ from TA jobs, no valuable experience from helping other people understand concepts. It’s salting the ground instead of nurturing the next crop of PhDs

Also fewer people majoring in a discipline because they don't get the help they need at the start.

Graduate student unions can help push back on this but very unfortunate (and, I suspect, not a coincidence) that it's being rolled out at a HBCU.

But at this point, most newer PhDs are wilting on the vine (to continue your metaphor) because there are so few jobs, and every university is cutting tenure-track lines. In every discipline. It's truly been horrifying to watch.

Yeah, this strikes me as likely in part a RESPONSE to decreased availability of cheap grad labor. My institution has been struggling to fill TA positions in many depts for years now; while we are still turning out vastly more PhDs than the market can support, there ARE many fewer grads overall.

I mean obviously the admins would be happiest if the institution had no faculty at all, so it’s not a hard sell to them. But I can also imagine a fair number of faculty who are already well-practiced at ignoring the writing on the wall going for this bc they don’t want to do that labor themselves.

Not to mention how bad it is for grad students who NEED teaching experience to get jobs and need the training!If you want to be anything other than full research they want you to have TAd and then planned and taught whole classes. This will mean new teaching profs come in with less experience.

(Which is not to say I love the system as it is: wherein you get teaching experience by being thrown to the wolves and not actually learning pedagogy. But denying even that bit of training?)

True. My daughter is paying for her second year of grad school by being a GTA. The bank of mom and dad is down to paying for her car insurance and phone.

THIS! I handily passed all my English classes in my own schooling, but I understand the what and why SO much better now that I teach it!

And the "what's missing" is so different from student to student! I've been teaching college math for 20+ years, and there are definitely "here are my 5 best guesses of what you're struggling with here"... and students *still* surprise me on the regular.

Or when the problem isn't actually math - I spent 20 minutes talking through all the trig with a student who was struggling with a word problem. They had all of that *down*. It eventually turned out that they didn't know what a ferris wheel was, and clearing that up meant they could do the problem.

In programming, it's fairly well known that debugging is harder than writing new code. What's often missed is that debugging *people* is also much harder than debugging code, and that's a large part of what good teaching is. Figuring out exactly where the mental block is can be tough.

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