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

Now, I'm thinking that was pretty much they only way they could think of to ensure kids were doing things themselves.

I know it was a rough transition for my nephew, though, and I don't know that I would have handled it very well either. I'm not sure what would be a better option, though, given how much of a disservice such easy access to a mental crutch is.

> Now, I'm thinking that was pretty much they only way they could think of to ensure kids were doing things themselves.

IMO getting too worried about this sort of homework “cheating” feels like the wrong way of looking at it. Although, there are lots of processes that accept and reinforce this wrong viewpoint.

For k-12, getting the parent and the student to sit down outside of school and “cheat” by having the parent teach the kid is… victory! You’ve reinforced the idea that learning can happen outside schools.

For college, having students get together and “cheat” by doing their homework together is… victory! You’ve gotten the students to network with their peers. That’s… like, the main value proposition of a university, to some.

The problem is when undue grade weight is put on these processes. It is a hard balance to strike, because you need to offer enough grade to incentivize the stuff, but not enough that it feels unfair to those who go individually.

As far as LLMs go, it offers an alternative to learning to collaborate with other humans. That’s bad, but the fix should be to figure out how to get the students to get back to collaborating with humans.

> For k-12, getting the parent and the student to sit down outside of school and “cheat” by having the parent teach the kid is… victory! You’ve reinforced the idea that learning can happen outside schools.

I don't think they were trying to prevent parents from working with children; I think they were trying to prevent parents doing the homework for children, or the kids farming it out to someone else online, or getting someone else to do it for them, period.

Same with college; it wasn't exactly networking when someone I knew paid someone to do their homework for them.