The (US) academic system is not set up to accommodate anyone, really. It's designed to get someone just below average through their standardized testing and not much more. If you don't fit that mold you're shit outta luck. You either suffer through it like "normal" people, or you find it utterly intolerable and fail or drop out.
Personally, I learn best backwards from everyone else. Building up very slowly from fundamentals and basically starting over with basic algebra every semester is actual hell. I need to see the goal concept fully formed and functional, and then work backwards to derive the fundamentals I'm missing.
Generally speaking, once I understand a concept I have it forever. I usually only need the briefest of refresher on mechanics and formulae as I use them. Spending the first month of calculus class going over 9th grade algebra is an unbelievable waste of my time.
My final attempt at college was a CS degree. I made it through one semester and did not even get to a single CS concept. It was at least a year and a half of bullshit prerequisites that I had to pay for. I dropped out when I had to write a presentation to the board of my hypothetical company on the benefits of upgrading their printers. I'm not kidding. I paid real money for this.
I've totally given up on the educational system. I don't fit into the cookie cutter ideal of the average idiot grinding out a degree. I just can't do it.
I think probably the ideal way for me to learn is to spend a lot of time one on one with a domain expert that can show me the final concept and work backwards with me to fill in the gaps in my knowledge. I don't want or need, nor can I tolerate spending time going over things I already know for the 30th time. I need to learn the things I don't know. School just doesn't work that way.
>Personally, I learn best backwards from everyone else. Building up very slowly from fundamentals and basically starting over with basic algebra every semester is actual hell. I need to see the goal concept fully formed and functional, and then work backwards to derive the fundamentals I'm missing.
Same, and at work too. I think it's because we think big picture and conceptually. Tell me the outline, and I'll seek out missing information and fill in puzzle pieces, until I can grok it. It's a slow process but learning from first principles I find absolutely boring and unengaging.
I found math in high school utterly meaningless, a set of drills and exercises to do again and again without explanation.
If you go to the gym and you want to do some exercises, you'll generally get a list and try to learn them correctly.
If math teachers taught sports, no one would ever do anything because they would never understand what the goal was. What's the end result? The complex end result should be made known so that we know why we're doing something.
With math it's, shut up and do your drills and if you don't you'll be punished with bad grades. See that guy in the corner with his head down and protractor? He loves it, be like him.
That's one area where I think LLMs will shine outside of the hype zone: they could boost a student's ability to make progress without supervision.
And I understand that there are great teachers out there and an LLM cannot replace that, but at the same time there are a lot of bad teachers wasting everybody's time.
Yup, I've actually gotten pretty decent results out of an LLM for subjects I'm already pretty familiar with. If we ever figure out the hallucination problem, LLMs could revolutionize education overnight.
I think that almost everyone would benefit enormously from having a focused and dedicated one-on-one tutor. Just imagine if you could call up the leading world expert in any field at any time to ask any question you could possibly have. We as a species would get so much more done.
At least that's what I want AI to be in the next decade or so. A tool to push humans to a much higher potential where we can solve our own problems more effectively. I'm afraid we'll skip that step, though and go straight to worshiping the AI that makes the most paperclips.
Anyway, I'm still experimenting off and on with local LLMs to get me closer to where I want to be. I'm not sure it's much faster to use an LLM and continually verify its output, but it does at least provide structure and guidance for my own self-teaching.
