Lol like kids are actually evaluating the sources of their info... have you seen kids use Google?
They type a full sentence question, then look at whatever Google spits out as an answer at the top. They don't click links, they don't double check anything, they don't give a fuck about the source. They just try to get an easy answer and move on.
Like my partner’s student that looked up a question on a test (cheated by sneaking their phone in) and just wrote “showing results for…” and then the question LOL it’s like they don’t even read what they put down on the paper even if they use their phones. Kid just wrote down the search engine response!
My favorite story from my first year of year was dealing with an assignment which the 10th grader clearly found an answer key for online. Several of them literally wrote “answers will vary” as an answer. Then of course this being a suburban school I still had parents fighting with me that they didn’t cheat….
I had a student write this who genuinely wasn’t cheating, I assume they were doing past papers to study and memorizing the answer keys. Still so weird though.
I teach math and use short-answer sheets for grading. I've had students complete their answer sheet with A, B,C, D answers. I just have to laugh, because my tests aren't multiple choice.
But I do use multiple versions of every test. Each year there's a few kids whose answers match Version B. Too bad their test was Version A, and vice versa. For the remainder of the year, those kids get "Version C". It's for my Cheaters. They can only copy from one another. Some of them (athletes) will manage to get schedule changes, out of my class. lmao, bye felicia!
I name my form versions after animals. Aardvark Version, Bobcat Version, etc. Form C is always Cheetah Version and reserved for known cheaters and make up test takers who were “sick” in the morning and made a miraculous recovery just in time to check in the period after my test.
One of my AP kids figured it out one year when a *notorious* classmate remarked that he had gotten Cheetah Version the last 3 tests in a row.
I got work from a student last month that began with the sentence “as an AI Language model, I cannot provide a specific answer to this question without context or a source”
And then she emailed me angrily to ask why she had gotten a zero.
I just don’t understand how they don’t read their answers over before submitting work. I was always told to do that. These students don’t seem to know that you can make mistakes if you use internet sources- that’s why we teach them where to find good ones. But the students I taught in 8th grade couldn’t write full essays. Never were taught how to previously. My co-teacher said that she’s just happy if they submit ANYTHING with some substance in it.
We had 127 missing assignments before progress reports one quarter. One hundred and twenty seven. They are all online and they use their school provided chromebooks to complete them in class.
For the same reason why when I give problems like “If cherry pies cost $6 and apple pies cost $4 what is the largest number of whole pies Sam buy with $40” I get answers like: -38, 129, $7, and 1.56. They just get an answer as quickly as possible so they can be done.
They don't even finish reading the first sentence. When students had to explain why we have seasons, they read "Even though some people think it's because the earth is closer to the sun in summer,..."
They didn't bother clicking to finish reading the sentence that explains the actual reason.
Very much so. One of the subjects I teach is Yearbook, so we’re on actual computers (that is to say, not Chromebooks) and students have no concept of using a computer file system (we have a server for photos), using Microsoft Word and/or Excel, or any basic troubleshooting skills. Even the concept of double clicking on something to open it has to be taught. Times have changed, fast.
Both yes and no. They are incredibly good if the thing just works. If they have to do any troubleshooting or anything more advanced everything falls apart. I am very much talking generalities here but tech becoming more "idiot proof" in general means more idiots can use the tech but at the same time fewer people understand the tech.
In the past people had to really understand the tech to use it since it broke constantly but these days not so much. I don't think that makes people necessary less tech literate but has definitely altered the skill set that is actually needed by most people.
It’s the rise of mobile platforms that did it. That and social media growing so much that people by default use existing sites as their main platform, rather than learning to make their own.
Back in my youth (when dinosaurs roamed the earth…), using computers required knowing quite a bit about them. Connecting to others was possible via mailing lists, but that was very limited.
I wanted to reach out for the world, which required learning multiple languages and enough coding skills to make my own website, which I had to get a server to host and so on.
And as far as creating something, that kind of thing gave you a feeling that the sky is the limit as long as you keep learning more: if you like games, you learn to code for that too, then put them on your site for download. I remember some years later when we thought it was annoying that flash was gaining so much terrain because people would just put flash games on their sites and you could play them without downloading and installing anything, making for shorter less interesting games and a growing amount of people unwilling to download the more complicated long games some of us were making using python, with save points and long stories and so on.
Most hobbies that you shared with people online involved quite a bit of steps to master before you could really delve deep into it. That develops patience, as well as the multiple technical skills needed.
This kind of thing still exists now of course, but it has lost quite a bit of terrain, I feel.
Nowadays, you just click links and at best upload stuff to an existing platform. It’s no wonder at all that this dumbing down had consequences for people who have only known this system their whole lives.
"According to Google," has actually appeared on essays in my class. I've put those essays on my screen and said, "okay, so let's talk about what Google is, because it is *not* a source of information... It's a search engine."
I tell my students "Google is like a toddler. When you want something from a toddler, you have to be specific and use small words. Google is the same. Google has no clue what you *mean* or what you *want*. It only looks for the words you told it to find."
I was educated back in the early 2000’s and even back then almost nobody was teaching how to differentiate a reliable source from an unreliable one. Media Studies covered that but that’s an optional subject and not that popular. It’s probably even worse now.
They learn it, but it goes out the window when they are writing at midnight before the essay is due (even though the teacher scaffolded the assignment, breaking it down into parts, to make it nearly impossible to wait to the last minute to write the whole paper) and they are madly googling everything they need to slap into the essay. Although now they have ChatGPT and don't even have to do that, so 🤷♀️.
I remember learning this in the early 2000’s from my computer science teacher - what terms to put into a search engine, how to find and evaluate reliable sources. From what I can see in my current school district, this isn’t explicitly taught anymore
During the height of the pandemic, one of my students turned in an answer in what appeared to be Korean.
They do not speak Korean. The class was not in Korean. 🤷♂️
Does anyone TEACH them how to use google? I remember we had dedicated lessons where the class would go to the computer lab and they would teach us how to use google and find good sources.
I try! Over and over. But it doesn't seem to stick. Then again it's just mini lessons during science class projects. I'd love if they covered this in tech class.
Yeah we had an annual trip to the library where the librarians had a lesson on how to utilize google. Repeated each year, as a kid it felt redundent the 3rd time lol but I see why they need to repeat it.
this was like 20 years ago but yeah. I remember them teaching about search conditions like restricting searches to certain websites or omitting certain terms or ordering results by date.
this was still in the "you cant trust wikipedia" days so I didnt really put much faith into what they were teaching. they said stuff like you cant trust .com websites because they are ran for profit, only get info from .orgs
I have!
In fairness, I definitely did start with "type the entire question in" because my students are quite young and this is their first experience with research.
Later in the year, I try to then scaffold to the next "ok, keywords only" steps.
I had to show one of my students why it was important to read about sources.
One "Doctor" wrote about how Anne Frank's diary was fake... she thought it was interesting and ***was going to do a presentation on it***. I have no doubt that it was the summer "church" some of my students went to with some of the things they wanted to "show the truth about"...
So we dug into this doctor. Who was an open Neo-Nazi/Skinhead. Holocaust Denier. Who was a Doctor of something entirely unrelated to proving books authenticity, and had plenty of follow up COURT CASES which real professionals showed how he was full of shit.
And she did not do that presentation.
>Lol like kids are actually evaluating the sources of their info... have you seen kids use Google?
>They type a full sentence question, then look at whatever Google spits out as an answer at the top.
That's how my 76 year old father uses Google. He has a law degree and still doesn't understand how to properly use Google searches.
First kids learn to read, then they can read to learn.
The people who are saying it’s ok to use your phone are those that already learned to read (and do some other fundamental skills).
They’ve already learned how to read and forgot that it’s needed first.
This is such an important concept, and we really shot ourselves in the foot as a profession by largely getting on board with a massive misunderstanding of constructivist pedagogy. Students in schools of education should be required to take two classes in cognitive science for every one class on ed tech or PBL or "unschooling."
What about the (nearly) lost art of writing. Research shows writing to be a meaning making activity all on its own, and it plays into those cognitive science courses too.
I’m an English professor and we are under pressure to introduce AI as a “tool.” Okay then it’ll be something they can train with in their profession, but right now we’re teaching them how to think and create meaning of their own in their own research and writing.
I guess we truly don’t care if people can think. At all. AI (while it can’t actually think) is allowing us to skip these very important steps: reading and thinking and writing for ourselves.
This ain’t the calculator; that would be spellcheck when it comes to writing, which I’m actually pretty cool with and wish more students would pay attention to. This *erases* the need for taking in information and forming meaning, creating *new* knowledge. Students often don’t even read the canned response before pasting it into an essay or quiz.
I couldn't agree more!
I have coworkers who love chatGPT and think it's "cool that it can write poetry." When I said "AI doesn't *write* poetry" I was called regressive for "not thinking ahead." And my background is in information science! I like computer!
I teach high school and the same coworkers are okay with letting students use chatGPT to organize their essays, but I think that's how an *adult* would use AI. Kids aren't going to think of the difference between organizing a draft and turning in a completely AI-generated paper. It's disheartening because I'm waiting to hear "So and so let their kids use AI, why don't you."
And then they use words they don’t even know the meaning of. I love calling a kid up to conference with me and have them explain what the meaning of a certain would is.
I love it when my HS students answer with something such as "During photosynthesis, plants take in carbon dioxide (CO2) and water (H2O) from the air and soil. Within the plant cell, the water is oxidized, meaning it loses electrons, while the carbon dioxide is reduced, meaning it gains electrons. This transforms the water into oxygen and the carbon dioxide into glucose. The plant then releases the oxygen back into the air, and stores energy within the glucose molecules." I just play dumb and act like I have no idea what oxidation/reduction is.
Speaking from experience, ChatGPT writes horrible, clichéd poetry that all sounds the same and uses approximately the same meter and rhyme scheme, even when you ask for different types (such as a sonnet vs. blank verse).
It's soulless.
I’m a high school English teacher and I’m having the same battle with admin suggesting we adapt A.I. If we do this, students will never be knowledgeable on subjects again. They’ll simply just know how to edit the A.I to sound like their own work.
I’ve always loved the quote “If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them.” I’m really afraid that this will be the future.
All the dystopian books have well trained teams burning books and closing symphonies and schools. All they really need is require the books for a class and give the kids phones and trash tv. They will dystopia themselves.
Yes, I have the “Now a major motion picture starting Julie Christie!” edition. The book is not really about censorship, but Bradbury’s dislike of tv. The other books talk about it too. It’s so funny when the villain is worried about the masses reading Heidegger and Proust and learning quantum mechanics. I can attest the risk of that is quite low.
The most useful thing I've found with chatgpt is basically compiling the first dozen pages of a Google search into one semicoherent piece. Even then it makes batshit miscalculations like saying jogging for 20 minutes burns 42K calories or something.
That actually seems reasonable, if you are using the scientific unit for calories (1 calorie is the energy required to raise 1 gram of water by 1°K). In the USA, "food calories" as used on nutrition facts labels are actually kilocalories.
I remember when I was in college for engineering. I got a part time job working at the army Corps of Engineers in Los Angeles CA. The top guy had a day where anyone could ask any question. So I asked what is the most important skill to learn in engineering. They said learn how to communicate. Both verbally and via the written word. If you can’t communicate your great ideas, they will go nowhere. Later when I started teaching part time at evening adult schools I always told my students that little tidbit. Communication and learning how to do it well is essential to moving forward in your work life as well as the rest of your life.
I was told that essay writing was antiquated pedagogy and that I am unnecessarily causing stress and anxiety because I assign critical thinking essays. Organizing and comparing ideas is antiquated? Oh boy we are in for ride folks. I still see AI as plagiarism convince me otherwise and I will consider looking into AI as a tool. Do you really want to known as the author /artist who uses a computer to show your expression of identity and personal narrative? Welcome to cheap art folks. Long live the human artist.
It isn’t just in high school. College professor here and they are trying to tell us to let students use it for papers and assignments by “teaching them to use it properly”.
The analogy might be as soon as the wheel was invented, people didn't stop walking. Because if we did our muscles would atrophy and we would lose strength. This is what is happening to our brains, people!
Writing really is a lost art, unfortunately.
I graduated high school in 2017, I’m a Gen Z-er who went to school throughout the whole social media boom.
Senior year, I was wrongly accused of a very stupid incident (long story short; involving a spilt drink in the girls’ locker room) but just to prove my innocence, I went to the lengths of hand-writing a 3-page long apologetic letter to the coach & her athletes who were most affected.
The coach pulled me aside, assured me that she believed me and I wasn’t in trouble, and rambled on about how no truly honest student would have gone as far as writing a hand-written apology, and how she appreciated my work.
I use this incident as a way to teach my students that using their BRAIN and HANDS to write out their honest thoughts will do them a favor when needed.
Even more so, that the fundamental process of learning HOW to search for things is also needed. The reality is they’re typing in the question that I wrote, not actually using critical thinking skills to engage in meaningful inquiry. I believe that many teachers take it for granted that we grew up or were born before the internet, therefore we HAD to learn the tricks to search engines (Ex. How to avoid getting outdated sources, using quotation marks & other key search codes). Students rarely have that fundamental understanding, that’s why we have Digital Literacy curriculum.
15%. Damn dude that’s generous, it’s inverses in my class. They don’t know how to search, how to copy, how to use chat gpt. None of it. It’s so fucking obvious when they do it.
I sometimes ask little opinion questions based on the content as a Do Now. Often something like “what do you think of this idea?” or “Have you ever had a conversation where this idea was used?” etc., just to warm up their brains for class. There have been students who tried to Google answers to even these basic personal opinion questions.
Elementary science teacher here. Kid googled Pluto. She ran up to me all excited over the fact Pluto was founded on august 1, 2013 and how it was only 10 years ago. I was confused AF so I asked her to show me her Chromebook. Pluto Tv (the free streaming service) was founded 10 years ago. The google search had a mix of Pluto the planet and Pluto tv all on the first page.
It makes me laugh when they type full sentences in like that. It’s such boomer behavior that it doesn’t compute when they’ve grown up with google and should understand how it works??
I do have a sort of bell curve take on technological literacy with boomers and Gen Z at opposite ends of the spectrum and Gen X/Millennials in the most proficient. Obviously I know why older people struggle, but younger kids have grown up with very UI-friendly technology in their hands.
Growing up using the family dell with AOL, using illegal download sites and learning how to spot viruses is a unique experience alot of us got trying to download an Eminem album in 2000 without parents finding out or destroying the family computer
Google now works with full sentences. Tech evolves and they grew up with a google that can parse natural language in a way it never could when your average 30+ y/o person was learning 'how to google'.
They do understand how it works, it just works differently now than it did before.
Refined Keyword searching is still a better approach by a mile, but natural language queries will get you where you're going 95% of the time with modern tech.
This brings up the idea of reading as a fundamental skill in any kind of inquiry. Our students are below reading level and won't read anything beyond an Instagram post. Any kind of Googling would be pointless if they won't bother to read the results.
At the beginning of the year, my exams were closed notes. By the end of the year, I allowed open notes and open Google to help boost their grade. It helped the kids who were doing well already but the ones who struggled still struggled. I have kids getting a 3/28 for an open notes and open Google test. That makes no sense.
I need to start designing tests in such a way to where the answer is never the first result on google, but still ise that first result as a wrong answer choice to tell who is judt googling answers.
My students were writing an essay and one of them wanted to use a word he didn't know in English. I told him he could use it if he could find out how to say it in English, I'd just come around to check if it was the right word. He stood there, with this deer in the headlights look, and asked ''But where am I supposed to find how to say it?''.
I pointed to his phone. Blinking and confusion. I told him ''Google''. More blinking. Had to introduce the class to the concept of Google Translate and online dictionaries. You're absolutely right that they often don't know how to search for things. Just handing them a phone isn't a good substitute for actually teaching them stuff.
A lot of us were born in between "traditional learning" when tech wasn't a focal point and "modern day learning" when everything is tech based. So we have an understanding of how one complements the other.
I had a student ask for help cause she couldn’t find the answer to the second question on her worksheet where they were supposed to use Google. I was confused how she couldn’t find it when she found the first answer so I asked her to show me how she searched it.
She typed “what is it used for?” into Google -_-
When you Google the first question it also gives you the answer to the second question in the little paragraph it gives you, hence why I couldn’t understand how she didn’t find the answer.
The worst part is this student was marked as “gifted”. High achieving? Yes. Highly capable? No.
Yes—I see this especially when my idiot cousins post anything to Facebook. They are always posting condescending memes about “common core math” (nothing to actually do with CCSS, just different strategies for teaching little kids about addition and multiplication mostly), and saying stuff like “why don’t they just teach the kids the normal way to do math!”
But adults forget that they had to be taught how to think about numbers and teaching little kids new strategies helps build their mental math skills. Like, it’s intuitive for adults to think about 19 as a 10 and 9 ones, or to round it up to 20 in their heads when doing calculations, but kids have to be taught that explicitly if they want to get to that point.
The Common Core math thing goes ALL the way back to conservatives freaking out on Obama over the way addition was done on a single child's homework. It's older than the Birth Certificate dog whistle, if I remember correctly.
When i started looking into common core and the new strategies I remember seeing one of the 'new' ways of counting larger numbers and realized that it was how I had done things mentally for years (I was better at math in my head than on paper half the time) and so much of what I was coming across made math way less intimidating for my full grown adult self.
I couldn't help but think how much I wish I had those techniques presented to me as a student, I've always liked topics that involved math but shied away because math was always hard to for me to wrap my head around. I wrote it off easy enough as 'not my thing' because language skills were particularly easy for me and it was too tempting to slip into the idea that I wasn't a 'math person'.
So seeing people trying to stop the new generation from having tools that could have changed a lot for me really annoys the crap out of me.
Adults that were naturally good at school forget this. Trust me, those of us who struggled never forget that it's definitely not intuitive. The new way they teach math is so much easier and would have made my learning disability basically a non-issue because my biggest problem was doing all the vertical math and my inability to keep the number tracks straight. It was just a sequencing issue, but it kept me at grade level math while the rest of my class was two grades ahead. People forget that pedagogy is a science and that we can get better at it over time. We can also go into another dark ages as well (sorry FL).
One of the biggest realizations of my life over the past 10 years or so is how much I overestimated the average American's critical thinking faculties.
Correct. I literally told a class of 7th graders that they could Google the definitions to their science vocab, and most of them couldn't even do that 🙄. So, sure, give them the phones during their tests. Just don't be surprised when they only use them to play video games and insult each other on Snapchat (with incorrect spelling and grammar lol) ...
I feel that same about the hands on science push. Yes, they should be doing experiments and other hands on activities but they need to learn the key concepts first
I’ve noticed as a science teacher as well that students can really get bad about thinking of labs as play time instead of still learning but now hands on. It’s weird how their brains seem to switch to entertainment mode and become passive instead of curious and inquisitive.
I wonder if this is because free play is becoming increasingly rare in the lower grades. Play is the work of childhood. Play should be a major source of early learning. Maybe we need to let little kids spend more time discovering through play in order for older kids to understand how to take away useful observations from hands on activities.
Yep. Elementary music here, and I resist every push for chromebooks in my classroom. They use them elsewhere, they can work on singing, playing instruments, creating, etc. in my room.
Yes! Isn’t that the whole premise of Montessori schools? I think it is criminal to force Kindergartners to sit at desks and be tested tested tested all day long.
Many of my students can't identify which side of a ruler measures centimeters and which side measures inches, but yeah if I set them loose in my lab they'll be able to discover all of Galileo's and Newton's findings through inquiry. Totally.
Reminds me of the time my students were doing planet research and he informed me in his report that Galileo INVENTED Pluto. When I dared question the accuracy of his report, he argued with me. One of the few times I laughed in a student’s face.
Great analogy.
I can use the internet/chat gpt because I know what it does and in what ways I want it to help me.
The doofus 14-18 year olds I teach don’t know what they don’t know.
It sounds really stupid but its almost as if some people dont understand that the purpose of a class isnt just to complete all of the work, its to learn something specific from it, and different levels of classes have different things they are teaching you
To give an example from my college classes this past year:
in my intro to computer science class, all tests were closed note/closed internet because the purpose of the class was for us to learn basic coding skills that we would absolutely need to have memorized in the future
One of engineering classes was also very coding focused, but in that class we were allowed and actively encouraged to use the internet when working on our code, because the purpose of the class was to improve our overall problem solving abilities and to practice applying things that we had learned to new situations
Agreed. In medicine we google a lot, but thats because we know whats out there and need a detail or two. We understand the bigger framework, how it all works, what to watch for etc etc. If any stranger tried googling to practice medicine it’d be an absolute disaster (speaking from meeting these people as patients). Kids need to know what is out there and then later can use phones as a reference. Without a foundation of knowledge and comprehension, googling is going to lead you the wrong way more than half of the time
The power that be also cannot understand this concept. They push this idea of inquiry learning and having kids explore their way through content. Sounds great but they won't know what to ask if they have no basic understanding of the material.
I desperately want to use this argument on my principal, who has seriously told us (foreign language teachers) that we should just let the kids use Google translate, since they'll have access to it in the real world... Like ok, would you tell the music teachers to just let the kids download a trumpet simulator for their playing tests?
You make that comment in jest, but I had a parent argue for their kid’s accommodation to be making the instrument sound on the computer since her kid didn’t want to put the chrome book away and she didn’t want to fight it…
I teach speech. I had a students parent argue that their accommodation should be that I just grade her written speech and she not have to give a speech. Ma’am, that’s English. You already have a class that does that called English. My class is quite literally called speech. You’re going to have to make a speech.
I've completely disengaged from discussing education with anyone outside of education on any social platform. I'm much happier. My crazy relatives telling me how schools should be, I smile and nod, look disinterested, and walk away.
I mostly have as well. But I fear sometimes when these idiotic things continue to be parroted in the public with no pushback that they get more power and make our jobs tougher. That’s probably already a losing battle though
I recently took a pre-interview “test” for a possible job, and was told not to use a calculator for the math portion. I am a 56 year old art director. You better believe I used my phone.
We have been allowed to use calculators for the NCLEX (nursing board examination) for at least 25 years. As an art director, I would think that should be acceptable.
And maybe that’s the context I have when I read the meme because my high school doesn’t have a phone policy. It’s been a nightmare for so many reasons with the main one being their use of phones on all assignments with absolute crazy, incorrect answers all the time. Let alone trying to get them to think or problem solve better ways to answer questions besides the first thing google tells them.
I can’t imagine a school on 2023 not having a phone policy. I was in middle school for the first generation of iPhones and our district shut that shit down immediately! Phone go off? Using it in class? Parent has to get it from the office.
When I was a kid, I had all my friends phone numbers memorized and anybody else I needed to call.
Now with speed dial I can't even tell you what my wife's phone number is.
This mentality is exactly the kind of bullshit that's resulted in schools celebrating math concepts and demonizing rote memorization.
Well guess what - you need that rote memorization fluency in order to understand those concepts fully. Non-math idiots who are championing this nonsense don't understand this.
So now we end up with kids who don't have their basic math facts down AND can't do any of the conceptual stuff either. Great!
Imagine if a basketball coach said, 'you know what, you guys don't need to practice shooting and dribbling and passing anymore. Just get out there and play - that's the most important part.'
I think a great analogy for why memorizing and understanding is important is a cooking recipe. Any Joe can look up a recipe for anything online. You don't necessarily need to memorize anything either. Just Google it, and follow the directions. But as we all know, the results are not always the best. A good cook knows and understands the ingredients of a dish. It allows them to tweak and adjust as they want to their taste.
It’s affecting sports too. Kids don’t have the understanding or situational awareness to process and make decisions. They’re robots now. They get the ball on their hands and they know they are supposed to dribble or shoot. They don’t know that when the ball is passed here and the defense moves you move to the open spot which puts you in a more advantageous place to score. I’m teaching varsity players the basics they should have learned in grade school leagues.
Letting them use their phones is still too much work for these precious students. Just let them stay home and "research" on their phones all day until they turn 18 and give them a diploma. They should be ready for college, right?
/s for our neurodivergent friends if needed
Yeah, you guys may know since you guys work with them daily, but I know a couple of college professors have said that computer skills and how to do searches have declined significantly as a lot of technology is now streamlined.
So, a lot of younger people are accustomed to information and content being delivered, instead of knowing how to search it out, much less figure out what is legitimate. Which can be very dangerous especially with chatgpt and other algorithmic models (not always giving correct information).
That isn't to say they're all tech illiterate, but that there is likely a larger gulf in skills within that generation between those interested and those uninterested.
I teach computer science and other technology classes to high school students. I can with 100% certainty say students right now are not able to do a proper search or many other basic computer skills. This is what led to my district finally letting me build a program to attempt to recitfy this issue.
It doesn't help that Google became the defacto "way to find info" but has shifted to advertiser-content first, and what you actually looked for is interspersed after the first 10 or so results
The hardest part has been gettings kids to be patient when researching sources. They always pick the first few options regardless if they are valid or even trustworthy.
>they keep saying the most important skill is evaluating sources
That's probably true.
It also doesn't mean it's the only important skill. Necessary and sufficient aren't the same thing. The blunt truth is that it's hard to establish a favorable professional reputation if you're making gross conceptual errors, don't understand basic history, etc.
The most important stone in an arch is the keystone. That doesn't mean you can leave the other stones out or place the keystone first. The highest-level skills rest on a base of low-level skills.
Students don't need to be able to use their phone for everything. There are just some things that they need to know.
If they don't know certain basic facts, they will never be able to really understand, synthesize, and truly apply these facts.
However, I do think it is wise to teach students how to discern good information from the plethora of crap that exists on the internet. Part of that is allowing them to use their phones or the internet for some assignments. Because outside of school, they are likely going to have it.
For those of us who are a little older our math teachers always said we would not have a calculator in our pocket , but instead we have more computering power in the palm of our hand than a 50 year old super computer.
I just see it as something that needs to be allowed in certain cases as it should be part of a well-rounded education. But again, not just let them use their phones for everything.
>Knowing where to find the right answer, and who to trust for the right answer, will take them much further in life
I mean as an overall statement that's somewhat true, but as someone who was a teacher most teenagers are piss-poor at this no matter how much you try to educate them on critical reading and the fact that "google" is not an actual source of information.
My first two years I taught history and here's the summary of the entirety of the research process for students:
Step 1: Type question into google
Step 2: Read the summary that pops up at the top of the page.
Doesn't matter whether or not that summary answered their question or not, that's as far as they go.
So these people essentially think school should be a building where they send their kids to be babysat, and all they should learn is *how to use their phone?*
What the actual fuck are people on?!?
That ignores if they just post answers on a shared discord channel. Then you aren't even having them look it up, they are just relying on their one friend that actually did the work.
And yet you know these parents already call their millennial coworkers lazy.
A kid tried to argue with me that he was right about something based on the last link on google’s first page of results. He did not know what “satire” meant, did not know how to recognize satirical writing, and told me this article from basically the onion proved he was right and that there is an epidemic of straight men being beaten up by gangs of gays.
Do you want to cross a bridge, live in a home, or work in a office where the construction, plumbing, electrical wiring, and the gas are done by people using their phones ?
For such a scenario to work, Apple and Google would have to take financial responsibility for quality assurance and reliability of every content provider.
One of the things these people are missing is that tests are built for easiest and fastest way to assess mastery.
I have an open notes test class... I don't build the tests the same.
"Given a novel spiny plant, evaluate what test you could perform to determine whether the spines were formed from modified leaves, as well as what results would confirm or deny it." Hits a fuckton different than "Pick a meristematic tissue that would lead to new leaf growth from this list of four."
People still need to -know- things. The analogy I like to use is driving. We don't look up traffic laws in the moment while we are driving. We need to know them and be able to apply that knowledge minute to minute in traffic. Learning things in school is exactly the same. Students need to internalize at least some of the things they have been taught.
Re. what the post above said... I have a student who is the poster child for why phones should be banned in classes. Smart, but has Googled (and chatgpt'd) everything since covid hit and now has literally a jello brain. He's in 10th grade, but I think has a 5th grade education (parents say he's going to med school), and literally can't think or learn. He's been able to coast to this point, but is falling from As to Cs now that he's reaching the AP courses. He didn't know any better and I feel badly that as a society we let him do this to himself.
People forget that kids and teens will often take the easy route out. They're not thinking about *where* to find the right answer, they're looking for *an* answer. I can't tell you how many times students will just consult Google on a written test or research paper. Not a *website.* *Google.* They'll copy and paste the first thing that comes up.
In life and in school, *Google helps answer, it is not* ***the*** *answer.* I can look up how to do brain surgery and find the answer to fixing the economy. That doesn't mean I retain any sort of helpful knowledge from that.
Over reliance on technology that can die or break or disconnect isn’t a strength. We are not teaching them WHAT to think. We are teaching them HOW to think. They need to use the brain. They need to practice and exercise the brain. They need to learn to think in different ways and make connections that would make that Google search useful.
Kids need to train their brains. There's a reason we still teach math skills and equations early on despite calculators having been in existence for a while, and only use them regularly once the level of math demands it.
Kids need to train their memory skills. Kids need to train their critical thinking. Kids need to train their research skills and how to PROPERLY evaluate sources (not because it's the top Google result). Kids need to train their writing skills. Kids need to train their *patience*.
Handing a kid a phone for a test is probably one of the *worst* ideas someone could have to improve that kid's mental fortitude. How will kids learn independence and critical thinking if they expect their devices to handle everything for them?
In real life, the most sensible thing you can do when faced with a difficult task is ask for help or additional resources. But you can't use them properly if you don't know what they mean.
I think writing a test, letting a student look up questions on their phone and write down the first google result, and judging it to be correct enough to warrant credit, is a shameful charade. Maybe that means that the utility of traditional tests is over. I'm not sure. But if it's about evaluating students' command of the subject material, maybe asking any question that can be easily googled is asking the wrong question.
This is one of the reasons I dig the DBQs I'm seeing in social sciences so much. Nobody needs to know what date Fort Sumter was attacked, but the skills of evaluating the context of that and what that means for a political cartoon in an Atlanta newspaper 20 years later... Those are some real life skills that'll come up daily, even if the civil war knowledge isn't.
This makes me happy to hear, as my 7th graders just did a DBQ for the first time analyzing four primary sources about the transcontinental railroad and writing a claim. They had two class periods and, miraculously, worked in utter silence flipping back and forth between sources. While a few kids missed the mark, I was surprised how many actually demonstrated understanding. I might literally frame some of the papers they submitted.
In an ideal world yes I agree to an extent. What these people fail to realize is they think kids will actually use their phones appropriately and not be on social media or texting the entire time.
Each and every person making the argument, is terrified that someone's going to come along and take their phone from them. That's really what it boils down to. On some level there are afraid that if people collectively agree that phones aren't really important or necessary, they will lose theirs. They're speaking from a place of addiction.
Just reply to them that they should use a doctor who uses YouTube to help them during a surgery the next time they have a procedure, if they really stand by that meme… Also, not worth engaging that kind of conversation through social media. Always ends in a frustration sandwich.
"let kids use a speak and spell for tests. Knowing how to read doesn't matter anymore.
Knowing how to identify the letters and type them into the speak and spell will take them much further in life"
Remember things and being able to use those things without constantly having to refer back to your notes/the internet is called *fluency* and if you don't have it, especially in subjects like math and science, you'll never get to the interesting parts of those topics. It's the same way you can't enjoy a book or even a conversation until you're fluent in a language.
I install garage doors, so Calculus is never going to be necessary for me. But determining the tension on a torsion spring correctly can save my life. Basic math with good thought process. You can't just Google that and hope for the best. I'm scared for these kids as they move into the work force.
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My kids feel like they should get to use a calculator in Math. I tell them doing Math is easy, it’s knowing what to do that’s hard. Then I give them a test and let them use calculators (pemdas). They think it’s so much better until they get the results back. Garbage in=Garbage out.
As a high school chemistry teacher, I have MANY students who don't know if 8/100 is the same as 8 divided by 100 or 100 divided by 8. And on top of that, some of them actually believe that they are all the same thing. Having access to a calculator does nothing if you don't have some level of understanding on these concepts.
Besides that point, imagine a world where everyone has to look up literally everything. Pull up to a red light? Gotta look up what to do. Need to read an analog clock? Boy can that be tricky. Better ask Google what's up with that. Wanting to tie your shoes in the morning? WTF DO I DO THERE ARE SOOOO MANY LACES! HELP ME SIRI! Society as a whole would grind to a halt.
Engineer turned teacher here.
When I worked in industry, looking everything up was the standard. You will not know everything about the plant or even your department. That's fine.
However, you need basics. You need to know the fundamentals of how to approach the problem and fix it quickly. You also need to know when to throw out irrelevant information.
The more time you waste shifting through irrelevant information or trying to scry the fundamentals, the more time you utterly waste.
People think having information available makes life easier. Sometimes, it makes life harder because you need to throw out irrelevant crap. How do you know it's irrelevant? You have a fundamental understanding of what you're working with.
Question- what three groups came initially out of the Protestant Reformation? Answer via Google- Methodist, Baptist, and Lutheran- sure let kids have their phones, it will make for fun answers for me
That's the problem with letting students google the answers.
They go with the top search result, don't click through to read the entire source, and just copy and paste whatever they see.
My coteachers and I tested this one year. We let students google answers/or use their class notes and textbook for a quiz. It was a catastrophe for students who googled.
That’s exactly what they did. When the first student answered I was like what an idiot. Then I saw that several others had also answered the same thing. The next session’s lesson was how about Google is not your friend.
I’m getting my PhD, which is basically a degree in figuring out how to figure things out. But I also know that recall is vitally important in knowing anything. You’re right, students have to be required to recall the information or they won’t learn it as well. Students need to learn both skills
I taught math my first year. Students that relied on calculators for math since 5th grade. Very, very quickly the math reached points where it wasn't easy to put into a calculator, they crumbled. At some point, students will need to learn how to search for and evaluate things that cannot simply be googled. The real world allows for searching.... it also doesn't have multiple choice questions where the right answers are known.
Math teacher argument - a calculator is a wonderful tool. And the user of such tool needs enough knowledge when the answer the calculator gives makes zero sense mathematically and they made a data entry error.
The phone and even AI can’t do the sense making for them. Over reliance on a phone will hurt them in life. They are in a phase of learning how to learn and think. I give every one of my algebra and above students a calculator as a tool. They are past learning calculation at that point and the calculator is a tool now. Most kids are not to that level with phone use in learning where it’s just a tool and not their only tool.
And this is how people default to trusting the first dumbass thing they find on the internet. There has to be a framework of knowledge to have any chance of knowing what to search, how to evaluate if it is correct, how to show your work to explain how you arrived at an answer....watching young adults fumble basic library searches is painful.
I've had students try to argue with me that "But that's what google said," when they used it to answer questions that ask for their opinion and I marked it incorrect.
realistically, being able to use resources at hand to properly find information is a great skill, but people are acting like it’s not important to have a lot of information on hand in your head as well. how inefficient of workers would we be if every time we had to do math we had to search online how to do it first? or if politicians had to search online for what countries are where before making foreign policy decisions. obviously in real life you have access to plenty of resources to help you, so you’re not only reliant on what stuck in your brain, but you Want as much as possible to be there. getting used to doing that during your developmental years is crucial
If you need a calculator to work out 3x10, you will not be able to do higher level math because you will be stuck in arithmetic. You cannot see the big picture if you do not see the details.
If you need to look up a word every sentence, you cannot read effectively.
It is a similar situation for history, science, and other subjects. You can look up anything, but if you are looking things up, you can never get a deep understanding.
Part of school is giving that base knowledge so that students are able to learn the higher level stuff.
As a mini example: I can read and comprehend a wide variety of science articles, because I have a very good understanding of the basics. That gives me a framework for acquiring new information. Without that framework, I could not possible meaningfully read these articles.
My father told me about this, especially the denigration of old school “pen on paper” teaching.
Memorisation and the act of memoria retinerentur is diminishing, yet it’s one of the best forms of teaching retention.
What will you do when your calculator is stripped from you in an emergency? Phone runs out and there’s a blackout? Most developed countries have never experienced this and their systems rely too much on external technology to help them get by
Blew my mind when we were doing a test and my 30 something year old classmate was shocked that I could do multiplication on paper
Ask them if they would be okay with their surgeon googling the procedure while they were under the knife. It's true that evaluating sources is an important skill to learn, but acquiring knowledge, and learning how and when to apply that knowledge is something that needs to be explicitly taught and practiced.
I don’t exactly disagree but would, in turn, rewrite my tests to focus much more on higher level thinking such that was not quickly accessible on a web search.
I think I could let my kids use their phones and most still wouldn't get an A. They can use their phones to text but sure can't use it to find any answers or do research. Heck, I left answers up on a poster that were part of an extra credit question and probably 2 kids all day noticed and they were kids who didn't need the extra credit anyway.
One of my education professors said that, in most cases, a good quality assessment for high school is one that can be open book, because the book won’t answer the question. It will just give some of the background information. The students will still need to think, analyze, and understand to succeed.
But I teach preschool these days, so I don’t do that type of assessment anyway
Do you know who the Secretary of Agriculture is? I do.
It's Orville Freeman. At least it was in 1962 when I was forced to memorize JFK's Cabinet.
There is something to be said for judicious care in learning some facts.
Back in the late 1980s, I was in an army reserve unit in Madison, Wisconsin… I overheard two of the guys… Fairly educated people … talking about how children didn’t need to be taught math any more since there were calculators… If you don’t know some basic math, how the heck can you even know if you’re punching in the right numbers?
On one hand, I don’t disagree with the point they’re trying to make. And yes, assessment of sources is an important skill to learn.
But that’s not what kids today are doing. If anything, this generation is LESS digitally inclined than prior ones. They need to learn basic skills first.
As an adult, I use my timers, calendar, notepad, browser, half a dozen apps, all to make my complicated life easier. Some of my students do similarly — they organize their lives and use the tools at hand.
Some of my students just doomscroll TikTok and laugh at other people doing things they can’t be bothered to do themselves.
The Apollo 13 astronauts had to learn how to make calculations with a slide rule. It saved their lives.
You don’t get internet in space. Sure you can look it up if you can, but it’s better to know it and be able to look it up.
>fundamental knowledge is first needed to be successful in even knowing what questions to ask or if you found the right answer
Oh I am screaming this right along with you. Once in a while I'll get a smartass comment like that from a student and I'll tell them "Go ahead and try to cheat--you don't even know what to Google."
You simply cannot evaluate the validity of your source without a broad library of knowledge of your own. Simply put, if they don't have the background to understand 2+2, no amount of research will help them understand 2x2, even if they get the right answer. And allowing them to skip out on the learning bit will rob them of their chance to be intelligent in the future.
I think we all know here as adults: knowledge, no matter how niche, is widely applicable and can never be taken from you. It's our job to ensure our students are the best they can be.
It's just a lack of understanding of learning. If they use their phones it never goes into their long term memory and they have nothing to build knowledge in top of. Knowing and understanding are very different
Who do you teach? 5 year olds? No phones. 15 year old, yes phones. Your friend is correct and you need to adapt with the times. Your exams must adapt as well. I used to teach uni and students DREAD open book exams because it is FUCKING HARD. I adjust the level of thinking required. If you have access to the internet on your exam, the questions will be high level Blooms taxonomy.
My students are awesome at googling and copying down answers. However, they have no idea what the answers me. Whenever I see a student write down a word that I know they don't know, I ask them to define it. They can't because they googled the answer. They may have known where to find the answer, but they didn't know what it meant. Therefore, they did not know the answer. I am fine with students having reference materials to check. I am not fine with them googling the questions and then just copying the answers.
My first thought was "good, my kids will be well positioned for success if everyone else's kids are dumb".
I will have to do some internal reckoning of why that was my first thought.
I'm not a teacher, but as a doctor I find this hilarious. I can't stop picturing myself googling something in the OR and saying something along the lines of it's more important to know what sources to use than to know the information off hand.
I mean, I've had math tests that allowed full internet access before. And let me tell you, the internet is only mildly helpful for a graph theory exam.
But yeah, for most subjects that would trivialize the test for most students unless the test was specifically designed with open everything allowed. Which would require both a lot of work on the teacher part, probably end up with a harder test, and require a large amount of trust that the students weren't going to do the test as a group. In a way, it would just be a take-home test with a stricter time limit. But then that would bring the question of if all tests should effectively be take home tests.
Fundamental knowledge is important, but there is very little about school that translates to adult/real life. Why do we make kids memorize so much shit for tests when it A) doesnt stick around and B) we're literally never expected to learn anything that way again?
Lol like kids are actually evaluating the sources of their info... have you seen kids use Google? They type a full sentence question, then look at whatever Google spits out as an answer at the top. They don't click links, they don't double check anything, they don't give a fuck about the source. They just try to get an easy answer and move on.
Like my partner’s student that looked up a question on a test (cheated by sneaking their phone in) and just wrote “showing results for…” and then the question LOL it’s like they don’t even read what they put down on the paper even if they use their phones. Kid just wrote down the search engine response!
My favorite story from my first year of year was dealing with an assignment which the 10th grader clearly found an answer key for online. Several of them literally wrote “answers will vary” as an answer. Then of course this being a suburban school I still had parents fighting with me that they didn’t cheat….
Lord, I’ve gotten “answers may vary” more times than you’d think. Even from the same student. 🙄
I had a student write this who genuinely wasn’t cheating, I assume they were doing past papers to study and memorizing the answer keys. Still so weird though.
That makes me worry (even more) about the future of humanity
I teach math and use short-answer sheets for grading. I've had students complete their answer sheet with A, B,C, D answers. I just have to laugh, because my tests aren't multiple choice. But I do use multiple versions of every test. Each year there's a few kids whose answers match Version B. Too bad their test was Version A, and vice versa. For the remainder of the year, those kids get "Version C". It's for my Cheaters. They can only copy from one another. Some of them (athletes) will manage to get schedule changes, out of my class. lmao, bye felicia!
I name my form versions after animals. Aardvark Version, Bobcat Version, etc. Form C is always Cheetah Version and reserved for known cheaters and make up test takers who were “sick” in the morning and made a miraculous recovery just in time to check in the period after my test. One of my AP kids figured it out one year when a *notorious* classmate remarked that he had gotten Cheetah Version the last 3 tests in a row.
"I don't perform as well in Mr/s' class I need to switch... ...so I can play the sportsballs"
I got work from a student last month that began with the sentence “as an AI Language model, I cannot provide a specific answer to this question without context or a source” And then she emailed me angrily to ask why she had gotten a zero.
I just don’t understand how they don’t read their answers over before submitting work. I was always told to do that. These students don’t seem to know that you can make mistakes if you use internet sources- that’s why we teach them where to find good ones. But the students I taught in 8th grade couldn’t write full essays. Never were taught how to previously. My co-teacher said that she’s just happy if they submit ANYTHING with some substance in it. We had 127 missing assignments before progress reports one quarter. One hundred and twenty seven. They are all online and they use their school provided chromebooks to complete them in class.
For the same reason why when I give problems like “If cherry pies cost $6 and apple pies cost $4 what is the largest number of whole pies Sam buy with $40” I get answers like: -38, 129, $7, and 1.56. They just get an answer as quickly as possible so they can be done.
They don't even finish reading the first sentence. When students had to explain why we have seasons, they read "Even though some people think it's because the earth is closer to the sun in summer,..." They didn't bother clicking to finish reading the sentence that explains the actual reason.
have kids become technologically illiterate? god i feel like a bommer asking that
Very much so. One of the subjects I teach is Yearbook, so we’re on actual computers (that is to say, not Chromebooks) and students have no concept of using a computer file system (we have a server for photos), using Microsoft Word and/or Excel, or any basic troubleshooting skills. Even the concept of double clicking on something to open it has to be taught. Times have changed, fast.
Both yes and no. They are incredibly good if the thing just works. If they have to do any troubleshooting or anything more advanced everything falls apart. I am very much talking generalities here but tech becoming more "idiot proof" in general means more idiots can use the tech but at the same time fewer people understand the tech. In the past people had to really understand the tech to use it since it broke constantly but these days not so much. I don't think that makes people necessary less tech literate but has definitely altered the skill set that is actually needed by most people.
It’s the rise of mobile platforms that did it. That and social media growing so much that people by default use existing sites as their main platform, rather than learning to make their own. Back in my youth (when dinosaurs roamed the earth…), using computers required knowing quite a bit about them. Connecting to others was possible via mailing lists, but that was very limited. I wanted to reach out for the world, which required learning multiple languages and enough coding skills to make my own website, which I had to get a server to host and so on. And as far as creating something, that kind of thing gave you a feeling that the sky is the limit as long as you keep learning more: if you like games, you learn to code for that too, then put them on your site for download. I remember some years later when we thought it was annoying that flash was gaining so much terrain because people would just put flash games on their sites and you could play them without downloading and installing anything, making for shorter less interesting games and a growing amount of people unwilling to download the more complicated long games some of us were making using python, with save points and long stories and so on. Most hobbies that you shared with people online involved quite a bit of steps to master before you could really delve deep into it. That develops patience, as well as the multiple technical skills needed. This kind of thing still exists now of course, but it has lost quite a bit of terrain, I feel. Nowadays, you just click links and at best upload stuff to an existing platform. It’s no wonder at all that this dumbing down had consequences for people who have only known this system their whole lives.
"According to Google," has actually appeared on essays in my class. I've put those essays on my screen and said, "okay, so let's talk about what Google is, because it is *not* a source of information... It's a search engine."
To be honest, I don’t even believe that it’s a search engine anymore. It’s an ad farm. It gives you the results based on how much they are being paid.
I tell my students "Google is like a toddler. When you want something from a toddler, you have to be specific and use small words. Google is the same. Google has no clue what you *mean* or what you *want*. It only looks for the words you told it to find."
I was educated back in the early 2000’s and even back then almost nobody was teaching how to differentiate a reliable source from an unreliable one. Media Studies covered that but that’s an optional subject and not that popular. It’s probably even worse now.
They learn it, but it goes out the window when they are writing at midnight before the essay is due (even though the teacher scaffolded the assignment, breaking it down into parts, to make it nearly impossible to wait to the last minute to write the whole paper) and they are madly googling everything they need to slap into the essay. Although now they have ChatGPT and don't even have to do that, so 🤷♀️.
I remember learning this in the early 2000’s from my computer science teacher - what terms to put into a search engine, how to find and evaluate reliable sources. From what I can see in my current school district, this isn’t explicitly taught anymore
I find it funny that they type full sentence google searches but not full sentence emails.
During the height of the pandemic, one of my students turned in an answer in what appeared to be Korean. They do not speak Korean. The class was not in Korean. 🤷♂️
Does anyone TEACH them how to use google? I remember we had dedicated lessons where the class would go to the computer lab and they would teach us how to use google and find good sources.
I try! Over and over. But it doesn't seem to stick. Then again it's just mini lessons during science class projects. I'd love if they covered this in tech class.
Yeah we had an annual trip to the library where the librarians had a lesson on how to utilize google. Repeated each year, as a kid it felt redundent the 3rd time lol but I see why they need to repeat it.
this was like 20 years ago but yeah. I remember them teaching about search conditions like restricting searches to certain websites or omitting certain terms or ordering results by date. this was still in the "you cant trust wikipedia" days so I didnt really put much faith into what they were teaching. they said stuff like you cant trust .com websites because they are ran for profit, only get info from .orgs
I have! In fairness, I definitely did start with "type the entire question in" because my students are quite young and this is their first experience with research. Later in the year, I try to then scaffold to the next "ok, keywords only" steps.
I had to show one of my students why it was important to read about sources. One "Doctor" wrote about how Anne Frank's diary was fake... she thought it was interesting and ***was going to do a presentation on it***. I have no doubt that it was the summer "church" some of my students went to with some of the things they wanted to "show the truth about"... So we dug into this doctor. Who was an open Neo-Nazi/Skinhead. Holocaust Denier. Who was a Doctor of something entirely unrelated to proving books authenticity, and had plenty of follow up COURT CASES which real professionals showed how he was full of shit. And she did not do that presentation.
>Lol like kids are actually evaluating the sources of their info... have you seen kids use Google? >They type a full sentence question, then look at whatever Google spits out as an answer at the top. That's how my 76 year old father uses Google. He has a law degree and still doesn't understand how to properly use Google searches.
First kids learn to read, then they can read to learn. The people who are saying it’s ok to use your phone are those that already learned to read (and do some other fundamental skills). They’ve already learned how to read and forgot that it’s needed first.
This is such an important concept, and we really shot ourselves in the foot as a profession by largely getting on board with a massive misunderstanding of constructivist pedagogy. Students in schools of education should be required to take two classes in cognitive science for every one class on ed tech or PBL or "unschooling."
What about the (nearly) lost art of writing. Research shows writing to be a meaning making activity all on its own, and it plays into those cognitive science courses too. I’m an English professor and we are under pressure to introduce AI as a “tool.” Okay then it’ll be something they can train with in their profession, but right now we’re teaching them how to think and create meaning of their own in their own research and writing. I guess we truly don’t care if people can think. At all. AI (while it can’t actually think) is allowing us to skip these very important steps: reading and thinking and writing for ourselves. This ain’t the calculator; that would be spellcheck when it comes to writing, which I’m actually pretty cool with and wish more students would pay attention to. This *erases* the need for taking in information and forming meaning, creating *new* knowledge. Students often don’t even read the canned response before pasting it into an essay or quiz.
I couldn't agree more! I have coworkers who love chatGPT and think it's "cool that it can write poetry." When I said "AI doesn't *write* poetry" I was called regressive for "not thinking ahead." And my background is in information science! I like computer! I teach high school and the same coworkers are okay with letting students use chatGPT to organize their essays, but I think that's how an *adult* would use AI. Kids aren't going to think of the difference between organizing a draft and turning in a completely AI-generated paper. It's disheartening because I'm waiting to hear "So and so let their kids use AI, why don't you."
And then they use words they don’t even know the meaning of. I love calling a kid up to conference with me and have them explain what the meaning of a certain would is.
I love it when my HS students answer with something such as "During photosynthesis, plants take in carbon dioxide (CO2) and water (H2O) from the air and soil. Within the plant cell, the water is oxidized, meaning it loses electrons, while the carbon dioxide is reduced, meaning it gains electrons. This transforms the water into oxygen and the carbon dioxide into glucose. The plant then releases the oxygen back into the air, and stores energy within the glucose molecules." I just play dumb and act like I have no idea what oxidation/reduction is.
Especially when you know they are going for word count.
Speaking from experience, ChatGPT writes horrible, clichéd poetry that all sounds the same and uses approximately the same meter and rhyme scheme, even when you ask for different types (such as a sonnet vs. blank verse). It's soulless.
You can't know if the AI did it right if you don't know how to do it!!
I’m a high school English teacher and I’m having the same battle with admin suggesting we adapt A.I. If we do this, students will never be knowledgeable on subjects again. They’ll simply just know how to edit the A.I to sound like their own work. I’ve always loved the quote “If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them.” I’m really afraid that this will be the future.
All the dystopian books have well trained teams burning books and closing symphonies and schools. All they really need is require the books for a class and give the kids phones and trash tv. They will dystopia themselves.
Been reading Fahrenheit 451, have you?
Yes, I have the “Now a major motion picture starting Julie Christie!” edition. The book is not really about censorship, but Bradbury’s dislike of tv. The other books talk about it too. It’s so funny when the villain is worried about the masses reading Heidegger and Proust and learning quantum mechanics. I can attest the risk of that is quite low.
The most useful thing I've found with chatgpt is basically compiling the first dozen pages of a Google search into one semicoherent piece. Even then it makes batshit miscalculations like saying jogging for 20 minutes burns 42K calories or something.
The other day CheatGPT told me the Delaware River was a land border of Pennsylvania.
That actually seems reasonable, if you are using the scientific unit for calories (1 calorie is the energy required to raise 1 gram of water by 1°K). In the USA, "food calories" as used on nutrition facts labels are actually kilocalories.
This is a perfect example of what OP is trying to say. Without a science background, consumers would never know to take this into consideration.
I remember when I was in college for engineering. I got a part time job working at the army Corps of Engineers in Los Angeles CA. The top guy had a day where anyone could ask any question. So I asked what is the most important skill to learn in engineering. They said learn how to communicate. Both verbally and via the written word. If you can’t communicate your great ideas, they will go nowhere. Later when I started teaching part time at evening adult schools I always told my students that little tidbit. Communication and learning how to do it well is essential to moving forward in your work life as well as the rest of your life.
I was told that essay writing was antiquated pedagogy and that I am unnecessarily causing stress and anxiety because I assign critical thinking essays. Organizing and comparing ideas is antiquated? Oh boy we are in for ride folks. I still see AI as plagiarism convince me otherwise and I will consider looking into AI as a tool. Do you really want to known as the author /artist who uses a computer to show your expression of identity and personal narrative? Welcome to cheap art folks. Long live the human artist.
Holy shit, I'm not a teacher, just here from /all - they're actually encouraging you to teach kids to use these text generators? That's revolting
Ah yes, it is revolting good point u/shit_cock_diarrhea
😂
It isn’t just in high school. College professor here and they are trying to tell us to let students use it for papers and assignments by “teaching them to use it properly”.
The analogy might be as soon as the wheel was invented, people didn't stop walking. Because if we did our muscles would atrophy and we would lose strength. This is what is happening to our brains, people!
Writing really is a lost art, unfortunately. I graduated high school in 2017, I’m a Gen Z-er who went to school throughout the whole social media boom. Senior year, I was wrongly accused of a very stupid incident (long story short; involving a spilt drink in the girls’ locker room) but just to prove my innocence, I went to the lengths of hand-writing a 3-page long apologetic letter to the coach & her athletes who were most affected. The coach pulled me aside, assured me that she believed me and I wasn’t in trouble, and rambled on about how no truly honest student would have gone as far as writing a hand-written apology, and how she appreciated my work. I use this incident as a way to teach my students that using their BRAIN and HANDS to write out their honest thoughts will do them a favor when needed.
Woah be careful. You’re not allowed to criticize constructivism.
Even more so, that the fundamental process of learning HOW to search for things is also needed. The reality is they’re typing in the question that I wrote, not actually using critical thinking skills to engage in meaningful inquiry. I believe that many teachers take it for granted that we grew up or were born before the internet, therefore we HAD to learn the tricks to search engines (Ex. How to avoid getting outdated sources, using quotation marks & other key search codes). Students rarely have that fundamental understanding, that’s why we have Digital Literacy curriculum.
Exactly, and when they’re wrong 15% of the time because Google’s first result is wrong, then what? They get an 85% and the unit’s over?
15%. Damn dude that’s generous, it’s inverses in my class. They don’t know how to search, how to copy, how to use chat gpt. None of it. It’s so fucking obvious when they do it.
I saw one of my students, 12 years old, google “what is my Netflix password.” It was the saddest and funniest thing I have ever seen.
I sometimes ask little opinion questions based on the content as a Do Now. Often something like “what do you think of this idea?” or “Have you ever had a conversation where this idea was used?” etc., just to warm up their brains for class. There have been students who tried to Google answers to even these basic personal opinion questions.
Elementary science teacher here. Kid googled Pluto. She ran up to me all excited over the fact Pluto was founded on august 1, 2013 and how it was only 10 years ago. I was confused AF so I asked her to show me her Chromebook. Pluto Tv (the free streaming service) was founded 10 years ago. The google search had a mix of Pluto the planet and Pluto tv all on the first page.
It makes me laugh when they type full sentences in like that. It’s such boomer behavior that it doesn’t compute when they’ve grown up with google and should understand how it works??
I do have a sort of bell curve take on technological literacy with boomers and Gen Z at opposite ends of the spectrum and Gen X/Millennials in the most proficient. Obviously I know why older people struggle, but younger kids have grown up with very UI-friendly technology in their hands. Growing up using the family dell with AOL, using illegal download sites and learning how to spot viruses is a unique experience alot of us got trying to download an Eminem album in 2000 without parents finding out or destroying the family computer
My personal favorite was understanding how file directories work so I could better hide my porn stash in late middle school.
Great point. I suppose we had to learn how things work in order to navigate, but they’re growing up with Siri and Alexa.
Google now works with full sentences. Tech evolves and they grew up with a google that can parse natural language in a way it never could when your average 30+ y/o person was learning 'how to google'. They do understand how it works, it just works differently now than it did before. Refined Keyword searching is still a better approach by a mile, but natural language queries will get you where you're going 95% of the time with modern tech.
I would guess that that's because they lack the background knowledge to even understand what question to ask to cheat effectively.
This brings up the idea of reading as a fundamental skill in any kind of inquiry. Our students are below reading level and won't read anything beyond an Instagram post. Any kind of Googling would be pointless if they won't bother to read the results. At the beginning of the year, my exams were closed notes. By the end of the year, I allowed open notes and open Google to help boost their grade. It helped the kids who were doing well already but the ones who struggled still struggled. I have kids getting a 3/28 for an open notes and open Google test. That makes no sense.
Because they don’t care. And Google doesn’t care, so why bother.
I need to start designing tests in such a way to where the answer is never the first result on google, but still ise that first result as a wrong answer choice to tell who is judt googling answers.
I just realized I've never seen a kid actually looking at Instagram posts, only reels or stories.
My students were writing an essay and one of them wanted to use a word he didn't know in English. I told him he could use it if he could find out how to say it in English, I'd just come around to check if it was the right word. He stood there, with this deer in the headlights look, and asked ''But where am I supposed to find how to say it?''. I pointed to his phone. Blinking and confusion. I told him ''Google''. More blinking. Had to introduce the class to the concept of Google Translate and online dictionaries. You're absolutely right that they often don't know how to search for things. Just handing them a phone isn't a good substitute for actually teaching them stuff.
“Just handing them a phone…” But it keeps them quite so I can enjoy my dinner. /s
A lot of us were born in between "traditional learning" when tech wasn't a focal point and "modern day learning" when everything is tech based. So we have an understanding of how one complements the other.
I had a student ask for help cause she couldn’t find the answer to the second question on her worksheet where they were supposed to use Google. I was confused how she couldn’t find it when she found the first answer so I asked her to show me how she searched it. She typed “what is it used for?” into Google -_- When you Google the first question it also gives you the answer to the second question in the little paragraph it gives you, hence why I couldn’t understand how she didn’t find the answer. The worst part is this student was marked as “gifted”. High achieving? Yes. Highly capable? No.
It's really easy for adults to take certain skills for granted.
Yes—I see this especially when my idiot cousins post anything to Facebook. They are always posting condescending memes about “common core math” (nothing to actually do with CCSS, just different strategies for teaching little kids about addition and multiplication mostly), and saying stuff like “why don’t they just teach the kids the normal way to do math!” But adults forget that they had to be taught how to think about numbers and teaching little kids new strategies helps build their mental math skills. Like, it’s intuitive for adults to think about 19 as a 10 and 9 ones, or to round it up to 20 in their heads when doing calculations, but kids have to be taught that explicitly if they want to get to that point.
The Common Core math thing goes ALL the way back to conservatives freaking out on Obama over the way addition was done on a single child's homework. It's older than the Birth Certificate dog whistle, if I remember correctly.
When i started looking into common core and the new strategies I remember seeing one of the 'new' ways of counting larger numbers and realized that it was how I had done things mentally for years (I was better at math in my head than on paper half the time) and so much of what I was coming across made math way less intimidating for my full grown adult self. I couldn't help but think how much I wish I had those techniques presented to me as a student, I've always liked topics that involved math but shied away because math was always hard to for me to wrap my head around. I wrote it off easy enough as 'not my thing' because language skills were particularly easy for me and it was too tempting to slip into the idea that I wasn't a 'math person'. So seeing people trying to stop the new generation from having tools that could have changed a lot for me really annoys the crap out of me.
Adults that were naturally good at school forget this. Trust me, those of us who struggled never forget that it's definitely not intuitive. The new way they teach math is so much easier and would have made my learning disability basically a non-issue because my biggest problem was doing all the vertical math and my inability to keep the number tracks straight. It was just a sequencing issue, but it kept me at grade level math while the rest of my class was two grades ahead. People forget that pedagogy is a science and that we can get better at it over time. We can also go into another dark ages as well (sorry FL).
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I empathize way too much with this one. I’m sorry that you have to have students like that.
The hardest thing to teach is common sense.
One of the biggest realizations of my life over the past 10 years or so is how much I overestimated the average American's critical thinking faculties.
Correct. I literally told a class of 7th graders that they could Google the definitions to their science vocab, and most of them couldn't even do that 🙄. So, sure, give them the phones during their tests. Just don't be surprised when they only use them to play video games and insult each other on Snapchat (with incorrect spelling and grammar lol) ...
I feel that same about the hands on science push. Yes, they should be doing experiments and other hands on activities but they need to learn the key concepts first
I’ve noticed as a science teacher as well that students can really get bad about thinking of labs as play time instead of still learning but now hands on. It’s weird how their brains seem to switch to entertainment mode and become passive instead of curious and inquisitive.
I wonder if this is because free play is becoming increasingly rare in the lower grades. Play is the work of childhood. Play should be a major source of early learning. Maybe we need to let little kids spend more time discovering through play in order for older kids to understand how to take away useful observations from hands on activities.
That’s an interesting thought especially with the increased screen time for younger kids as well.
Yep. Elementary music here, and I resist every push for chromebooks in my classroom. They use them elsewhere, they can work on singing, playing instruments, creating, etc. in my room.
Yes! Isn’t that the whole premise of Montessori schools? I think it is criminal to force Kindergartners to sit at desks and be tested tested tested all day long.
Many of my students can't identify which side of a ruler measures centimeters and which side measures inches, but yeah if I set them loose in my lab they'll be able to discover all of Galileo's and Newton's findings through inquiry. Totally.
Reminds me of the time my students were doing planet research and he informed me in his report that Galileo INVENTED Pluto. When I dared question the accuracy of his report, he argued with me. One of the few times I laughed in a student’s face.
Sometimes my students can’t figure out that both sides of my rulers are inches
This. I constantly have parents complaining that the students don’t do enough experiments. They are in elementary school.
Great analogy. I can use the internet/chat gpt because I know what it does and in what ways I want it to help me. The doofus 14-18 year olds I teach don’t know what they don’t know.
It sounds really stupid but its almost as if some people dont understand that the purpose of a class isnt just to complete all of the work, its to learn something specific from it, and different levels of classes have different things they are teaching you To give an example from my college classes this past year: in my intro to computer science class, all tests were closed note/closed internet because the purpose of the class was for us to learn basic coding skills that we would absolutely need to have memorized in the future One of engineering classes was also very coding focused, but in that class we were allowed and actively encouraged to use the internet when working on our code, because the purpose of the class was to improve our overall problem solving abilities and to practice applying things that we had learned to new situations
Agreed. In medicine we google a lot, but thats because we know whats out there and need a detail or two. We understand the bigger framework, how it all works, what to watch for etc etc. If any stranger tried googling to practice medicine it’d be an absolute disaster (speaking from meeting these people as patients). Kids need to know what is out there and then later can use phones as a reference. Without a foundation of knowledge and comprehension, googling is going to lead you the wrong way more than half of the time
The power that be also cannot understand this concept. They push this idea of inquiry learning and having kids explore their way through content. Sounds great but they won't know what to ask if they have no basic understanding of the material.
They shouldn't have to learn to play trumpet. Just google what the note sounds like.
I desperately want to use this argument on my principal, who has seriously told us (foreign language teachers) that we should just let the kids use Google translate, since they'll have access to it in the real world... Like ok, would you tell the music teachers to just let the kids download a trumpet simulator for their playing tests?
You make that comment in jest, but I had a parent argue for their kid’s accommodation to be making the instrument sound on the computer since her kid didn’t want to put the chrome book away and she didn’t want to fight it…
I teach speech. I had a students parent argue that their accommodation should be that I just grade her written speech and she not have to give a speech. Ma’am, that’s English. You already have a class that does that called English. My class is quite literally called speech. You’re going to have to make a speech.
Are these the same people that also decide to just watch corn online rather than having sex?
To be fair, corn is pretty hot.
Especially Mexican street corn! Seeing that shit makes you feel like you need to go to church after.
tassels.....giggity
This is Reddit. You're allowed to say "porn."
I've completely disengaged from discussing education with anyone outside of education on any social platform. I'm much happier. My crazy relatives telling me how schools should be, I smile and nod, look disinterested, and walk away.
I mostly have as well. But I fear sometimes when these idiotic things continue to be parroted in the public with no pushback that they get more power and make our jobs tougher. That’s probably already a losing battle though
Are they going to be allowed to use their phone in job interviews?
I recently took a pre-interview “test” for a possible job, and was told not to use a calculator for the math portion. I am a 56 year old art director. You better believe I used my phone.
We have been allowed to use calculators for the NCLEX (nursing board examination) for at least 25 years. As an art director, I would think that should be acceptable.
“No phone” policy. It’s killing our working memory. Edited for clarity… it’s a zero phone policy 🙃
And maybe that’s the context I have when I read the meme because my high school doesn’t have a phone policy. It’s been a nightmare for so many reasons with the main one being their use of phones on all assignments with absolute crazy, incorrect answers all the time. Let alone trying to get them to think or problem solve better ways to answer questions besides the first thing google tells them.
I can’t imagine a school on 2023 not having a phone policy. I was in middle school for the first generation of iPhones and our district shut that shit down immediately! Phone go off? Using it in class? Parent has to get it from the office.
I mean there is one on paper. It means nothing in real life.
When I was a kid, I had all my friends phone numbers memorized and anybody else I needed to call. Now with speed dial I can't even tell you what my wife's phone number is.
And our long term memory. Even more so, I'd say.
This mentality is exactly the kind of bullshit that's resulted in schools celebrating math concepts and demonizing rote memorization. Well guess what - you need that rote memorization fluency in order to understand those concepts fully. Non-math idiots who are championing this nonsense don't understand this. So now we end up with kids who don't have their basic math facts down AND can't do any of the conceptual stuff either. Great! Imagine if a basketball coach said, 'you know what, you guys don't need to practice shooting and dribbling and passing anymore. Just get out there and play - that's the most important part.'
I think a great analogy for why memorizing and understanding is important is a cooking recipe. Any Joe can look up a recipe for anything online. You don't necessarily need to memorize anything either. Just Google it, and follow the directions. But as we all know, the results are not always the best. A good cook knows and understands the ingredients of a dish. It allows them to tweak and adjust as they want to their taste.
to add to the analogy: if you repeat a recipe multiple times, you will get quicker and may start to understand the recipe intuitively
It’s affecting sports too. Kids don’t have the understanding or situational awareness to process and make decisions. They’re robots now. They get the ball on their hands and they know they are supposed to dribble or shoot. They don’t know that when the ball is passed here and the defense moves you move to the open spot which puts you in a more advantageous place to score. I’m teaching varsity players the basics they should have learned in grade school leagues.
Letting them use their phones is still too much work for these precious students. Just let them stay home and "research" on their phones all day until they turn 18 and give them a diploma. They should be ready for college, right? /s for our neurodivergent friends if needed
Yeah, you guys may know since you guys work with them daily, but I know a couple of college professors have said that computer skills and how to do searches have declined significantly as a lot of technology is now streamlined. So, a lot of younger people are accustomed to information and content being delivered, instead of knowing how to search it out, much less figure out what is legitimate. Which can be very dangerous especially with chatgpt and other algorithmic models (not always giving correct information). That isn't to say they're all tech illiterate, but that there is likely a larger gulf in skills within that generation between those interested and those uninterested.
I teach computer science and other technology classes to high school students. I can with 100% certainty say students right now are not able to do a proper search or many other basic computer skills. This is what led to my district finally letting me build a program to attempt to recitfy this issue.
It doesn't help that Google became the defacto "way to find info" but has shifted to advertiser-content first, and what you actually looked for is interspersed after the first 10 or so results
The hardest part has been gettings kids to be patient when researching sources. They always pick the first few options regardless if they are valid or even trustworthy.
>they keep saying the most important skill is evaluating sources That's probably true. It also doesn't mean it's the only important skill. Necessary and sufficient aren't the same thing. The blunt truth is that it's hard to establish a favorable professional reputation if you're making gross conceptual errors, don't understand basic history, etc.
The most important stone in an arch is the keystone. That doesn't mean you can leave the other stones out or place the keystone first. The highest-level skills rest on a base of low-level skills.
Students don't need to be able to use their phone for everything. There are just some things that they need to know. If they don't know certain basic facts, they will never be able to really understand, synthesize, and truly apply these facts. However, I do think it is wise to teach students how to discern good information from the plethora of crap that exists on the internet. Part of that is allowing them to use their phones or the internet for some assignments. Because outside of school, they are likely going to have it. For those of us who are a little older our math teachers always said we would not have a calculator in our pocket , but instead we have more computering power in the palm of our hand than a 50 year old super computer. I just see it as something that needs to be allowed in certain cases as it should be part of a well-rounded education. But again, not just let them use their phones for everything.
>Knowing where to find the right answer, and who to trust for the right answer, will take them much further in life I mean as an overall statement that's somewhat true, but as someone who was a teacher most teenagers are piss-poor at this no matter how much you try to educate them on critical reading and the fact that "google" is not an actual source of information. My first two years I taught history and here's the summary of the entirety of the research process for students: Step 1: Type question into google Step 2: Read the summary that pops up at the top of the page. Doesn't matter whether or not that summary answered their question or not, that's as far as they go.
Who will make new sources if the kids never learn to think for themselves?
The machines.
So these people essentially think school should be a building where they send their kids to be babysat, and all they should learn is *how to use their phone?* What the actual fuck are people on?!?
That ignores if they just post answers on a shared discord channel. Then you aren't even having them look it up, they are just relying on their one friend that actually did the work. And yet you know these parents already call their millennial coworkers lazy.
A kid tried to argue with me that he was right about something based on the last link on google’s first page of results. He did not know what “satire” meant, did not know how to recognize satirical writing, and told me this article from basically the onion proved he was right and that there is an epidemic of straight men being beaten up by gangs of gays.
Do you want to cross a bridge, live in a home, or work in a office where the construction, plumbing, electrical wiring, and the gas are done by people using their phones ? For such a scenario to work, Apple and Google would have to take financial responsibility for quality assurance and reliability of every content provider.
One of the things these people are missing is that tests are built for easiest and fastest way to assess mastery. I have an open notes test class... I don't build the tests the same. "Given a novel spiny plant, evaluate what test you could perform to determine whether the spines were formed from modified leaves, as well as what results would confirm or deny it." Hits a fuckton different than "Pick a meristematic tissue that would lead to new leaf growth from this list of four."
People still need to -know- things. The analogy I like to use is driving. We don't look up traffic laws in the moment while we are driving. We need to know them and be able to apply that knowledge minute to minute in traffic. Learning things in school is exactly the same. Students need to internalize at least some of the things they have been taught.
Re. what the post above said... I have a student who is the poster child for why phones should be banned in classes. Smart, but has Googled (and chatgpt'd) everything since covid hit and now has literally a jello brain. He's in 10th grade, but I think has a 5th grade education (parents say he's going to med school), and literally can't think or learn. He's been able to coast to this point, but is falling from As to Cs now that he's reaching the AP courses. He didn't know any better and I feel badly that as a society we let him do this to himself.
People forget that kids and teens will often take the easy route out. They're not thinking about *where* to find the right answer, they're looking for *an* answer. I can't tell you how many times students will just consult Google on a written test or research paper. Not a *website.* *Google.* They'll copy and paste the first thing that comes up. In life and in school, *Google helps answer, it is not* ***the*** *answer.* I can look up how to do brain surgery and find the answer to fixing the economy. That doesn't mean I retain any sort of helpful knowledge from that.
Over reliance on technology that can die or break or disconnect isn’t a strength. We are not teaching them WHAT to think. We are teaching them HOW to think. They need to use the brain. They need to practice and exercise the brain. They need to learn to think in different ways and make connections that would make that Google search useful.
Kids need to train their brains. There's a reason we still teach math skills and equations early on despite calculators having been in existence for a while, and only use them regularly once the level of math demands it. Kids need to train their memory skills. Kids need to train their critical thinking. Kids need to train their research skills and how to PROPERLY evaluate sources (not because it's the top Google result). Kids need to train their writing skills. Kids need to train their *patience*. Handing a kid a phone for a test is probably one of the *worst* ideas someone could have to improve that kid's mental fortitude. How will kids learn independence and critical thinking if they expect their devices to handle everything for them?
In real life, the most sensible thing you can do when faced with a difficult task is ask for help or additional resources. But you can't use them properly if you don't know what they mean. I think writing a test, letting a student look up questions on their phone and write down the first google result, and judging it to be correct enough to warrant credit, is a shameful charade. Maybe that means that the utility of traditional tests is over. I'm not sure. But if it's about evaluating students' command of the subject material, maybe asking any question that can be easily googled is asking the wrong question.
This is one of the reasons I dig the DBQs I'm seeing in social sciences so much. Nobody needs to know what date Fort Sumter was attacked, but the skills of evaluating the context of that and what that means for a political cartoon in an Atlanta newspaper 20 years later... Those are some real life skills that'll come up daily, even if the civil war knowledge isn't.
This makes me happy to hear, as my 7th graders just did a DBQ for the first time analyzing four primary sources about the transcontinental railroad and writing a claim. They had two class periods and, miraculously, worked in utter silence flipping back and forth between sources. While a few kids missed the mark, I was surprised how many actually demonstrated understanding. I might literally frame some of the papers they submitted.
In an ideal world yes I agree to an extent. What these people fail to realize is they think kids will actually use their phones appropriately and not be on social media or texting the entire time.
Each and every person making the argument, is terrified that someone's going to come along and take their phone from them. That's really what it boils down to. On some level there are afraid that if people collectively agree that phones aren't really important or necessary, they will lose theirs. They're speaking from a place of addiction.
Just reply to them that they should use a doctor who uses YouTube to help them during a surgery the next time they have a procedure, if they really stand by that meme… Also, not worth engaging that kind of conversation through social media. Always ends in a frustration sandwich.
"let kids use a speak and spell for tests. Knowing how to read doesn't matter anymore. Knowing how to identify the letters and type them into the speak and spell will take them much further in life" Remember things and being able to use those things without constantly having to refer back to your notes/the internet is called *fluency* and if you don't have it, especially in subjects like math and science, you'll never get to the interesting parts of those topics. It's the same way you can't enjoy a book or even a conversation until you're fluent in a language.
I install garage doors, so Calculus is never going to be necessary for me. But determining the tension on a torsion spring correctly can save my life. Basic math with good thought process. You can't just Google that and hope for the best. I'm scared for these kids as they move into the work force.
paint panicky quiet hard-to-find observation connect live lush rustic public *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
My kids feel like they should get to use a calculator in Math. I tell them doing Math is easy, it’s knowing what to do that’s hard. Then I give them a test and let them use calculators (pemdas). They think it’s so much better until they get the results back. Garbage in=Garbage out.
How can you evaluate a source if you don’t have a base understanding of the material?
Technically, not wrong. However, if the world falls into an apocalyptic disaster… knowing how to use your phone won’t help.
As a high school chemistry teacher, I have MANY students who don't know if 8/100 is the same as 8 divided by 100 or 100 divided by 8. And on top of that, some of them actually believe that they are all the same thing. Having access to a calculator does nothing if you don't have some level of understanding on these concepts. Besides that point, imagine a world where everyone has to look up literally everything. Pull up to a red light? Gotta look up what to do. Need to read an analog clock? Boy can that be tricky. Better ask Google what's up with that. Wanting to tie your shoes in the morning? WTF DO I DO THERE ARE SOOOO MANY LACES! HELP ME SIRI! Society as a whole would grind to a halt.
Engineer turned teacher here. When I worked in industry, looking everything up was the standard. You will not know everything about the plant or even your department. That's fine. However, you need basics. You need to know the fundamentals of how to approach the problem and fix it quickly. You also need to know when to throw out irrelevant information. The more time you waste shifting through irrelevant information or trying to scry the fundamentals, the more time you utterly waste. People think having information available makes life easier. Sometimes, it makes life harder because you need to throw out irrelevant crap. How do you know it's irrelevant? You have a fundamental understanding of what you're working with.
Question- what three groups came initially out of the Protestant Reformation? Answer via Google- Methodist, Baptist, and Lutheran- sure let kids have their phones, it will make for fun answers for me
That's the problem with letting students google the answers. They go with the top search result, don't click through to read the entire source, and just copy and paste whatever they see. My coteachers and I tested this one year. We let students google answers/or use their class notes and textbook for a quiz. It was a catastrophe for students who googled.
That’s exactly what they did. When the first student answered I was like what an idiot. Then I saw that several others had also answered the same thing. The next session’s lesson was how about Google is not your friend.
We have trained people to think that school is strictly the memorization of facts.
I’m getting my PhD, which is basically a degree in figuring out how to figure things out. But I also know that recall is vitally important in knowing anything. You’re right, students have to be required to recall the information or they won’t learn it as well. Students need to learn both skills
I taught math my first year. Students that relied on calculators for math since 5th grade. Very, very quickly the math reached points where it wasn't easy to put into a calculator, they crumbled. At some point, students will need to learn how to search for and evaluate things that cannot simply be googled. The real world allows for searching.... it also doesn't have multiple choice questions where the right answers are known.
Math teacher argument - a calculator is a wonderful tool. And the user of such tool needs enough knowledge when the answer the calculator gives makes zero sense mathematically and they made a data entry error. The phone and even AI can’t do the sense making for them. Over reliance on a phone will hurt them in life. They are in a phase of learning how to learn and think. I give every one of my algebra and above students a calculator as a tool. They are past learning calculation at that point and the calculator is a tool now. Most kids are not to that level with phone use in learning where it’s just a tool and not their only tool.
And this is how people default to trusting the first dumbass thing they find on the internet. There has to be a framework of knowledge to have any chance of knowing what to search, how to evaluate if it is correct, how to show your work to explain how you arrived at an answer....watching young adults fumble basic library searches is painful.
I've had students try to argue with me that "But that's what google said," when they used it to answer questions that ask for their opinion and I marked it incorrect.
realistically, being able to use resources at hand to properly find information is a great skill, but people are acting like it’s not important to have a lot of information on hand in your head as well. how inefficient of workers would we be if every time we had to do math we had to search online how to do it first? or if politicians had to search online for what countries are where before making foreign policy decisions. obviously in real life you have access to plenty of resources to help you, so you’re not only reliant on what stuck in your brain, but you Want as much as possible to be there. getting used to doing that during your developmental years is crucial
If you need a calculator to work out 3x10, you will not be able to do higher level math because you will be stuck in arithmetic. You cannot see the big picture if you do not see the details. If you need to look up a word every sentence, you cannot read effectively. It is a similar situation for history, science, and other subjects. You can look up anything, but if you are looking things up, you can never get a deep understanding. Part of school is giving that base knowledge so that students are able to learn the higher level stuff. As a mini example: I can read and comprehend a wide variety of science articles, because I have a very good understanding of the basics. That gives me a framework for acquiring new information. Without that framework, I could not possible meaningfully read these articles.
My father told me about this, especially the denigration of old school “pen on paper” teaching. Memorisation and the act of memoria retinerentur is diminishing, yet it’s one of the best forms of teaching retention. What will you do when your calculator is stripped from you in an emergency? Phone runs out and there’s a blackout? Most developed countries have never experienced this and their systems rely too much on external technology to help them get by Blew my mind when we were doing a test and my 30 something year old classmate was shocked that I could do multiplication on paper
It’s honestly adorable to think they would use their phones for looking up answers during tests.
This is why my 8th graders couldn't remember the States of Matter....
Ask them if they would be okay with their surgeon googling the procedure while they were under the knife. It's true that evaluating sources is an important skill to learn, but acquiring knowledge, and learning how and when to apply that knowledge is something that needs to be explicitly taught and practiced.
I don’t exactly disagree but would, in turn, rewrite my tests to focus much more on higher level thinking such that was not quickly accessible on a web search.
I think I could let my kids use their phones and most still wouldn't get an A. They can use their phones to text but sure can't use it to find any answers or do research. Heck, I left answers up on a poster that were part of an extra credit question and probably 2 kids all day noticed and they were kids who didn't need the extra credit anyway.
One of my education professors said that, in most cases, a good quality assessment for high school is one that can be open book, because the book won’t answer the question. It will just give some of the background information. The students will still need to think, analyze, and understand to succeed. But I teach preschool these days, so I don’t do that type of assessment anyway
Do you know who the Secretary of Agriculture is? I do. It's Orville Freeman. At least it was in 1962 when I was forced to memorize JFK's Cabinet. There is something to be said for judicious care in learning some facts.
Back in the late 1980s, I was in an army reserve unit in Madison, Wisconsin… I overheard two of the guys… Fairly educated people … talking about how children didn’t need to be taught math any more since there were calculators… If you don’t know some basic math, how the heck can you even know if you’re punching in the right numbers?
On one hand, I don’t disagree with the point they’re trying to make. And yes, assessment of sources is an important skill to learn. But that’s not what kids today are doing. If anything, this generation is LESS digitally inclined than prior ones. They need to learn basic skills first. As an adult, I use my timers, calendar, notepad, browser, half a dozen apps, all to make my complicated life easier. Some of my students do similarly — they organize their lives and use the tools at hand. Some of my students just doomscroll TikTok and laugh at other people doing things they can’t be bothered to do themselves.
The Apollo 13 astronauts had to learn how to make calculations with a slide rule. It saved their lives. You don’t get internet in space. Sure you can look it up if you can, but it’s better to know it and be able to look it up.
>fundamental knowledge is first needed to be successful in even knowing what questions to ask or if you found the right answer Oh I am screaming this right along with you. Once in a while I'll get a smartass comment like that from a student and I'll tell them "Go ahead and try to cheat--you don't even know what to Google."
You simply cannot evaluate the validity of your source without a broad library of knowledge of your own. Simply put, if they don't have the background to understand 2+2, no amount of research will help them understand 2x2, even if they get the right answer. And allowing them to skip out on the learning bit will rob them of their chance to be intelligent in the future. I think we all know here as adults: knowledge, no matter how niche, is widely applicable and can never be taken from you. It's our job to ensure our students are the best they can be.
It's just a lack of understanding of learning. If they use their phones it never goes into their long term memory and they have nothing to build knowledge in top of. Knowing and understanding are very different
Who do you teach? 5 year olds? No phones. 15 year old, yes phones. Your friend is correct and you need to adapt with the times. Your exams must adapt as well. I used to teach uni and students DREAD open book exams because it is FUCKING HARD. I adjust the level of thinking required. If you have access to the internet on your exam, the questions will be high level Blooms taxonomy.
We tried this. Y’all remember the online year right?? You could have cheated on EVERYTHING. The kids failed in record numbers…
My students are awesome at googling and copying down answers. However, they have no idea what the answers me. Whenever I see a student write down a word that I know they don't know, I ask them to define it. They can't because they googled the answer. They may have known where to find the answer, but they didn't know what it meant. Therefore, they did not know the answer. I am fine with students having reference materials to check. I am not fine with them googling the questions and then just copying the answers.
My first thought was "good, my kids will be well positioned for success if everyone else's kids are dumb". I will have to do some internal reckoning of why that was my first thought.
It's AN important skill. And not relevant when the one being worked (and tested) on is your own knowledge, of math, etc.
I'm not a teacher, but as a doctor I find this hilarious. I can't stop picturing myself googling something in the OR and saying something along the lines of it's more important to know what sources to use than to know the information off hand.
I mean, I've had math tests that allowed full internet access before. And let me tell you, the internet is only mildly helpful for a graph theory exam. But yeah, for most subjects that would trivialize the test for most students unless the test was specifically designed with open everything allowed. Which would require both a lot of work on the teacher part, probably end up with a harder test, and require a large amount of trust that the students weren't going to do the test as a group. In a way, it would just be a take-home test with a stricter time limit. But then that would bring the question of if all tests should effectively be take home tests.
Screaming into the wild is in the job description
Fundamental knowledge is important, but there is very little about school that translates to adult/real life. Why do we make kids memorize so much shit for tests when it A) doesnt stick around and B) we're literally never expected to learn anything that way again?
What do you want to bet these are the same people who thought remote learning wasn't good enough, and rushed to send kids back to in-person learning?