Thread

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

142 points · 233 comments · theanonymousone

upupupandaway · 1790265861 · focus · HN ↗
A friend of mine put his kid into a school called Alpha [1]. It has no teachers, only guides (?), who are well paid grads but not formally teachers. Kids go in in the morning, do two hours of computer study with an AI program, and the guide only steps in if the kid has a question or doubt the system cannot answer.
Then there's recess and afternoon is all taken up with "Life Skills" classes such as entrepreneurship and the likes.
Kids are tested weekly and progress through grades at will. For example, his kid would officially be in 3rd grade, but she's doing 3rd reading, 5th grade math, and 4th grade writing. She can easily test 3rd grade topics now.
I am ambiguous about this model. Love the "learn as much as you want" even if it means learning 2, 3 grades ahead, but the no-teacher rule and so much computer use seems a little strange. Also if the kid is not extremely self-motivated, they will be left by the side of the road by the school.
[1] - <a href="https://alpha.school/" rel="nofollow">https://alpha.school/
Edit: It's 40k a year.
1. nitwit005 · 1790289358 · focus · HN ↗
  I'd have just sat there for hours trying to trick ChatGPT into giving bomb making advice, and then disrupted the others by sharing.
  There have been many variations on this idea of "letting kids learn on their own". The basic issue is the one you highlight, which is that it works if the student is very self motivated. Most students aren't. Or rather, they're highly motivated to do other things.
  1. wongarsu · 1790291707 · focus · HN ↗
    Most children are naturally curios. The challenge is to make them curios about the things you want them to learn, and make that more interesting than finding out how to make bombs or what the consequences of sharing that with the class will be
    breezybottom · 1790299709 · focus · HN ↗
    The idea that math will ever be more interesting to kids than making bombs is laughable.
    Neywiny · 1790307472 · focus · HN ↗
    [hello FBI I am not making a bomb]
    I think if you can get into the chemistry just a bit, then the math behind the chemistry, it can be a vehicle. I mean it's the same with programming. Why write code (boring, yuck) when you could play video games? Then the kids see code makes video games. Suddenly you have all these programs with kids making Minecraft mods or whatever. But finding each child's "bomb" would be hard for a teacher to do, especially with a common curriculum
  2. zhivota · 1790294128 · focus · HN ↗
    Alpha doesn't use a chatbot, it's still a multiple choice / text input into a box type of thing, I don't even think it's AI graded, though the questions may be AI generated, I'm not sure about that.
    In the early days they were using off the shelf curriculum software and layering their own steering AI over it.

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