A high schooler writes about AI tools in the classroom

> I recently found out that my nephew's school had no take-home homework before high school, instead having kids complete assignments during class time. At first, I was flabbergasted that they would deny kids the discipline building of managing unstructured time without direct supervision.

Good!

If they want to give kids the chance to develop the skill of managing unstructured time, that could easily be fit into the school day/week in a variety of ways.

In most K-12 schools, there is a lot of time in the day that is used incredibly ineffeciently.

For my personal experience, college was a time management joke after high school, mainly because I didn’t have to spend so much bullshit/wasted time in classes.

> Homework- at home- seemed like such a fundamental part of the schooling experience.

That’s a very privileged stance to take (I usually don’t play the “privilege card”, but it’s appropriate here).

For many/most students, the home is not particularly conducive for doing homework a variety of reasons.

Maybe not for the median HN contributor, many not for the median middle class person in the US, but these groups are not the majority of students.

I don’t think the time in school will miraculously become more efficient bc of no homework.

Your second point… so what

My straight-As appeared and disappeared within a school year each of the time my family spent renting out an acquaintance's 4,000 square foot custom-built house. My bedroom had large, built-in desks (one for each occupant and a third for the computer) and a big window that looked out over the street. Light, fresh air, (relative) privacy, space. Every other house, I was doing work at the kitchen table or on the floor. It makes a huge difference.

After we had to move on from there, you'd have thought that moving away from the distraction of a neighborhood full of classmates whose houses I could bike to on a whim (homework done or not) would be helpful, but it turns out that replacing physical afterschool hangouts with AIM chats and early social media was not exactly conducive to the physical and social well-being that supports youth academics.

Yes, having these things straight is a massive privilege. And, even during the worst times, at least I was safe. I think a lot of Americans are clueless. Or, they prefer their kids competing against peers who are at a huge disadvantage. (One guess where the rampant prevalence of imposter syndrome comes from.)

My uni performance would always drop whenever my parents would fight at home.

You aren't doing your homework when you're trying to not have a panic attack from shouting.

> For many/most students, the home is not particularly conducive for doing homework a variety of reasons.

I think this speaks to the parents and the type of home environment that they create. This is one of the major sources of disagreement between the right and the left, where the former (sometimes strongly) feel the parents bear responsibility for the type of environment their kids grow up in while the latter (equally strongly) feel that they can't really help themselves due to external factors (abuse, addiction, sickness, etc.).

> For my personal experience, college was a time management joke after high school, mainly because I didn’t have to spend so much bullshit/wasted time in classes.

Same here. Junior high and high school especially were the least-flexible, strictest environments I’ve ever been in, including in work life. People (teachers, relatives) telling me things like “this is the best part of your life” and “they have to be tough on you because the real world is so much harder still”—luckily I got a job early in high school and started to get the sense they might all be wildly wrong about that, then went to college and instead of being harder, it was like a fuckin’ vacation. So much more flexible, humane, and chill.

And yeah, 8 hours at school and 2+ hours of homework every night… in hindsight, I have to not think about it too hard or I’ll get angry. I could have learned more putting in literally 1/4 the time, and not been constantly stressed out to a degree I wouldn’t realize until later was extremely unhealthy.

Not just a huge waste of time, but caused harm it took me more than a decade to mostly get over. And I wasn’t even seriously bullied or anything! I was even somewhat popular!

Doesn't it swing both ways?

You view it as time wasted, another might view it as time socializing and self organizing -- primary school is there to teach people first and foremost how to integrate into society and be 'normal' citizens -- if we hyper-optimize it for academics something will be lost.

> external factors (abuse, addiction, sickness, etc.).

Beside factors that body's performance, also consider factors that impact well-meaning parent or caregivers' _presence_ in the home, such economic realities, e.g., parents working multiple jobs, parents with challenging schedules, single parents, lack of community support (e.g., availability of a supportive neighbors or families.)

Agreed, of course. All captured in the etc. Nothwithstanding these factors, the debate still boils down to who's responsible for the kids' well-being: Them or society.

I think the lefty one is more accurately that the children cannot help what kind of home their parents provide.

Maybe their parents have a responsibility to do better, but if the parents are not delivering on their responsibility, should the children bear the consequence?

That’s the polite way they state it. The under the line philosophy comes from some reading of pre-determinism.

People who are guided by this see the negative fate of a child as a measure of the parent’s rejection of god’s grace. That’s why you have the weird commitment to pro-life principles, but nearly complete disdain once a child leaves the womb.

People find ways to twist things to fit their self interest.

The counterargument is : If there are no consequences, what is the incentive to bear responsibility?

Ultimately this argument does not have a clear answer because it's driven by beliefs, not facts.

It’s never that simple. When society creates an environment where neglect is baked in, society bears some culpability.

I think that both of you are close but missing the real moral debate.

Assume for a moment that doing homework is a positive thing for kids. The debate is whether you should give homework if there are potentially kids whose home environment is not conducive for doing homework at home. I.e. do you choose a path that lifts the average (providing homework), but could put some kids at a disadvantage, or do you aim for the weakest, at the cost of the average?

the consequences and responsibility fall on different parties. Children inherently cannot have responsibility because they are children.

It's a wrong-headed counterargument. I'll agree that people can argue about the answer, but it is perfectly clear to me. I'd also say it's a value-system driven argument which I see as different than a belief driven argument

Beliefs separate from values.. that's a strange dichotomy. Do you harbour beliefs that conflict with your values?

I disagree with the binary (family/society) framing because the well-being of children has always depended on overlapping responsibilities between parents, communities, and society. Not only that, but that false dichotomy also ignores children's autonomy as well.

Either way, in this debate, what really matters are outcomes- whether children thrive or not.

My kids (CA high school) were incredibly stressed with a heavy workload that seemed mostly pointless and specifically, teachers who didn't care and students who didn't care as a result and used AI and cheated whenever possible. Both opted out of high school after 2 years (GED-equivalent test, to junior college for 2 years). They were and are getting basically straight A/A+s. Older one just finished 2 years of JC with 2 associates degrees and 4 certificates, and transferred to state school for 2 years to finish BA.

My experience was wildly different. I was what was generally considered a middle-of-the-road high school in a good-to-great school district in Canada (the highest-performing one next to the university was a whole different level). I rarely had much homework other than writing a few essays - which I often printed on my dot-matrix printer (yes, this was in the 80s). I studied half an hour for my highest-level senior chem final and aced it. Maybe studied 1-2 hours for calc, etc. Computer labs were some of the best times - hacking Basic on PETs.

Got to university (computer engineering, just slightly below electrical engineering) and it was brutal. Dropped 25% from high school to 1A semester. Had no study habits, "just wing it" had worked just fine to this point - if anything, it had worked too well. Of course, basically everyone in my class of 80 had the same story: graduated #1 overall in their high school (just like me). Some had way better habits / discipline. We had one student who came back to school 10 years after trying to make it as a studio musician. I once asked him point blank: so, do you do 5 hours of homework a night (because he ALWAYS knew the answer, etc) - he looked at me straightfaced and said "I try to do 6". Eventually, I managed to graduate in the top 1/3 of my class, stay on to get an MASc and have had a ~30 year career in software, so I'm reasonably happy. But I've had a hard time identifying with my kids' experience - high school was a blast for me and super easy. University was not. It's the other way around for them.

I am in my 30s and still think my school years age 12-16, was easily the worst time of my life.

One big frustrating, stressful, unfair experience.

Part of that question is whether society is responsible for the adults' well-being, so that they can then do a better job at improving their children's well-being.

There's a simpler way to re-frame your question: Prioritarianism

Or: should we help the worst off at the expense of everyone else?

Most people will answer no. Mostly because this is a race to the bottom. And in a framework like education, you risk a slippery slope of making the bar progressively lower.

Left wing politics tends to focus on egalitarianism, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. This is the current school structure. Both the bottom and the top students get lower quality education in order to provide the best education for most. It is a logistics problem.

But your framing is bad. It need not be a zero sum game. We can lift the floor without costs to the middle or top.

  > Maybe their parents have a responsibility to do better, but if the parents are not delivering on their responsibility, should the children bear the consequence?

This has always been the fundamental position for me. They're children. They don't have (legal) autonomy. They have no (legal) independence. There is no contention between the belief that parents should bear the responsibility for their children while also being in favor of programs like free school lunches.

I cannot understand how people are against such things. Sure, I don't want to pay for other people's kids, but what's the alternative? They starve? I guess we could make people sterile until they prove they have the income to support children and implement programs to constantly monitor the children's well being. But honestly a nation wide sterilization program and child monitoring service sounds wildly more expensive than these other programs. Not to mention insanely dystopian. Sounds much cheaper to just hand out free meals at school.

  > If there are no consequences, what is the incentive to bear responsibility?

Sorry, but if a starving child is not enough of an incentive, I'm not sure we're talking about people that can be incentivized.

Either they want to provide for their children but are unable to or they just don't care.

Punishing the former does nothing to help the child, likely only exacerbates that situation as, last I checked... parents who care for their children really do not like their children being taken away from them.

Punishing the latter, you can only incentivize the latter to maybe do the bare minimum, skirting whatever they can get away with. You end up in an endless cat and mouse game needing to constantly check in and monitor kids. I mean child abuse is already illegal, and we don't seem to be able to get this problem solved.

Personally, I think it is a lot cheaper to just feed kids than to fund the services needed to constantly monitor parents, all the legal fees to prosecute them, and then all the fees to put children in foster care where the situation might repeat itself. Feeding them also has the added benefit of them not starving while all those things are happening. It guarantees the child gets food.

I'm all for punishing negligent parents, I'm not sure anyone is against that. But you know what I'm also against? Starving kids. Stop making this false dichotomy. It just ends up with starving kids.

  > Do you harbour beliefs that conflict with your values?

I'm not sure how long you've been human for, but this is in fact a common thing. Common for all living creatures really. Unfortunately we cannot always uphold the full idealized versions of our beliefs due to constraints of the world we live in. But on the other hand, if your beliefs weren't beyond our capabilities then we'd never improve.

(I'll assume it is "not very long")

It's hard to be fair to kids who put in the effort and kids who were not taught to put in the effort or do not want to or do not have to or do not have the opportunity to, at the same time.

I can tell from the ad hominem that you have confused pop philosophy for the real thing. A book on ethics might be a good start. I suggest Blackburn. We'll just leave it at that.

I'll try once more. There are children starving globally every day. How many of them are you saving personally? If not all, why not? How many should we save collectively? And which "we" should be responsible for which children (neighbourhood, town, city, country, region)? If so, why? These are not trite questions. Think carefully before answering.

Don't move the problem. We weren't discussing world hunger.

Your objection to the first question is already captured in the ones that follow. Try to put some more thought into it, yeah?

Okay, I'll tone down the snark (it's only there because you got my back up). Ultimately as you think about these questions, you will realize that the answers are not absolute, but based on degrees. You might think "hmm, I can't solve world hunger, but maybe I can help all the kids in my neighbourhood/city/state." Essentially what you will settle on a quantity and duration that seems reasonable to you. The thing with reasonable is that if you scratch the surface, it's little more than a line in the sand. Your own personal line based on your personal beliefs and values. Turns out everyone else has a personal line too, just in a slightly different spot, based on their different beliefs and values. That's why there's no one right answer. In civil society, everyone compares their lines and through debate, settle on one. Since it's a compromise, no one is actually happy with the outcome, but it's the best outcome we can arrive at given the problem.

Your current position is one of intolerance: It seems impossible for you to understand why the line could be in any spot other than the one you picked. If that's the starting point, then you can never come to an agreement.

Idk man, I didn't say anything that radical. We live in a world where the most conservative people tend to worship people that say feed the poor. That seems pretty hypocritical to me. All humans are to some degree, but there's a difference between internal and external based concessions

I truly believe you do not know how you instigated the aggression. So allow me to clarify: people do not like to be treated like children. Even children don't like being treated like children, so regardless of if you believe we all are, you're going to get nowhere with that attitude. I also want to clarify that you aren't being arrogant, you're being pretentious.

Also, you seem to have forgotten we're having a very different conversation in another thread. Here you're acknowledging that people have desires beyond their capabilities. There you accused me of only comprehending pop philosophy for stating such inconsistency. Maybe it is you who were so focused on winning arguments that you lost what the arguments were even about.

Yes, I want to solve world hunger. I have no problem understanding that feeding children in US schools does not solve world hunger. But I also have no problem understanding the existence of time, as problems can't be solved uniformly nor instantaneously. There's no magic in the real world. Nor do I have a problem with understanding that this isn't a binary situation. Ensuring kids in the US get fed results in more kids getting fed despite there still being kids globally not being fed.

Idk man, there's no inconsistency here. Just because I'd like a billion dollars doesn't mean I won't be happy to get a million. Sure, long way to go, but it's a lot closer than I was.

It's only a line in the sand if you stop. Otherwise we call that "progress" ¯\_(ツ)_/¯