A couple of nights ago my wife and I used ChatGPT to generate a bunch of various report card comments. The results were fairly good as a starting point but, what was really interesting is that ChatGPT corrected terminology errors I had made in the prompts.
For example, I wrote "ppositional defiance," and in the response, ChatGPT corrected the term to "Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD)" along with a brief description of the disorder.
And, in response to my jokingly using the term "little monster" to describe a disruptive student, ChatGPT chided me for using the expression, calling it "utterly inappropriate."
It makes one wonder, do students need to learn how to write? The question has been asked before in a 'simpler' context. Do students need to learn long division? Seems like if not now, soon, the answer is no.
Except in the narrowest sense of "writing" meaning to put words on a page in grammatical order, it can't really be compared to learning to perform a mechanical chore like long division. It's more comparable to learning numeracy. To learn to write is to learn how to structure thoughts in human language, just as to learn math is to learn to structure thoughts in a universal framework built on logic.
One could make the question more explicit: If machines can think, is there a need for students to learn how to think? If not, is there a need to teach anything at all?
Just my personal view: The presence of reasoning machines makes it all the more urgent for our species to learn reasoning skills. The passing on of knowledge has perhaps been our key evolutionary advantage. Without the ability to write (and to structure thoughts), future humans would be defenseless against whoever or whatever could do so.
Sure, basic writing is probably still important, but more nuanced things, for instance, do students really now need to learn the form of an argumentative essay? That is/was a good skill to have. But now or in the future one could say i want an argument essay for why we should build this feature. i'd just get ChatGPT to do it.
eh, learning form in argument is exactly the same thing as learning to order one's thoughts. Would you do away with a lawyer's need to parse the law, or an engineer's need to learn control structures because a computer could write a paper they wouldn't understand? We need to be teaching people to spot the flaws in AI arguments and to spot when other people have used AI to write those arguments. There's no way to do that unless the students are competent in writing excellent arguments themselves.
My mother-in-law has ranted many times about how they don’t teach cursive anymore. She doesn’t know how to use a computer.
I think you raise a very interesting (and likely very controversial) thought to explore.
My quick opinion is that we can only teach so much. And the list of things that could be taught is forever growing. We need to be pragmatic about priority.
I just hate we optimize putting info into computer (typing vs cursive), but now computers can just read writing, so why are we so focused on typing? Just make computers adapt to humans, not train humans to accommodate machines.
Print and cursive are about the same amount of effort, and that amount is a lot more than hitting keys. The average person can type 40 words per minute, or handwrite 40 letters per minute.
I agree — but then, I teach & remediate handwriting. Nowadays, more and more of my work is to teach humans to do what computers have learned to do: namely, to read, cursive, whether or not they write that way too.
I just tried a quiz of 15 multiple choice questions on New Zealand history, and I asked it to indicate the correct answer. It made a couple of glaring errors, which was disappointing.
