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Womansplaining with Julie Barrett
Julie Barrett, Founder of Conservative Ladies of America, covers today's trending hot topic with a Christian world view.
Womansplaining with Julie Barrett
A Veteran Teacher Speaks Out: How AI Is Undermining Education
A veteran teacher with 23 years of experience discusses the alarming impact of artificial intelligence in education and how it's creating a generation unable to process or retain knowledge.
• Knowledge builds like a pyramid, with basic facts forming foundations for more complex understanding
• Students using AI to complete assignments bypass essential learning processes needed for knowledge retention
• The ability to recall information from memory is crucial for making connections across different domains
• Teachers are increasingly using AI to create lessons and grade students' AI-generated work
• Most students lack the knowledge base to evaluate whether AI-generated content is accurate
• One-to-one device policies in schools create dependency and reduce students' ability to develop essential skills
• Screen dependency corresponds with declining handwriting skills and reduced ability to focus
• Government-controlled AI in education could potentially control what information students receive
• Parents should limit screen time, encourage reading physical books, and provide outdoor play opportunities
• Finding communities that share your educational values becomes increasingly important as schools become more technology-dependent
Take control of your child's education by serving as their project manager and finding resources aligned with your family's values.
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Subscribe to the Substack: Dissident Teacher | Substack
Trump Executive Order on AI for Youth: Advancing Artificial Intelligence Education for American Youth – The White House
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Conservative Podcast | Julie Barrett Womansplaining
A couple weeks ago, president Trump signed an executive order advancing artificial intelligence for youth, and while I know that AI is the future and, of course, our students will need to be able to use it and even be able to program it, it raises a number of concerns, and that's what we're going to dive into on today's episode. Hey everybody, I'm Julie Barrett and you are listening to the Woman'splaining podcast. I am also the founder of Conservative Ladies of America and we are an organization of like-minded ladies and gentlemen who are working hard to encourage, empower and equip citizens across the country to engage in their government, to stand up, speak up and create change on a local level, a state level and even on a national level. You can learn more about Conservative Ladies of America and how you can get involved in our grassroots movement by visiting our website, conservativeladiesofamericacom. That's conservativeladiesofamericacom.
Speaker 1:Today on the podcast, I've got an amazing guest for you to hear from today. This is a teacher who is going to remain anonymous, which is why we did audio only for this podcast episode. This teacher has a wealth of knowledge in the process of learning and has been a teacher for 23 years, and has some really important insights about the learning process and how technology and AI are really hampering the ability for American students to actually learn. What you're going to hear today is going to alarm you. I hope that this doesn't just alarm you but actually compels you to take action and in this conversation, towards the end of the discussion, you're going to get some tangible things that you can do to step up and make a difference. So, without further ado, let's dive in.
Speaker 1:I hope you enjoy today's show.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you so much, dissident Teacher, for joining me, and we are keeping your identity anonymous, as you are still in the teaching field and come from a public school system in a blue state, and I've been following you on X for quite a while now and I really, really love the truth and the spotlight that you bring to the public education system, and today I want to really dive in with you.
Speaker 1:We could go through so many different issues and topics on public education, but I specifically wanted to have you on to talk about this executive order from President Trump about artificial intelligence with youth. I'm guessing this is directed mostly towards public schools, and you have a series of posts on your Substack, which is linked in the description of this podcast, so encourage everybody to go dig through these, but I would love to. I'm not even sure where to start because AI is really over my head. So maybe you can kind of talk about how AI has been impacting the public school system so far and kind of what do you see? What are your? I'd really like to hear just your off the cuff thoughts on this, on this executive order and and really mandating this into the public school system.
Speaker 2:I mean I hesitate to say, you know, to put any political sort of inferences, because I just don't know enough and I hate the game anyway, so I'm probably not. I can't really speak to that, except to say that there is definitely a lot of money to be made there. There's a huge incentive If you can replace most teachers, especially the sort of the quote unquote expert class of teachers for, like your master's degree, they're very expensive. And if you can get rid of a lot of them and have AI and the promises that AI will be individualized, and have AI and the promises that AI will be individualized, and you'll see this with a lot of like sort of the AI forward education accounts where they're like entrepreneurs that's what we call them educational entrepreneurs right, and so they're like oh, we can do everything your school does in two hours and your kid's going to have better outcomes. Who wouldn't want that? Right and so.
Speaker 2:But if the public schools end up using AI, the parents won't have the control over sort of what the kids are getting. There's not going to be a lot of supervision of that. But for the government it would be a huge win because the cost of the average teacher, especially in the blue state very, very expensive. So if you can sort of just have people who are less educated and less expensive, if the labor pool is sort of cheaper, that's going to be a huge boon for the state, although I don't know, it's kind of it has a cost too right, because you know you have that, obviously, like tenured union professionals who would not love this as long. Maybe if they could keep some of their jobs it would be okay. But I think that's sort of one of the motivations or one of the incentives for adopting AI, but I just don't. You know, I think that's sort of one of the motivations or one of the incentives for adopting AI, but I just don't you know I think maybe the best place to start is to understand how kids learn.
Speaker 2:And the thing that people have to understand is and this has been going on, we've been teaching basically the same way for hundreds and hundreds of years which is sort of this idea that at the lower levels, at the younger ages, what kids are sponges, right, everyone knows that and they just pick up random facts and random words and they just kind of hold on to them because the brain is geared for just knowledge acquisition, and so that's just like, okay, what is a tree, what is a bird, who is mom, who is dad? And so they've sort of just picking up all these facts, and these facts are basic building blocks, and those building blocks the best way to explain is like it's like a pyramid, right, and so you turn these blocks into not even blocks, they're kind of like triangles themselves. There's a lady named Efrat first, who I should definitely credit with this, and she's out of. She's an Israeli and she is a. She's into neuroscience and she's sort of trying to explain and help teachers understand how learning works. So she has some beautiful diagrams that are linked in my sub stack, and I also have these articles on X as well. So if you're, if you like X better, you can go there and find my articles on AI there, articles on X as well. So if you're, if you like X better, you can go there and find my articles on AI there. But basically what she's shown is that knowledge builds, it solidifies, and then you can build.
Speaker 2:So sort of imagine like small triangles that build into a bigger triangle and then that becomes a foundation for for more things and like bigger concepts and bigger ideas. So you start with this was my analogy in my article you start with that's mom and that's dad and that's brother and that's grandma, and eventually you get the concept of. So that's like at the very young age. And then, as they get older, they sort of get the concept of family and then they start to begin to understand what family means. And then you sort of have okay, here is what belongs in a family. This is not the family, this is the family. And that's sort of like you're getting up to higher levels. So that's like upper elementary, like third, fourth, fifth, right, where you're sort of differentiating things that fit into a category versus don't. And then, as you get more knowledge and you build sort of, you kind of build out your conceptual understanding of things. Now you can get into more nuance and be like okay, well, how does the community fit into family? How does family fit into the community? Does our family always fit into the community? In what way does our family fit into the community? So you start to ask these bigger and bigger questions about how we fit into different concepts and different sort of connected ideas. How do we connect to these things? And so you basically are building these big pyramidal structures, right? Well, what's happening with AI is that the AI is doing two things.
Speaker 2:One, we saw this earlier with Google and you saw this just terrible idea that just permeated K-12 education. And actually some teachers that post on my or comments on my articles talk about they're like very old math teachers. I'm like we warned about this when they adopted calculators. Right, like the calculator was gonna to be the end of math knowledge. And in a way, they were right, because I have written about kids that I had in sort of I had like a very high level AP class and my students struggled with multiplying two digit numbers. So like these are wealthy, well, supposedly well educated, privileged seniors who weren't sure what to do with 18 times 12. Like they weren't, they weren't sure. And and these are parents, like these are the children of professionals lawyers, engineers, accountants like these are upper middle class, very successful people. And so like, literally, that calculator argument was not wrong, because what happened was at the elementary school level. The teachers are like, well, they don't need this anymore, right, they don't need to, they don't need to memorize their times tables as much practice with addition, they don't need their math facts, they don't need this, like these fundamental skills, because they have a calculator and they can just go to the calculator.
Speaker 2:And so then we get in 2012, 2011, 2012,.
Speaker 2:We get Siri or we get the iPhone, and now you have basically a computer in your pocket that you can just quickly, as my students say, search it up, which I hate that because grammatically it's terrible.
Speaker 2:But like I'm just going to search it up, which I hate that because grammatically it's terrible, but like I'm just going to search it up and I'm like, well, that's nice, but at some point you're going to need to be able to recall this thing. And why this is important is like people, people go, well, why can't you just look it up? Well, because this is a problem when you're dealing with a complicated set of connections and you're trying to make connections and usually we do this as humans to solve a complex problem, right? I'm pulling information from my knowledge of science and maybe history. I know I read that story about that boy and he solved it this way. So maybe I'm pulling literature and maybe there's an analogy or like an allegory in religion that maybe would help me with a relationship, right? So I'm trying to pull all this information together and then make the connections. Well, here's the problem If you don't have that knowledge, how do you pull from multiple places to get an answer? You don't right.
Speaker 2:So you don't have the knowledge in the first place to even say, like I know that story, we don't know those stories anymore, I don't remember that story, I don't have the math, so I can't test whether that seems like a real claim, like that claim that you know that this percentage claim seems off to me. Well, why does it seem off? And I think a lot of adults. Because we are educated and one of the big problems with teaching and education in general is that when you're good at something, you forgot how you got good at it. You're just natural to you. You don't think about. You don't think about oh, I actually had to do this on my fingers and I really struggled with division. I remember struggling and we just forget because we're like, oh, I've internalized this process, I don't have to think about it anymore Right.
Speaker 2:And so we're just like, okay, well, why don't you just just look it up? And it's fine, and eventually you'll remember it. But what I have found and probably you've experienced this too is like you'll look something up and you'll find the answer, and then a couple of weeks later you'll need to look it up again and you're like, wait, I just looked that up. How come I can't remember this? Right, and it's because I looked it up right. I'm outsourcing the knowledge to another entity. I'm saying like, well, I'm just going to go here and I can keep going here, so my brain is not holding on, it's not being tested with that information, it's not being forced to recall it, and that's.
Speaker 2:You know, without getting too much in the educational weeds here, it's necessary to forget in order to learn. So you kind of like you learn something in class, a teacher lectures it, you forget about it, you go home. Maybe a couple days later there's a quiz. You review for the quiz. You've forgotten it. So that's why you review again. It's like, well, I don't remember it, so I need to review, right.
Speaker 2:And then you don't look at it again, and then the quiz forces your brain again Okay, can I remember this? And did I have enough exposure to it over time and did I test myself enough times to, in recalling this information, to have it sort of literally like solidify into that? Remember, I told you that pyramidal structure in my brain? Do I have the pyramid, or is it just like a jumble of messy blocks that you know I might be able to recall, but I might not?
Speaker 2:And so what's happening is we use, um, the as we use, as we outsource our memory more and more, because what, what learning really is, is memorizing. As much as people demonize this constantly, I think it's such a toxic thing to say, oh, it's rote memorization, as though that in itself is bad. It's like no, no, no, no. One of the reasons I'm really good at literature is because I have memorized poetry and I have memorized quotes and I have memorized scriptures from the Bible and I have memorized what words mean, like I don't have to look up these words all the time because I know what they mean Right.
Speaker 2:And because of that, I have a very high level of literacy which allows me to access and problem solve across multiple domains. Right, and so this is sort of what is lacking, because now, let's say I didn't know anything about, I didn't have any. I know a lot of what words mean, and you see this with students they don't know, they don't have a very large vocabulary, they don't know they don't have a very large vocabulary and so when they approach a harder, a higher level text, it's not that they're, it's actually not a reading problem. And this is a big issue that people don't. They struggle with because we see the state test scores. And what do the test scores say? Well, on the reading comprehension, your kid did really badly. So people start thinking, okay, is he dyslexic? Does he have a reading?
Speaker 2:a visual processing disorder? Does he have autism? Does he have ADHD? Right, can he not focus on the text? No, the problem is, your kid lacks the vocabulary around this topic, and one of the most convincing pieces of evidence that teachers have to deal with this is this study that these women did, the two scientists did, and they took great good readers and bad readers and they said, okay, let's test you, right, who's a good reader, who's a bad reader? And they took bad readers and they said but then they took a subset of those bad readers and they gave them a reading on a topic they were very familiar with, like baseball. I think it was baseball specifically. So there were these kids who knew baseball, they played baseball, they watched baseball, they love baseball and lo and behold what happened to their reading scores when they read about baseball Through the roof, higher than the high achieving kids who didn't know about baseball. Right, because what?
Speaker 2:reading really is is connecting bits of information and then sort of yes, you'll have gaps. Sometimes, like I'm sure we've all experienced, we're reading a book and there's a word and I'm like I've never seen that word. I have no idea what that word is, right, never seen it before. But then we're able to because we have so much other information that fills out our view of sort of like what's happening on the page. We can sort of guess what the word means right Within the context, and the context and teachers try to teach that like it's a discrete skill, but it's not. It's not a skill and that's. It's based on how much additional context you can pull. If you can pull a lot of context from the page, you can, there could be a word in there and you can kind of sort of suss out oh, this is what that word means, this is probably what it means, right?
Speaker 2:but if you're blanking on a lot of the page, then you can't do that and really, really, that's a function of knowledge, it's not a function of reading skill. It is not like your kid cannot sound out the words, because I can tell you, right now I have plenty of students who will read beautifully a page and then you say, okay, well, what was that page about? And they're like I don't know they can't tell you.
Speaker 2:They can't tell me Right, and part of that is a focus problem which is also due to screens, and that's a whole other ball of wax and we're going to put the kids in front of AI all damn day. Right. What are we doing to their focus overall? Right, and that's. That's a whole other problem. That's like literally a separate problem for the ai. Okay, so back to the ai problem. Sorry, I kind of like went off on the thread no, that's okay.
Speaker 2:That was kind of a good foundation yeah, I'm trying to set you up so that you understand, okay. So now, so I'm a kid and I get, um, I get, let's say, middle school, because this is private. This is where it's sort of the leaning on ai really starts to happen. Where it happens is when a teacher gives an assignment that the students do not have enough knowledge to complete. Right, and this is very common, because in our public schools right now and this is something all parents should be aware of most of your public schools are operating on what's called like discovery learning or project based learning, or inquiry learning.
Speaker 2:Um, we've heard I'm sure many people will have heard this phrase as a teacher, the sage on the stage, like the expert that tells the knowledge, right, or is the teacher supposed to be the guide on the side, where the child uses their own intrinsic interests and ideas and the teacher just like sort of pushes them in directions to help them, sort of like, fulfill the body of what's missing from their knowledge, right? So that's when you get like the projects, like create a slide, deck about this thing, or draw like, do create a, you know, an elevator pitch, or there's all kinds of these dumb little projects that teachers do. But here's the problem if I don't know very much about a topic that I'm given, or let's say I pick a topic but the teacher says you can't pick something you're already an expert on, because then there's no learning, right? So you can't present. So let's like go back to that baseball example.
Speaker 2:I'm a baseball kid, I don't know a lot about other things, and I just think like, okay, well, you can't do baseball because you know too much about it. So let's branch you out into rugby, which you know nothing about, right? Okay, well, that kid, in order to approach that topic, is going to have to read research, watch videos, understand it, and like, if he kind of knows football, he might be okay, but if he doesn't know football, either the kid's going to be like at sea with rugby. So now you've given them a project and he's supposed to fill I don't know two pages of an essay, or he's supposed to do a you know 10 slide deck or something like that, and so what he would? What the old days when we were in school? While I was in school I don't want to age you when I was in school, in like the in the 80s and 90s, in like K through 12, we would go to the library.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:We'd get the book on rugby and we'd take our index cards Right.
Speaker 1:we'd get the encyclopedia, we'd make photocopies, we'd highlight.
Speaker 2:Yes, yes, and we'd make little notes and then we would put it together as best we could in some intelligible, organized way, right, okay, well, they don't do that anymore because now you have the internet, right and so. But here's the problem you, you don't have one source of information. You could literally open 10,000 tabs on rugby, you could open a YouTube video on rugby, you could do all right, so, like, there's a lot of ways to learn, but how do you aggregate them? When you've never done that before, when you've never had to put something in a logical, coherent structure, how do you do that? Well, here's the problem. Now they have AI, so when you give them instead of like if you did this all in class, which most teachers will never do and the other problem with that is again another issue with education.
Speaker 2:I'm very much anti this. This, especially at the younger ages, is the one-to-one device policy, where every school gives every kid yep, or the school gives every kid a laptop or a tablet, and basically that's their primary learning module, and you can see how that would like, maybe cut costs or whatever, because they don't have books. They're not dragging books back and forth. It does make it like a one-stop shop in terms of like, if all the materials, materials are there, it's kind of like oh, this will be easier logistically for the kid, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right, all that's crap.
Speaker 2:But the problem is that the kids are like okay, but now I have access to the internet and I have access to I can use chat GPT for free. Right, I can use. There's lots of things I can use for free If you, you can get really great results with like websites, like goth, which I'll talk about in a second. But basically you just go okay, I'm going to open up chat GPT and I'm going to say, okay, I have this presentation on rugby, and so I'm gonna say, hey, chat GPT or whatever I use, can you write me a one page or two page paper on sort of the basics of rugby? And, lo and behold, you got in five seconds. It's done.
Speaker 2:Right, it's so fast, it's insane yeah, and so, and here's the here's the beauty. So, parents, only, if you whoever's listening this you guys need to know about goth. It's like my favorite thing now. I love telling parents this because it freaks them out.
Speaker 2:Um, and like I'm basically making the argument for like, listen, don't let your kid have a screen, as much as long as you, as for as long as possible, don't, because you're and I'll tell you my own struggles with my own kid, if you guys want to hear it, because it's I'm. I'm dealing with this too, like I'm not right in the muck with the rest of you. I totally understand, um, so anyway, so goth will do this for you, which is just. I don't know who the devs were, but I kind of want to like buy him a beer, because what they did was they're like okay, you can, you can grade, you can grade it down. So, like, chat, gpt is going to come up with something that's probably suitable for like eighth, ninth grade reading level, cause, you know, americans aren't reading much beyond that.
Speaker 2:So it'll come up with something that, like you, can take to pretty much any sort of corporate boardroom and go like everyone can read this and understand it, right, or any retail establishment, pretty much Okay, so Gotha will let you do this. Okay, can you gear that to like the fourth grade please? So do not use any vocabulary above the fourth grade.
Speaker 1:Oh, wow.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, keep the sentence structure very simple and hey, throw in some spelling mistakes please Like wow, yes, so a really savvy kids and I know kids this savvy because I've run into them they know exactly how to play this game so that it's almost undetectable to a teacher especially, especially the teachers, which they are heavily, and I'm not throwing shade at teachers, I'm going to say that really carefully up front. I have this. Really I cannot find the attribution. If anybody can throw it at me, I would love to hear from you. There's this amazing sentence that hit me like a ton of bricks one day and I was writing, I was reading and it's the cell shapes the prisoner.
Speaker 2:So understand that your teachers are responding to the incentives at play. A lot of them are good hearted people trapped in a really bad system. A lot of them have been shaped their habits over, remember, because a lot of teachers go from high school to college straight into teaching. So they never experienced like a real job where they're really accountable, where they can really be fired, where they, if they screw up, it costs somebody a ton of money, like of money. They don't have that experience. So their habits are shaped by the attitudes and cultures on most campuses and most campuses are, pretty frankly, they're pretty work and conflict averse. They're friction averse is maybe the better way to say it. So how do you keep everybody happy? You don't piss off parents, you don't piss off admin and you try to minimize any behavior problems with your students. Well, how do you do that? Keep things nice and easy right so everybody gets a b or an a, nobody, nobody needs to complain. So so understand about teachers.
Speaker 2:And the reason I'm saying that, to go back to my original point, was this that teachers to know if a kid is cheating, like I know, immediately when I have a kid who cheated, because I read their writing that they do in class and I grade it all. So like I don't and don't before you think I'm, like you know, throwing myself on a. You know, pyre, I, like you know, I'll assign writing, brief writing assignments pretty frequently, but it's stuff that I can grade inside you know 30 minutes, right. So I'll flip through it and be like, wow, this kid's totally lost. Oh, my gosh, is this kid? I'm worried about this kid's handwriting. I can barely read this right. So I'm like I'm sort of and because, and again I say this, so if any teachers are listening.
Speaker 2:I have 23 years of teaching experience, so I'm good at this. This is a skill set that I've developed over time. You'll get good at it eventually, too, if you keep doing this, and if you need anybody who needs help, by the way, feel free on X If you need help. If you're a teacher and you want to be sort of more paper friendly, more doing things away from digital, from screens, and you want advice, please feel free to hit me up. I'm happy to help any teachers out there, or even homeschooling parents. You can hit me up too, but um, here's yeah.
Speaker 2:So like if you need, like what I'm saying is if you need help with your workflow, like if you're like I'm assigning this stuff and it's taking me hours and hours and hours to grade, and that's sort of my point is teachers don't assign writing because the back end of it is so horrific, right, it's like yeah imagine grading essays of kids who have come up through this sort of digital project based learning thing where no one's really given them good feedback on their writing.
Speaker 2:And you decide in the seventh grade that you're going to be super ethical and really help these kids and you want them to think and do all the good things that build great, literate American citizens who can, you know, actually engage with their government and and fight for. You know our rights and make sure that you know we're. Our government is, you know, within the constitutional bounds under which it was, you know, supposedly drawn up right. And so you're like, I'm going to do this because I'm an educator, right. And then you get your first paper and you're like, holy crap, it took me 30 minutes to grade a paper because there were spelling mistakes and grammar mistakes and, oh my God, the kid has no sense of organization and their punctuation is a hot mess and I oh my, how do I even cope? Begin to cope with this Right, so that disincentivizes teachers from reading.
Speaker 2:So so now, so you're like, okay, well, like, my district has given every kid a device and they all have a Google suite for education account and they can just turn things in through Google classroom or if somebody's using like Canva or whatever you're using, right, like, that's so much easier, it seems easier, but you have no way of knowing if you have not like engaged with these kids on on like almost a molecular level by looking at their writing, by reading the words and the ideas as they come and they're placed on the page, as horrifying as those can be.
Speaker 2:And trust me, guys, I worked in Title I schools for the first 13 years of my career, so these are very low performing schools, mostly students who English was not their first language, big, huge academic challenges with those kids. So I fully, fully empathize with any teachers who are dealing with this, or even parents who are like, oh, my God, my kid's a hot mess and I didn't realize until now, right? So if that's what you're going through, completely understand, but you have to know that about each and every one of your students. Otherwise, when they turn in the perfect B minus B plus paper slash project, you have no way of knowing if they did it or not.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:No way, there's no way you're going to be like, hey, and I had a kid, unfortunately, this year, who was a wonderful, very conscientious, hard worker, had some pretty significant learning issues and I was working with her very closely. And because I was working with her very closely, she turned in a paper and I was like no way you wrote this, like, and she did turn it in written by hand, so she copied it off of a screen, but it was definitely copied off screen. But because I knew her, I was able to ask her some very like specific questions like okay, well, what did you mean when you wrote this phrase? What does that mean? Why did you choose that phrasing? And you know, eventually she just admitted she's like yeah, I copied it. I couldn't do this Right, but I knew her. And because I knew her, I knew that. But most teachers don't know their students that way and that has to take a lot of a lot of your time and effort and that has to take a lot, of, a lot of your time and effort.
Speaker 1:You really have to be, and I'm the daughter of a teacher. My mom taught high school for, you know, several decades, for her entire adult life, until she retired and she worked. You know she did things at home in the evening lessons plan, grading papers, that sort of thing. But I think a lot of teachers now and again not trying to throw shade at teachers, because I know there are good teachers but I think a lot of them are relying on the technology and the easy tools and you know, probably wouldn't know that a student's real work from AI.
Speaker 1:I mean they might be able to identify that it's AI, but they have no idea what real work would even look like.
Speaker 2:But it's even worse than that. So here's the other problem. So now, not only do you have students using AI, you have teachers using AI to grade student papers, so they're running, which I think is actually. I mean, you have to keep a sense of amusement here, okay, because if you don't, you're going to lose your mind, you're going to lose your mind. So if you don't, you're going to lose your mind, you're going to lose your mind. So if you imagine I go home and, like I said, I'm writing that paper on rugby, I have fricking no idea what rugby is.
Speaker 2:I've never seen it, never heard of it. You know, I don't know anything from Australia or England or whatever, or South Africa, so I have no idea what rugby is. I know it looks like a football, but it's not. It's a weird football. Like what the heck is that? Why are they? You know they don't have any pads on what's going on, right? Like I don't understand any of this.
Speaker 2:Okay, so I write this paper and my I picked rugby because, you know, my teacher gave me some weird parameters for the project, but whatever, I don't know, and the teacher doesn't know anything about rugby, almost certainly Right. So the teacher's not some like rugby expert like, loves the New Zealand All Blacks and is like I love rugby. So their teacher doesn't know. So the kid writes a paper with AI and the teacher runs the paper through AI. Maybe the teacher feeds the AI the rubric like the school rubric for writing a research paper, an informative essay or whatever, and so they run the rubric and say, okay, you know, chat, tpt or grok or clot or whatever they're using. Hey, give me a like, score this, this essay on this rubric, according to this rubric. So the teacher's not even reading it wow so.
Speaker 2:AI is grading. Ai like like, it's almost like inception, it's like hilarious to me it's hilarious, it is hilarious, but if it wouldn't be, I mean I'm sorry you guys, I shouldn't, I shouldn't even say that, because it actually lacks a lot of empathy. Because if you kind of are stuck in a school and you've begged and I did, I the reason I quit public school, probably the biggest reason was that my son was in the sixth grade and we had one-to-one devices and I saw what was happening to him and I was like, oh hell, no, oh no, no, no, no, this is not happening to my child, we're not doing this.
Speaker 2:Because I saw I had already seen it in my students and my own students in high school. So I was seeing in my ninth graders and my seniors and I was like what is this? This is this is being completely dependent on an outside source of information for everything. So you, you have no functional, you know, you have no functional way of judging truth. Really think about that. How scary is that? You don't know how to know if someone is telling you the truth, except for, maybe, like a gut feeling or a relationship that you have with the person, right, like, well, I know this person wouldn't lie to me, if students are so reliant upon technology and ai, are they even having the opportunity to develop those, those gut feelings, those you know, intuition and instinct?
Speaker 2:they're not, they're not, they're they. It's almost like and you'll see it in the kids if you, if you said, put your, put your devices away, you know no phones. And you and, by the way, that causes a bunch of emotional drama too when you say that no screens, no phones.
Speaker 2:They got a piece of paper. The first thing you'll see is they can't their printing and their handwriting is terrible, because that has been completely, it's sort of gone by the white side, the teaching of proper printing cursive almost dead, completely. They're, you know it just, it just often isn't getting taught at all. And let me let me frame this too for you guys, all of you who are listening, like, oh, my school's not like that. Well, you're just like your congressman isn't the bad congressman, right? Like, not my congressman, right, my school is fine. Your school may be fine. I'm going to put a big asterisk yes, your school may. You may have a good school. But what I'm telling you is these policies are coming out of your universities.
Speaker 2:And the universities are where everybody gets trained Teachers, admin, superintendents, all the district officials all those people are all trained at the same universities. All those people are all trained at the same universities. Like a lot of this is coming down through that. So you know, frankly, that's the number one thing to keep in mind. Okay, now, let's say you do have an outlier school, great. Okay, if your kids are on screen, still like it's still a problem. So, because they're not learning those fundamental bits of knowledge, and even if they are being required to sort of engage in that way where it's like, okay, we're going to read something on paper and you're going to answer questions on paper, right, if they also have screens and that work can be done at home, there's no reason the kid can't just open up their laptop and copy answers off the internet.
Speaker 2:Which also is another issue people don't realize is that most teachers are pulling their lessons from online sources now. So, like most teachers, you know your teacher teaching age is like me and younger. So you know people that grew up with the internet, more or less, right, I, the internet was widespread by the time I was probably like 15, 16, like kind of everybody had it in their house. I mean, it's AOLs dial up, but people had it right. And so now that the teacher's younger than me which is probably most teachers at this point, they are completely reliant on the internet for everything. So they will search in the morning lesson plan for X, right? So, whatever they're, this is what you have to remember. Whatever they're pulling up, your kid can also access like there's no firewall, right.
Speaker 2:So when a kid, a kid will do that. Kids are so brilliant with technology, they figured this out really fast. All you have to do is you know scan, like put your, you put your camera. There's certain apps like you just put your camera at a worksheet Even if your teacher is still like a dinosaur and giving them worksheets if they have their phones or they have a device, they just scan the worksheet and then the answers will come Like that worksheet came from the internet, almost almost certainly. So the answers are on the internet almost certainly. So, literally, the kid can just like be like okay, well, I'm just going to copy this now, right?
Speaker 1:And they're like, smarter with technology than a lot of their parents are, I think, because they've just like this is all they know, and so they know tricks, that that we as parents don't know.
Speaker 2:Yeah, ask any teacher who is like suppose is has tried to police like their, their students laptops where you're like walking around the room and and you know they're not supposed to be on certain things, the kids know all the keyboard shortcuts to get off of everything really fast so you never see it.
Speaker 2:So, unless you have like, and then you, you, if you have spyware, which is like a lot of schools do, um, they literally have like the teacher will have a monitor and on their monitor they can see like every kid's monitor supposedly, except my students at my school, my last site, my last normal conventional public school site, um, my students all had they figured out how to load vpns onto their supposedly like super safe school issued laptops they had there I watched by this girl and I was like what are you? Are you watching? Is that netflix?
Speaker 2:oh my goodness, she's like, yeah, I and I'm like, and I had a really open relationship like with my student, like not when I don't open, like inappropriate open, but like they just knew I told the truth and so they would tell me stuff.
Speaker 2:And so they were like oh yeah, like everybody has a vpn, so like and I and you would see it was always hilarious during march madness, or if the world cup was on or like anything with like having to a fifa, like the kids were all watching games all day on their devices wow and and some of them, my favorite was sports gambling.
Speaker 2:I'm like, are you guys literally gambling? And I would just laugh. I, because at this point it's like and the other thing parents you guys should be aware of and you may know this, you can read it on my blog or any number if you just go on X and watch the lack of discipline prevalent at all of our public schools Like, basically, teachers have almost completely given up trying to assign or discipline any students because it's either going to result in backlash from parents who are mad that the rules are being enforced on their precious snowflake kid, or it's going to result in the kid being defiant and saying, no, I'm not going to do it. And nanny, nanny, boo-boo, you can't make me. And then if you send them to the principal, they come back with a bag of cheetos and a gatorade. So like, yeah, you know, like it's just like teachers are.
Speaker 2:You can't expect teachers to enforce rules when they're not going to be backed up. You know, and you either need to have the parents backing you up, either you have, either you're like one of those teachers that has a great you know, great um sort of reputation in the community. So people know you and love you and they you know, they, the parents are like on board because you have like that great fourth grade elementary school class and local elementary school and if you're that teacher you probably enforce rules. If you're great at your content and you're a really solid teacher, you probably can mostly enforce decorum. But if you are not awesome, at this point it is really really hard. Like it's really hard because you've got kids with cell phones who will be on their phones.
Speaker 2:You've got kids with AirPods who will? Have AirPods in while you're talking and hide it from you and like what are you going to do Walk up and do ear checks? I mean there are people who try that, but you know they end up it doesn't work. So I mean these are just realities. I'm sorry, I'm kind of like off the topic. But just to go back to, teachers don't have the incentive to then call. So it actually does make my point. They don't have the incentive to call out the cheating. Right.
Speaker 2:First of all, here's the big problem. People like, oh, you can use an AI detector. No, you can't. The AI detectors will be like we're 74% sure this is AI. If I'm a parent, I'm going to be like yeah, you're 26%. It's not sure so.
Speaker 2:And can you? And here's the other thing as a parent I would do is be like can you show me any other samples of my kids writing that lead you to believe that this is not theirs? Oh, you mean they haven't done any writing in your class this whole semester. Well then, how do you know?
Speaker 1:Right, yeah, it's like you're damned if you do, you're damned if you don't. So it's a lose lose situation, because the teacher loses, because how do you fight against AI?
Speaker 1:You know if you're in a public school where a you know there's some kind of regulations or whatever guidelines about AI. Um, you got to follow that and the kids are using it. And, um, you got to follow that and the kids are using it. And you know we've, for the last you know many years, however long these kids have had, you know, the Chromebooks in the schools, the one-to-one devices. You know there's a lot of issues with that I mean, we could have you know we could talk for hours about the problem you could fill. Shows no-transcript.
Speaker 2:And I think what I in my head right now, what I'm hearing is like all the you know sort of true believers like and I follow a lot of them on on X, because I'm like, oh, I don't hear what these guys have to say, like what's the argument in favor of AI? Right, and I'll give you a really important illustration to explain why I'm like, no, you're wrong, like sorry, like this is me saying you're wrong. People like, well, if the kids what they really need to learn is to prompt, and if they learn how to prompt, well, then they can do amazing, wonderful things with AI. Okay, okay, okay. So let me break that down for you prompting is a skill and it's a skill again, that is not a skill like that, it's like a discrete skill, even, okay. So my son, um, like my sons are are pretty serious hockey players, okay. And so you say, okay, go shoot the puck, okay. Well, okay, what kind of? What kind of shot first, right? That's first.
Speaker 2:Okay, well, what? What kind of shot? Okay, how far does the puck need to go? Where am I shooting the puck at? Okay, and what situation am I under? What's the context of the shot? Am I alone? Am I? Are people pushing at me? Are people pushing on me? Are people trying to hit me? Are people trying to poke, check the puck away from me? Okay, all of these things change how I deal with this situation. On top of that, you have the things that everyone else has just forgotten when are my fingers on the stick? How strong is the pressure on the stick? Where are my hands on the stick? What position are my feet in? How bent are my knees? Where are my feet in? How bent are my knees? Where are my elbows? Like the number, the amount of information that goes into a single shot in hockey is almost like I don't want to say it's unquantifiable, but it's huge.
Speaker 2:It's huge and it varies depending on the situation, right, so you have it's context dependent, it's like height dependent, like how tall are you, how strong are you All of these things are factors that go, that impinge upon what you do in a situation. Okay, so you have to have enormous knowledge and like almost muscle memory in order to do this. Well, right, okay, and now you're saying saying, okay, if third graders could just learn how to prompt, they'd be fine. But they don't know anything. So if you give them a prompt, if you say to them, okay, let's write a prompt about the american founders, right, what pro? You need to do a report on the founders of the united states.
Speaker 2:Okay, do you even know who any of them are? Do you know what a founder is? Do you know how do you define founders? Because if you go on the internet, right, you might find out, like if you go to AI, you might find out that it was like it wasn't. It wasn't white British men, it was, it was a bunch of black. It was actually black slaves who found it. There are these, these articles and things exist, but how do you filter that out? How does a third grader filter that out? What do they select for what if they don't know who? I mean it's crazy, but what if I said what if they don't know who washington is? What if?
Speaker 2:the only presidents they know are washington and lincoln. And so they. They go. Well, I know more about l, so I'm going to lean on my prompting ability with Lincoln because I know more about Lincoln, and then I basically go. Well, lincoln was one of the important founders of our country. No, he wasn't, not at all. I mean, we can make lots of arguments about what Lincoln did and his significance, and obviously he's enormously significant, not a founder.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:Right, like. These are problems, and the only way you solve this problem is you have an enormous body of knowledge. So what I think these AI guys who are like AI is the solution. They forget, they have forgotten what they know, they have forgotten how much they already know, and one of the things that, the one of the things that's required in order to build this like huge base of knowledge, and this, this schema that we use to approach all problems, whether they're relational or like oh my god, I have a slab leak, what am I supposed to do now? You know, like. Or my dog is throwing up, I don't know. You know, like. We have all these things that we bring to bear on these sort of random things that happen in our lives, and so if, if you don't have this like sort of built up foundation of knowledge, how do you get to the point where you can ask a great question?
Speaker 1:Absolutely.
Speaker 2:Kids can't ask great questions until they know a lot, and I'll give you an example from my from teaching is I was very lucky last year to have had we had this beautiful. It was like a shoot, I should know.
Speaker 2:It was a it was a Memorial day assembly at our school and a bunch of veterans came and I was teaching US history at the time and it was like the second half of US history. So I had Vietnam and Korea and some Korean vets, korean War vets. They were there and I was like Would you guys mind coming to my classroom so my kids can ask you questions about the war. Like here are these living wonderful men who sacrificed so much, and like their stories they both cried was very emotional, sorry, anyway.
Speaker 2:And my students, who are wonderful students and but like I hadn't really gotten, because I was, you know, it was my second year teaching and it was a huge amount of curriculum, second year teaching this curriculum particularly and I hadn't really covered as much as I would have wanted to generally before I it specifically around vietnam and the cold war. I had gotten into the cold war and I had touched on vietnam but I hadn't spent enough time really like getting them into the, not the weeds necessarily, but really grounding them. And what Vietnam was, how did it happen? What did it mean, what were we fighting for, why were we there? Kind of things right. And so the kids, some of the kids were able to ask really great questions, but very few of them were because they didn't know enough about the war to be able to draw upon that knowledge to ask people who are literally there interesting questions right and these men, the good you know.
Speaker 2:thank god for these men because they literally just they talked about their story. There were two of them and they had very different experiences in vietnam, but they were both in combat and so they sort of shared. They were kind of like swapping stories together. So it was this amazing hour and all these kids were just so blown away by it and that was cool. But when you say, oh, the kids can just prompt, like no, they can't just learn to prompt they have to know stuff first and people are like, well, they can just watch a YouTube video.
Speaker 2:Well, here's the problem with that. Sure, it's what I said earlier. You and I have both looked things up on the internet like think about a recipe, right, like a basic recipe, and you're like, okay, well, actually that's even a bad example, because you and I know how to cook.
Speaker 2:that's the problem so it would have to be something like well, I'm assuming sorry I'm making assumptions about you um, but like we have experience at least cooking meals over time, so we're more likely to not struggle as much. But let's say, I'm looking up some discrete piece of information about something I don't know very much about, like, say I don't know like the infestation of pythons in the Everglades right, to use a Florida example.
Speaker 2:I don't know, I don't know how that happened. I think it like had something to do with pets or whatever. But let's say there's some like discrete fact, there's like some law that caused this to happen, right, I don't know it. So I look it up. I'm like there must be something. So I look it up and I'm curious, right. So I literally am, you know, because you will say, well, as long as a kid is curious and they just like look things up, they'll learn it, right. So I'm curious. I'm like I'm just curious, I'm gonna look this up. So I look it up and I find out it's like the Florida homesteading act of 1942. Let let people raise snakes in their backyard or some insanity, right. And so I'm like, oh, that explains a lot. And then I just leave it and I don't do anything with that information.
Speaker 2:I've just satisfied my curiosity, okay, well then I'm talking to somebody later, like, say, it's like a month later, and they're saying, oh, I'm, we're going to, we're going to Disney world. I'm like, oh, yeah, and you know, one of the things we're going to do is we're going to go on a trip to the Everglades. So yeah, you know, they have a lot of like, they have a lot of problems with like pythons eating all the bird eggs over. That. Like there was some reason why that was a problem. I can't remember, though, why. And the reason why is because until you do something with the information you learn, until your brain processes it, it won't be yours Like it can't just be.
Speaker 2:I looked it up, I saw it, it satisfied my curiosity and then I moved on. It has to be. I looked it up, it had to connect it to another piece of information. That piece of information was relevant to me because I had to use it the next day. I had to teach it to somebody. I had to explain it to my boy scout troop. I had to prepare for my trip to the everglades. I don't know like I had to prepare for biology exam or something right, right.
Speaker 2:Then it becomes something that your brain goes oh, this is important, she needs this, she's going to need this again in the future, so I'm going to hold on to it. But when I outsource my information gathering or delivery to a little square you know I'm looking at my iPhone right now, like my, you know, four by eight piece of equipment, right Like I my brain goes oh, you don't need it because you can. Just, you, just. How did you get that information in the first place? So you touched the phone.
Speaker 2:So you can touch the phone again when you need it Right.
Speaker 1:And so when we know we can do that, like we can go look it up, it's at our fingertips anytime we want it, um, so we don't have to retain it. And these kids are, by not having to go through this entire process, they are completely missing out on on this retention and memory of you know, true learning.
Speaker 2:Yep, like literally, it is learning. We are saying you don't have to learn. That is the statement. And when you say here's the laptop and you'll have it for every assignment, including your test, right, here's the laptop, here's the access to AI. Because now, like literally, I think, in. I know that in the state that I came from there is a board of superintendents and sort of. They like all meet together and hang out and it's like it is a professional board like you know right Right.
Speaker 2:Anyway. So one of the big things they're working on is okay, well, what policy are we going to push out to all the superintendents in the state on AI? Yeah. And so these guys are going to recommend a policy on AI. And you know, superintendents you know I'm not a big fan of most of them are just politicians. They're very well paid and they're very ineffective in general.
Speaker 2:Um, you know, most of them are useless in terms of their actual. They don't understand how classrooms work, they don't understand how learning works, they don't really care, they're just looking for the next leg up or that, looking for that 90% pension at $400,000 a year. So like they don't care and they're trying to be politically viable and because, because there's so much money oh, and I do want to point this out there's so much money coming from these developers, these app developers, developers, and especially with like sort of government contracts, as we all are finding out, much to our chagrin, um, how abused that system is, of how much the government overpays for things or pays for things that it doesn't use or that aren't effective. Right, that are basic giant wastes of money.
Speaker 2:Yeah, what could, what? What guarantee do we have that the AI that we get, that is adopted because it won't be like just use any AI, at some point there will be a clamor for a government approved AI and it will be a government subsidized AI, ie, the developers of the AI will be getting a buttload of money to develop the AI. That will be the only AI. Possibly unless the kids still have cell phones, which they probably will that the only AI the kids can access or use, because it'll be quote unquote safe Right. Well, I already told you about the VPN, so you know that's not real.
Speaker 1:Right, and that's a scary thought because you know, we know who is, for the most part, who's developing these AI, know these AI models and most of it is left leaning. I mean, you can ask chat GPT or co-pilot about elections and it will come back and say I can't talk about that.
Speaker 2:So yeah, well, and here's the thing. Imagine then how much power. This is terrifying to me. The schools are already really bad, it's really really bad. How much power would any administration that comes in say we're gonna we're gonna tweak the algo, we're gonna tweak the llm, we're gonna load it with results that we want to draw from right. We're gonna sort of close the loop and we're only going to load it with what we want it to draw from. So imagine if, like Wikipedia, was your only source of information.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Like what would that do to kids? And what if that? What if Wikipedia was completely within the government's purview to edit and you would never know that they were editing it? How would you know?
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:How would a kid know? How would a parent know, right? And the other thing with AI is, if you're using sort of like this idea of like, ok, well, the AI is going to be tutoring and it's going to be great, it's going to constantly test and retest and reteach and it's going to individualize for my student and like, I'm OK with that for, like math, that makes sense for math, right, but for literature, for history, government, econ, even science, at this point, like that's dangerous to be able to say to the state, you are 100% in control of the information the kids see.
Speaker 2:And here's the problem If you've ever done a chat like, if you've ever done like a long chat with AI, right, so you have this long ass chat and you're asking all these questions and you're prompting it, you're reprompting it and you're like that's not what I want. What about this? What about this? Right, and again, I'm I'm speaking from a place of like, enormous like. You know, I'm old, so I have a lot of knowledge, right, so I can, I can tweak questions Right now as a parent, if I have a 17-year-old, I can go, give me your laptop, log into your Canva and let me see the materials your teacher's giving you right, I can see the textbook, if there is one online. I can see the handouts, if they're, you know, digital PDFs, whatever. I can read all of that.
Speaker 1:Well, you have a conversation with AI.
Speaker 2:where's that recorded Right? And I, and also as a parent, and much sympathy to all you parents like.
Speaker 2:I've been in this boat. I, you know you're working 40, 50 hour weeks. Two of you are working 40, 50 hour weeks because you know housing is ridiculously expensive and you're trying to like pay for daycare too and after school care and keep the kids in sports. And you know, you, you want to go see grandma once in a while and, like gas is expensive depending on what state you're in, right, like, okay, all of that is happening and now you're supposed to jump on and check all this crap. Or are you just gonna say to your kid how's school today?
Speaker 2:exactly it was fine. Mom, did any of your teachers like, let's say, you're conservative, right? Any of your teachers say anything weird today? No, oh, what was ai like? We did? We were on, I was using I, you know, I used, um, I used, you know, government ai all day. Let's call that gay gai. Okay, I just triggered the whole audience, sorry guys, anyway, um, so, like, let's say so, I was just, I was on government ai today. Okay, well, all day, yeah, like I was on ai for hours and I was trying to solve this problem and I couldn't figure it out. Blah, blah, blah. Okay, well, okay, well, did you get a solution? Yeah, I did. What's your? Let me check your grades. Oh, you got b's and a's.
Speaker 2:Okay, looks good yeah you have no idea, you have no idea, because the ai is individualized, right.
Speaker 2:So every kid is getting something different. Like right now, if you have a crazy ass teacher, there's like 10 kids in that room that are like what the heck did that teacher? Just say, right, and they're gonna go home and they're gonna say to their mom this teacher said this crazy thing. I'm totally freaked out right now, like, and then the mom will check with her friends like hey, did your kid say, did the teacher say this is my kid crazy, did that happen? Right? So like there's a way for you guys to check what did the teacher say? With ai, you can check, you can't you? Because it's not like a script, it's like a video the teacher's playing.
Speaker 2:It's literally responding to whatever your child is typing into it right so you have this frightening yes yes, this is why these are my people like me, who are all like everyone's, like you're just angry. Yes, I am, I'm also yeah I will save up. No, I'm just kidding, I'm not actually bitter. I am angry because what I see, what I see, the way I see this is this, is largely because I taught econ for as long as I have and I love economics, it's like my passion is. All I see is opportunity cost yeah what could these kids have learned?
Speaker 2:What could they have become, what could they have done? And what did they end up doing? And that's why, like my sixth grader, he was he's brilliant. I love this kid, um, but it's like he will. He would finish his assignments in like 10 minutes and then be on YouTube shorts all day and I'd be like what the hell is going on?
Speaker 2:Because he would have in one class he would have bad grades, and that was math. I'd be like why in the world do you have a bad grade in math? You're good at math. He's like don't worry about it, mom, I got this. This is sixth grade, this is an 11-year-old, so this is how that was. Like he's in ninth grade right now. So that was three years ago and he's like he's like don't worry, mom, I got this. So he was blowing off all the homework because the way the grading was set up was as long as you pass the test, you'd be excused from all the homework. Well, he'd get A's on his test because the tests were easy. So he'd do nothing for weeks in math and then take a test, get an A and have an A in the class again and I'm like oh, no, no, no, no, no. We're not doing this.
Speaker 2:This is not the game that we are playing here, Like I would rather you just sat at home and read books than this, so like, and that was back then and he was already gaming the one-to-one device system.
Speaker 2:Wow, as most kids were Right, and as far as I know, and again I can say I'll again I'm right with you guys, parents, all of you, I'm right with you Was I going to go and log on and check everything he did that day, even though I ostensibly it was possible for me to check all his assignments? No, I wasn't going to do that. There was no way. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Not enough time in the day, so that wasn't going to happen. And because I wasn't going to do that and I could see what was happening to him, just like by interacting with him and talking to him, I was like, oh, this is not, this is, this is not good, and I'd already into. You know, in my, not in my defense, but just so that you know, you guys know I had already experienced this for years, because I'd experienced it as a teacher, and so I'd experienced this one-to-one device policy.
Speaker 2:that started gosh. When did it start? At my last site, everybody had a laptop by 2014. So 10 years, so I've been watching this for 10 years and then COVID obviously accelerated it because sort of everyone had needed devices because they weren't allowed to be in school. And then now and now we have this political infrastructure, because most cities have these bond measures that are basically eternal, where the taxpayers have said yes, we will pay for it forever, for this.
Speaker 2:Yeah For technology, we'll pay for technology and we'll do it forever because our kids are going to be digital citizens or whatever that means digital learners, global citizens, digital learners or digital natives, or whatever they're calling it now.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, so that's where we are and AI right now. Like I've talked to multiple high school students and most of them are using it and they don't want to call it cheating. It's cheating If the teachers aren't going to say it's cheating and there's no way to police. Like, basically, like my hard rule in any school I work at is I do not, I do not make rules I cannot enforce, I won't. If I cannot actually enforce the rule, it's a stupid rule because that means the kids are going to break it and then I lose authority. Right, like my authority is undermined by making a rule that I can enforce. Well, that's what our school's doing. Like, ok, use AI, but don't cheat.
Speaker 2:What does that even?
Speaker 1:mean Can you even do that?
Speaker 2:Right, yeah. And then the thing is like if the kids don't know enough about the topic and they just know it tangentially, they know a little tiny bit whatever AI produces is going to sound good to them. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And they're also because they can't vet it, because they can't go. I'm going to read what AI wrote. See, I actually went through this hilariously with Romeo and Juliet, so I was planning a lesson for that and I was like you know what? I'm going to let chat GPT do this for me, which was here are the vocab words I chose. So I had chosen the vocab words from the reading and I was like okay, put, chat GPT, here are the vocab words.
Speaker 2:Give me the part of speech and give me the, give me the definition, like a really basic definition that's appropriate for this age level, and then pull the quote from Romeo and Juliet where this appears right, okay, easy, right, seems easy. Like I literally just like giving it to like an. And pull the quote from Romeo and Juliet where this appears Right, okay, easy, right, it seems easy. Like I literally just like giving it to like an assistant. Can you just do this for me, and it's like there's no interpretation necessary. Find the word, give me the definition from the deck, from the dictionary, find the quote from Romeo and Juliet out of copyright, so it shouldn't be a problem, right, like.
Speaker 2:I'm be, right, so it shouldn't be a problem, right like I'm not asking it to find something recent. Okay, it made up quotes oh, wow it made. I was like I'm like reading it, like it does this nice table for me. I'm reading it. I'm like what the hell is that? I'm like that is not because I've read romandola, like you know god knows how many times, probably 10 times at this point. Um, and I'm like that's not the quote at all, like at all. And so I look at the next one.
Speaker 3:I'm like that's not the quote at all like at all.
Speaker 2:And so I look at the next one. I'm like that's not the code, what is go? I'm like what? And then like literally, I was like what in the world? And so then I prompted it individually. I'm like, okay, okay, please tell me, in this act of romeo and juliet, where does the word find, where the word x appears like a thunder, where does the thunder appear? And it came up with a, with a fake quote again, and I was like okay, so here's. So now, how do you know? It's like if it's going to fake Shakespeare right Right.
Speaker 2:What else is it faking?
Speaker 1:And these kids don't know, right Cause they just don't have these. You know because you have the experience, you've read the book 10 times and so you know that it's a fake quote. But these kids don't know and they don't have the, the, the learning and the processing of all of these materials to to be able to decipher fact from fiction.
Speaker 2:And if you're on X at all right now, like if you're watching, because I mean, obviously my algorithm is pretty, my X algorithm is pretty curated to like education issues, ai and like some weird economic stuff that I love. But basically that's my feed and it is just buried with college stories from college about how the college professors cannot. All they're doing is fighting AI. They cannot get in front of it. Everybody's using it. So those are your teachers.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So what does that mean? Do your teachers know anything anymore? Because they're going to get content certified. They're going to have a degree in English or history or science or math. Can they actually do those things? Do they actually know them, them? If a kid raises their hand and says, miss, can you help me understand what this is saying? Will she be able to? I don't know.
Speaker 2:I don't know wow and I've already seen that, like I've already seen just the quality of, because, you know, for many, many reasons, not the least of which is grade inflation at the high school level, yes like lying about what grades are right right, not right so, which is that we have plenty of teachers who are thoroughly unqualified, even though they are credentialed in their content area.
Speaker 2:They do not know what they are talking about. They do not know and I know because I like I know that because obviously I talk to colleagues who are in my same credential area I'm like, oh, that's no, no, that is not accurate like no, no, no no um, but you know and that's one thing because I have a relationship with those people but what happens when a parent goes your teacher's straight up wrong?
Speaker 2:does the parent have the balls and a lot of parents don't to correct the teacher because the teacher controls the grade. So literally your children are being miseducated, like it is happening right now, and and there's so much at stake because everyone's like we need this credential, we have to go to college, although I hope more and more people are questioning that narrative, because I think, that's bananas on its face um but like we have to go to college, and not only we have to go to college, we have to go to like a competitive college.
Speaker 2:It's got to be an elite college, right, it's going to be a great school. Then they're not going to go head to head with a teacher on anything.
Speaker 2:And in fact I would argue that a lot of parents would tacitly encourage their kids to use whatever utilities are at their disposal to ensure they get a good grade and, frankly, this is like a perfect you know, like for lack of a better word like cluster, because, okay, so let's say, the teacher doesn't really know what their content they're. Oh, by the way, they're also using AI to write lesson plans. Fyi, I should have mentioned that too. Teachers are using AI to be like I need a lesson on photosynthesis, write it up for me.
Speaker 2:So the AI is doing that for them too. So there's like literally no thought on the teacher's end, which means the teacher could like literally not know the topic at all and they're just following the script the AI gives them. So that's another. That's another ball of my can of worms, right, anyway. So the teachers are like giving the lesson plans. They don't really understand it. Your kid actually is trying to learn. Maybe he's honest, ethical, maybe you've like raised him well, and so he's asking the teacher questions. The teacher can't really answer them. The teacher says, well, just go to ai. Kid goes to ai, completes the assignment. Hasn't really cheated, necessarily, because the teacher told him to do that. The teacher uses ai to grade the ai, so the ai grades ai as an, a like, like yeah like this is my night.
Speaker 2:My nightmare is the only the. The only way this gets worse is if the government controls the llf.
Speaker 1:Then it's worse well, and they and they, and you know that they will, and and I think you know that that we are very um, you know we're we're pushing parents to homeschool their kids, get them out of the government school system because it is like you said, it's just a cluster, and yeah goodness, like you are such a wealth of information. We could go on and on and on.
Speaker 2:I won't let you, I won't make you know well, I would.
Speaker 1:I would love to do another, another podcast with you and go into some of the other subjects in education that are so important to parents right now, because I think just what you're saying is something that I think parents maybe intuitively know that something's wrong and things are going in a bad direction and things are going in a bad direction.
Speaker 1:But to actually hear a teacher define it just as you have is like, oh, this is bad, this is going in a wrong direction, and even though the technology is scary for a number of reasons, but primarily we're going to have kids coming out. We already do and we have for several years now coming out of the public school system that they did not learn. They should not have graduated.
Speaker 2:I wrote a series on that. I mean that's probably my most popular one. It's basically your Kids Aren't Learning At All is the title, and it's like five of the incentives underlying the failure of our education system. If you have any niggling doubts any of you guys who are like I think something's wrong, but I don't know what it is, I recommend you go there, because AI is a problem. I'm not going to minimize it.
Speaker 2:It's probably going to become a much bigger problem, but the issue is always and I want to frame this fairly because it is really hard, but this fairly because it is really hard but if you've ever read, like Fahrenheit 451 or Brave New World or any of these sort of dystopian novels where these guys were basically prophets, what they always pointed to was it was always a small number of people that keep the light of liberty burning. It's never the masses. The masses just go along to get along. And so what I think is happening for those of you guys who are paying attention and you're like, wow, I really love my kids and you know, I, I want my kid, I want what's real. I want my kid to be able to think, even though that's kind of scary because no one else will be thinking, so it might be like almost like a liability. I wonder that sometimes like is this a liability?
Speaker 2:I think it can be, and arguably. Right now it almost feels dangerous, like if they're too smart, are they going to be in trouble. Like are they going to be targeted, but here's what I would say it's always been a remnant, like you got to think of it, like the remnant, like the small number of people.
Speaker 2:There's all kinds of allegories all through religious texts everywhere about like it's a small number, only a small number will hold on to the truth, right, we'll hold on to the truth, right. And so, just like, carry that as like a human truth and go, okay, what can I do for my kid, to the extent that I'm able to right now, to ensure that kid gets an education? I would say number one take away the fricking screens. Get them off the screen, like, as much as you can. If you can't get them off at school, understandable. Number two get them reading real books and get them outside.
Speaker 2:This is Jonathan Haidt. I'm like channeling Jonathan Haidt right now, except for the books thing. Get them outside, face to face with people without screens, running, jumping, getting dirty, making a mess, you know, possibly hurting themselves. Get them out doing things and like you need to find that community and you might have to search it out. Like it might be hard to find the people where they're like. No, I want my kid to have like to have friends that don't have screens.
Speaker 2:I want my kid to have a landline yes, right, find though you and you're gonna have to work hard for that, parents, but find it and then get them reading. And, if you want, like I also have on my sub stack and it's on X2, it's an article called books to build I think it's called books to build great Americans, and I've made lists, like very extensive book lists. So, for any interest, any topic, I've got them by age, like three to seven. So little kid books. If you've got a little one and you want them to start reading on their own or you're reading to them, that's, that's the go-to. And then I think it's eight to 12. So, like kids who are independent readers, those books, and then sort of like the 13, or if you have a really precocious kid who's like a great reader, you might want to start them on the 13 to 17 list. But, like, I really think at this point we need to reclaim the love of reading and literature, because we learn about humanity through stories.
Speaker 1:I totally agree.
Speaker 2:Yeah, if you want your kid like, yes, I think I will say this I'm okay with AI for math. I really, I really am. I know that sounds like I sound like I'm being a hypocrite here, but I'm like no, if you're supervising it, watching it.
Speaker 2:it is really helpful the way that, the way the AI can go through math, I don't like it for anything else, like humanities, basically I'm out on that. But. But specifically, get your kid reading, get them out playing, take them for walks, talk to them, get them talking, ask them what they think about stuff. Right, and I have lots of, if you, if you want to go down. That's not a rabbit hole, because I'm not a conspiracy theorist, um, but like, well, I mean, I love who doesn't love a good conspiracy theory? But, um, I'm not. That's not what I'm about.
Speaker 2:What I'm trying to do is help direct you guys to sort of take agency, take control of your kid's education, manage it. You're not going to be the best. You're the best teacher because you love them and you have the most skin in the game by far. Right, you are the best teacher, but you're probably not going to go. I couldn't teach my kid calculus, okay, like it wouldn't happen. So, but what you need to do is project, manage their education Right, you're like finding the resources, helping them get to the right people, the right sources of information and, really importantly and I'll stop talking, I promise is that you find the people that align with your family's values and ethics and beliefs. So there are plenty of people out there, purveyors of information, and I have no, I literally do not have a dog in this fight. I want American liberty to continue, and if you are an atheist family, an evangelical family, a Muslim family, a Jewish family, I don't care. Find what fits for your child, because that was, that is, our responsibility as parents.
Speaker 1:Absolutely.
Speaker 2:To pass our beliefs down to our children, and I mean ideally. They're aligned with like, aligned to truth, right. I don't believe in like subjective truth, but like figure it out for yourselves what are your priorities for your kids and then go get it because the school's not going to provide it. That's it. I'll stop talking, thank you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, that was like you. That was a mic drop moment. That was, that was fantastic. But I just want everybody listening to know they can find you on X at dissident teacher.
Speaker 2:No, no, no, I'm at educated and free, but my, my handle is dissident teacher, but it's at educated and free educated.
Speaker 1:No, I'm at educated and free, but my my handle's the Senate teacher, but it's at educated and free, at educated and free. Okay, I'll make sure that I link it properly in the description. I will also have your sub stack, which is an amazing resource, linked in the description as well. So please go check out the sub stack, subscribe to the sub stack. Lots of great content that will help you, help your children. I hope that you will come back and chat with me again.
Speaker 1:This has been just an amazing conversation and you have such a wealth of knowledge and ideas for parents. So thank you for taking the time to do this. Wasn't that an amazing conversation? And I cannot wait to have her back and dive into other important education issues. As I mentioned in the interview, I've got all the links to her sub stack and her ex account for you to dig through. There is such a wealth of information. I encourage you to subscribe to the sub stack. Be sure to pass it on to friends and people within your social circle so that everybody can get up to speed on what's going on in education, especially as it pertains to the AI issues. I hope that you will share this episode far and wide so we can spread the word. Thanks so much for listening and I look forward to seeing you in the next episode.