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glitchc • today at 3:25 PM • 3 replies • view on HN

A calculator, Youtube and iPad tried to replace teachers. They all failed but this time it's different.


Replies

hinkley • today at 10:23 PM

One thing that I've noticed as I've gotten older is that the introduction of calculus has slowly moved to younger and younger students. I suspect the tools are partly responsible for this. Less time on basic math and algebra.

When I first started calculus, I was furious at being taught Newtonian Physics and some bits of chemistry without calculus. It's a stupid bunch of equations you have to learn, which Newton worked out from calculus. I'm glad people are getting it more often together now, but also just a bit jealous at the same time.

piltdownman • today at 3:50 PM

A calculator is a tool that replaced the slide-rule or Abacus - no one contended the Abacus replaced teaching or teachers. Ditto an iPad which is effectively just a fancy calculator in this context.

Similarly Youtube didn't replace teachers - it afforded remote learning and correspondence courses a new medium for transmission, recording, and playback of teaching.

More to the point none of those were trained on a corpus containing the history of human pedagogy, were capable of inference, or of generating dynamic learning resources based on best-practice models with inherent self-correction and pedagogical reinforcement mechanisms.

analog31 • today at 3:52 PM

This time around, AI being able to do student homework means that AI is replacing students not teachers.

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