Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI

I'm a former physics teacher, and while I'm impressed by the technology, I think this is a low efficacy innovation.

The real challenge in teaching Newton's laws of motion to teenagers is that they struggle to deal with the idea that friction isn't always there. When students enter the classroom, they arrive with an understanding of motion that they've intuited from watching things move all their lives, and that understanding is the theory of impetus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_impetus

An AI system that can interrogate individual students' understanding of the ideas presented and pose questions that challenge the theory of impetus would be really useful, because 'unteaching' impetus theory to thirty students at once is extremely difficult. However, what Google has presented here, with slides and multiple guess quizzes, is just a variation on the 'chalk and talk' theme.

The final straw that made me leave teaching was the head of languages telling me that a good teacher can teach any subject. Discussions about 'the best pedagogy' never make any consideration of what is being taught; there's an implicit assumption that every idea and subject should be taught the same way. School systems have improved markedly since they were introduced in the nineteenth century, but I think we've got everything we can out of the subject-agnostic approach to improvement, and we need to start engaging with the detail of what's being taught to further improve.

> the head of languages telling me that a good teacher can teach any subject.

Tell me this wasn't foreign languages? :face_palm:

Okay, I was totally with you until this,

> but I think we've got everything we can out of the subject-agnostic approach to improvement, and we need to start engaging with the detail of what's being taught to further improve

I think if you walk into the bottom 80% of classrooms you would not see, interleaving, spaced repetition, recall-over-reread, or topic shuffling to avoid interference.

There's a load of understanding we've gained in pedagogy and human learning that has not affected how we structure formal education yet.

> I think if you walk into the bottom 80% of classrooms you would not see, interleaving, spaced repetition, recall-over-reread, or topic shuffling to avoid interference.

Where have you taught? I taught in Australia and the United Kingdom, where many of these things were mandated by the promulgation of spiral curricula by the relevant government departments. I'm aware in the US that, for example, algebra is taught as one or two block courses, but in the school systems I've taught in, algebra is taught as a few 'topics' of about a month in duration each, sprinkled throughout the whole four or five years in which mathematics is mandatory in secondary school. For Year 7 to 10 in Australia, there would be one or two topics for each of physics, chemistry, biology and earth sciences, covered across each year, building up from year to year. None of this was a choice by individual teachers or even schools; it was an artefact of the way the curricula are structured.