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Tutoring company tells parents to save their money and 'use AI instead'

142 points · 233 comments · theanonymousone

  1. radiorental · · focus · HN ↗
    This isn't binary, teachers have limited bandwidth and supplementing real teaching with AI supported research can work.

    Students need to understand what AI is and is not.

    Something got lost as we transitioned from parents telling their kids to 'go play and do not come back until dinner is ready' to us handholding & driving our kids from one social/sport activity to the next.

    While it causes fights with my kids, I blank refuse to do certain things for them (fix their internet connection, repair a toy or bike) I'll give them the tools and they know to ask when they get stuck.

    The act of learning through failure is a dying art these days. It's 'teach to the test', stressed out teachers, parents having too much to do compounded by taking on second, third jobs in this economy.

    Teaching our kids how to leverage AI is something parents should invest in. Its part of a broader education landscape.

    1. yardie · · focus · HN ↗
      As a parent I agree with you, but watching other kids get a leg up because their parents continue to jump in and save them. And your own get the double harsh reality of learning failure and then being punished for it through loss of placement and status. It's tragedy of the commons since everyone must pass no one can fail.

      > Teaching our kids how to leverage AI is something parents should invest in. Its part of a broader education landscape.

      The same was said for laptops and tablets. Now there is a push to remove them from the curriculum. Having them meant the students didn't retain anything because they were distracting. I feel using AI in place of pedagogy will have similar results. Why bother learning to retain any information when AI knows everything and can recall it in a split second.

      1. rockskon · · focus · HN ↗
        And now we have junior programmers that don't understand the code being generated and submit pull requests with garbage code.
        1. dosisking · · focus · HN ↗
          > And now we have junior programmers that don't understand the code being generated and submit pull requests with garbage code.

          Sounds just like most 'senior' devs tbh.

        2. yardie · · focus · HN ↗
          We were all once junior coders. We Also didn’t understand the code we had written or what we were being asked to do. I have yet to meet any junior coders who hasn’t written garbage code that hasn’t managed to squeak through unit testing.

          I’m embarrassed by some of my early work and simultaneously impressed it managed to work at all! And someone was dumb enough to pay me money to do it?!

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