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Comment by parsimo2010 | Hacker News Reader

parsimo2010

A very honest take. They tried something, it showed a very small improvement, and they acknowledged it. Acknowledging that the cause appears to be a lack of engagement agrees with my own experience. You can give students great tools but that doesn’t make them interested in math. Khanmigo might be a good tutor but it won’t help unless you’re chaining kids to a desk and not letting them leave until they finish some quota of problems.

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I wondered how he didn't see this coming from a mile away, but in looking up more about Sal Khan himself, the surprising thing is that he never had any 'normal' teaching experience, and that explains everything. In a normal classroom, good kids don't need teachers. You could give them a book (or some Khan Academy videos, or a reliable LLM) and they'd learn the material far faster than you can teach it. Now let's talk about the other 95% of kids...

Those other 95% are going to generally have either a lack of motivation or a lack of intelligence. And for these kids a good teacher can do a lot, but actually teaching the material itself is a relatively small part of it. It's about giving them that motivation, or adjusting the material for slower students. And most importantly, it's about doing all of this without making it apparent that you're doing this, since keeping it feeling 'natural' is an important part of making it feel interesting and also helping to build a better rapport with the kids. That rapport/connection building is critical, and completely outside the domain of LLMs.

A lot of academically successful people recieve everything but a "normal" education. They are the ones who have developed the ability to self study from a young age and have the drive. As cliche as it is, a lot of the academically successful students I see are the ones who are passionately curious. While many of the Asian kids are obviously more inclined to be more motivated (due to their parents), this motivation makes them passionate at the very least. Some other students simply love the thrill of being better than their classmates. From my observation, a lot of those kids love going to schools where they are challenged and all their peers are equally if not better than them. This cycle is ONE of the MANY reasons why they are so successful.

If I could rephrase this, I wonder if you're also saying in a way that 5% of people are naturally self-driven but for 95% of people, the relationship matters more than what they're doing. If they have a connection with the teacher, then they'll learn.

Have there been cases where kids in the 95% did end up being self-driven about a particular topic that they had an interest in? Or did they always need to be given motivation?

There are not that many super educated autodictats. If you take that good kid out from the classroom and put them into a library with no teacher and no peers in it, their education is likely to just stop or severely slow down.

It probably isn't a good tutor, I'm using frontier SOTA models and whenever I ask them to explain anything they don't consider my question and don't display any understanding but just spam out unrelated simplistic metaphors, can only imagine how much worse the models the kids had access to were, LLMs don't have understanding and can't fake it either, there's no conception of how a memory might be formed or something might be understood, without that qualia it can't be a good teacher it can only output text that looks like it might be a good explanation until you read it

A good tutor builds an understanding of the learners current mental model then tries to broaden it with targeted materials (text, diagrams, videos), selected exercises, the Socratic method ... All LLMs can do is produce text that statistically looks like tutoring. AI has a lot of uses but tutoring is not a great fit. I think a well written textbook even would be better than AI because the author can have a general understanding of where the target audience is usually at and where they're expected to end up.

Agreed, I need to do a lot of prompt crafting when some math academy thing is explained poorly by them.

What sometimes helps is to ask them to make something interactive and visual. Like 3B1B does

> whenever I ask them to explain anything they don't consider my question and don't display any understanding

You are absolutely doing it wrong.

My experience is completely different. It doesn’t take a frontier model to give a good explanation (likely plagiarized from a textbook or a “blank for dummies” article).

Try a bit harder to tell it your background and the kind of analogies you want and don’t want.

Possibly this is topic-dependent. Most of my queries are about science and math.

In the first instance you had to learn how to learn. The kid that doesn’t know this yet isn’t going to try harder.

My strongest subjects where I showed the most interest were based on like 25% natural interest and 75% how I vibed with the teacher and they vibed with me, atleast in High School.

University is definately more interest based but my success was still very influenced by the quality of instructor. The materials and methods are important but not nearly as much as the quality of instructor.

"the cause appears to be a lack of engagement"

"...unless you’re chaining kids to a desk and not letting them leave until they finish some quota of problems."

Uhm, hey, could we talk for a quick minute after this meeting? No, no worries - it's just that the other teachers and I were wondering if we could have a quick chat about what "engagement" means :)

Humor aside, your point is very valid - interest in a topic is often a prerequisite to someone engaging with a topic. Even stuff like "I hate this class, but I gotta do well if I want to become a doctor someday" is based on an interest in that longer-term goal.

I’m not advocating for the practice of chaining kids to a desk…

I’m trying to point out that a tool might be helpful for you to practice, but if it isn’t used then the tool can’t help. Maybe if you were forced to use the tool then you could see the benefit, but as you noticed, the act of “forcing” something may feel undesirable from a moral perspective.

Sorry, I didn't mean to say that you actually want to chain kids to desks. I thought the juxtaposition of the two statements was funny in a "clearly you did not mean this, so it's funny that one can intentionally mis-read it in this way".

And - thank you for your posts! They're interesting and insightful!

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