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A high schooler writes about AI tools in the classroom

(www.theatlantic.com)
222 points dougb5 | 15 comments | 04 Sep 25 02:37 UTC | HN request time: 1.722s | source | bottom
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zdragnar ◴[04 Sep 25 03:02 UTC] No.45123041[source]▶
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.

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csa ◴[04 Sep 25 18:44 UTC] No.45130765[source]▶
> 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.

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glitchc ◴[04 Sep 25 19:51 UTC] No.45131521[source]▶
> 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.).

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1. monknomo ◴[04 Sep 25 20:50 UTC] No.45132049[source]▶
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?

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2. glitchc ◴[04 Sep 25 21:02 UTC] No.45132153[source]▶
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.

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3. gpt5 ◴[04 Sep 25 21:06 UTC] No.45132182[source]▶
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?

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4. monknomo ◴[04 Sep 25 21:21 UTC] No.45132347[source]▶
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

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5. glitchc ◴[04 Sep 25 21:46 UTC] No.45132583{3}[source]▶
Beliefs separate from values.. that's a strange dichotomy. Do you harbour beliefs that conflict with your values?
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6. godelski ◴[05 Sep 25 05:58 UTC] No.45135407[source]▶
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.

7. godelski ◴[05 Sep 25 06:08 UTC] No.45135438[source]▶

  > 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.

8. godelski ◴[05 Sep 25 06:19 UTC] No.45135500[source]▶

  > 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.

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9. godelski ◴[05 Sep 25 06:24 UTC] No.45135521{4}[source]▶

  > 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")

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10. glitchc ◴[05 Sep 25 10:38 UTC] No.45137088{5}[source]▶
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.
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11. glitchc ◴[05 Sep 25 12:32 UTC] No.45137762{3}[source]▶
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.
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12. godelski ◴[05 Sep 25 17:51 UTC] No.45141458{4}[source]▶
Don't move the problem. We weren't discussing world hunger.
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13. glitchc ◴[05 Sep 25 18:07 UTC] No.45141649{5}[source]▶
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.

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14. godelski ◴[05 Sep 25 19:57 UTC] No.45142934{6}[source]▶
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
15. godelski ◴[05 Sep 25 21:17 UTC] No.45143723{6}[source]▶
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)_/¯