Matt Spivey’s Post

Transcript

So this professor, he teaches, I guess, education classes for students who are going to be future teachers, all right, At this university, he was a strong proponent of educators using generative AI in their classroom. So he told his student teachers, so these are, again, college kids who are preparing to go become teachers that they were going to need to embrace large language models as a teacher productivity tool. He felt their dread coming back at them. To win them over, he had them do the math, both literally and figuratively. It is in teaching math in particular where he saw the technology most obviously enhancing student centered learning. So he opened up chat GP for his class. He asked the bot to explain the concept of P value, a probability measure in one of the most important things for students to grasp in statistics. Moments later, the AI gave a pretty good answer. Pretty good, but not great. So again, these things aren't perfect. You have to still be smarter than the computer. And if you're smarter than computer, why are you using the computer? Just use your own brain O. The professor typed into chat GT explained this in simpler terms that a 15 year old would understand ChatGPT replied with a new answer. Only now is giving the professor specific examples to try to build some conceptual understanding in math. If you didn't like it, he could click the try again button and it provided him with a whole new answer. So this shows that you're not smart enough again if you have to ask the computer. To help you explain something to a student. If you're a teacher and you have to ask the computer to help you, that means you're not a good teacher. It means you're not smart enough. Because the whole point of being a smart teacher is that you can come up with creative ways to connect with any type of student. Low level student, high level student. That's the point of becoming a teacher. You've practiced all that and you have so much knowledge that you can explain things to anybody. That that's what being a teacher is. So if you can't do that, it means you shouldn't be a teacher. So when this guy is running his education courses and telling them to use the AI to help them, you're basically just telling all of your students and the rest of the world who is going to employ those very same students. Yeah, the students in my class that I'm going to send out to be your teachers. Yeah. They're actually not very smart. They need the computer to kind of do stuff for them. Why would you want to do that? How about you teach your teachers to be really good at this, in this case, math, to be math experts. And experts not only in the math, but experts at explaining the math to all different levels of students. That's what a proper professor of education would be doing instead of saying, well, use the computer to help you explain stuff that's that's so wrong. I can't, I have a hard time even keeping my composure because. It undermines everything. Those of us who have dedicated our lives to being expert teachers, it undermines all of that. And it just says you're not smart enough, so go use the computer to do it for you.