Courtney Milan: 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.

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 💚)

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