"what did students do before smartphones/tablets?"
"what did students do before laptops?"
"what did students do before the internet?"

it's not at all weird to me that this could have been uttered fully seriously.

Edit: only difference are those other technologies still requires critical thinking and won't magically write your assignments. Unless plagiarized.

Grew up before the internet.

One thing I have come to realize is how much of history I learned passively from movies and comic books. The first time I saw Edgar Allan Poe was in an The Atom comic, and Julius Cesar was in a cartoon. Pretty much everyone I knew first hear classical music when they played it behind Bugs Bunny.

These days, there's a tiny handful of historically based shows and movies compared to earlier times.

I have no doubt about it...

Yep.

Parts of Gen Z, and a lot of Gen A, will 100% seriously tell you that learning basically anything other than how to prompt ChatGPT is a stupid waste of time.

They'll all go feral when they can no longer afford it or the power goes out or the system crashes for a significant amount of time, as they've never learned how to think, nor anything useful to think about.

Since computers became common, it's seemed like an increasing number of people don't know how to, and don't think they should have to, learn skills.

Nah, people have been cheating and faking it forever.

It makes the dumb even dumber. In 10 years we will see the effect of it, just like ipad babies.

I teach collegiate intro programming classes, I can say it definitely seems that way. My office hours will be an absolute ghost town, nobody has any questions for me in class, and then when a project is due about 1/3 of the submissions are AI slop.

I know cheating has always been rampant, but I've never seen it this bad before.

In the U.S., the issue is that our education system is already fundamentally broken and doing a terrible job of teaching kids. Adding LLMs to that is like striking a match in the tinderbox.

at least it took a bit more effort than just a prompt or two.

lucky if your search terms just bring up someone else's work I suppose lol

My youngest (now 27) has a bit of a problem with that. The issue is that he's smart and most things always came easy to him. He'd do those giant writing assignments the night before that are supposed to be worked on for weeks and still get the high grade. Hardly ever seemed to study, but got solid A's. But when something comes along that he's not automatically good at, he gets super frustrated. He wanted to learn the guitar in high school (I play a little), so we bought him one and some basic instruction, but he hated it because it didn't come naturally. It's a decoration on his wall.

I will give him this though: he decided a few years back that he wanted to learn to draw, and that didn't come naturally, but he's continued to work at it and has gotten pretty decent. So it's something a person can get past.

Teach him to fail. Those kids are afraid of failing because somewhere in life someone traumatized them so they don't like to ever fail at anything.

"I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times." - Bruce Lee

Edit, in the same spirit: "The difference between a novice and a master is that the master has failed more times than the novice has even tried." - No idea who

Follow me for more Karate Kid-level inspirational quotes.

I love the feeling of neurons rewiring to form a new pathway of understanding. Or whatever the hell it is. At 38, it's a pleasure finding I can still learn and build new skills.

Playing Beat Saber and hitting a plateau only to find my focus starts to evaporate over the course of a hard track as I find that flow, that path to just being in it, each skill plateau merely being temporary, is great. Playing guitar and slowly starting to wire my brain for the pathway for barre chords and faster movement along the frets is a crazy feeling. That sense of finally finding the pathways for singing to operate even SLIGHTLY separately from the rhythm of the guitar, those glimpses of polyrhythm? Addicting.

If you're able, I hope you can teach him to find that pleasure of not mastery, but evolving strengths. Maybe it's like an RPG where skills can be leveled up over time the more you use them. I know all too well the frustration of imperfection to start, ADHD during the 90s and the whole "perfect student" pressure created a lot I had to undo and still am, but each time I can break free of that it's rewarding.

I'm 39 and I want to be instantly good at things. It sucks. Good luck breaking your nephew out of it.

People who can come through with decent work under completely unrealistic deadline pressure become all-stars.

I did this for my last company. We were about to lose our biggest client because we (not including me) had agreed to an impossible deadline to deliver a piece of software for them. I spent two weeks basically living at work and we (meaning mostly I) were able to deliver a bare-minimum product on time and keep our contract with the client alive. This kept our company intact long enough for us to be acquired by a major west coast tech giant - at which point I was rewarded with a layoff notice, while my bosses got millions in stock grants. I got a severance which was basically equal to what I would have been eligible to get from unemployment, which meant I didn't get any unemployment but at least I didn't have to pretend to look for work for six months.

I did it with no illusions about what my reward might or might not be. I just don't like being involved in any way with project failures.

Also: being able to draw hands is the most important identifier of not being an ai.

It works for everything. My dad made me tie a thousand knots because my shoelaces kept coming untied and now as an adult I am super in-demand in our local bdsm scene.

...everything else looked like shit, but the hands were amazing!

That's honestly how everything works. Nobody starts good at anything. If you want to be good at something, you have to suck first. You have to fail over and over and over again and learn a tiny bit each time as you hone your craft.

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."

I may be dumb and lazy, but at least I'm not, wait, what was the third thing?

ChatGPT land this plane with the engine failed for me

How bad is this on a scale of 1 to 100?

95 out of 100 This is catastrophic. Here's why it's a 95:

Landing Impact (40 points):

• Belly flopped onto a chicken farm
• Left wing occupied as a nesting box

Passenger Experience (35 points):

• Emergency slide covered in yolk
• Free eggs for all

...----

I'm a pilot and flight instructor. When I was a teenager, I would neglect English and Math homework to read my private pilot textbook.

See, there's this guy named Edward Thorndike who described several basic principles of learning, including the Principle of Readiness. See, learning is an active process, takes effort to do, and effort sucks. So people will only endure the suck of effort if they genuinely believe they'll get anything out of it. Students will best learn a lesson if they understand the value of the lesson to them in their lives. No, "you'll never know when algebra will save your life" is not good enough. No, "Someday this might come in handy" isn't good enough. Because of quiz-based game shows with million dollar cash prizes, that applies to literally everything from Mayan architecture to the seventh season of Friends.

My lived experience with essay writing is it was almost always an exercise in pointless pedantry. Thirteen years of public school and five years of college, I was almost always graded on punctuation, grammar, spelling, and strict adherence to the MLA style guide. One of the few essays that was graded for content was in an engineering class I took. We were to research a notable engineering failure, where something bad happened and an engineer was at fault. I chose the McDonnell-Douglas DC-10 cargo door and the two in-flight emergencies it caused. I cited the actual NTSB reports and the Applegate memo. Of all the essays I wrote for English teachers, I don't remember the topic of a single one, my memories of writing them involve "Okay when it's a periodical, the title is italicized, but when it's in a journal..."

When teachers answer "Why do we have to learn this" with "it's required for your diploma" literally don't learn it. It is a mandatory waste of time designed to either be a bullshit tolerance exercise or included because it aesthetically resembles academics.

That doesn't happen in aviation curricula because flying a plane fucking matters and there's a point to everything we teach. Under part 61, anyway. Part 65 is full of horse shit. I went to mechanic school and learned there's no such thing as an aircraft that's safe to fly. I build furniture now.

What were we talking about?

wrong post, ma man

I hated it when teachers would get narcissistic. But in universities it becomes a huge issue. There are computer science majors in my campus that are bored by math and programming so use chatgpt.

They are bored by the degree they chose themselves. So instead of changing degree plan or learning to enjoy it as a hobby like you would normally do, they just cheat.

Professors' workarounds are worse. Universities do not execute any "academic dishonesty" actions because they are the ones giving students free chatgpt account after a deal with openai.

So professors either use AI flaggers that give false positives and give everyone 0, or more commonly just give extremely hard exams to offset homework grade inflation.