Tag: teaching

The AI Threat To Critical Thinking In Our Classrooms

I’ve always believed in teaching Critical Thinking over raising robots to fit into the system. I’m hoping Bocopro comments on this one because he taught a long time and saw this firsthand.

Technology has no place in kindergarten through eighth grade (K-8). Evidence abounds that learning through books, pencil and paper, and dialogue with real people builds the strongest foundation for learning and provides cognitive, emotional and practical benefits.

The expensive private Waldorf School of the Peninsula in the Silicon Valley, where technology executives send their kids, has ZERO technology in grades K-8. Their website says, “Brain research tells us that media exposure can result in changes in the actual nerve network in the brain, which affects such things as eye tracking (a necessary skill for successful reading), neurotransmitter levels, and how readily students receive the imaginative pictures that are foundational for learning.”

Antero Garcia, Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University, explains why he has grown skeptical about digital tools in the classroom: “Despite their purported and transformational value, I’ve been wondering if our investment in educational technology might in fact be making our schools worse.”

States like Ohio are now requiring artificial intelligence (AI) policies for all K-12 schools, and AI appears to be the latest technology fad for government-sponsored education.

Most government (public) schools have already morphed into digital-based learning centers, relegating teachers to facilitators, with no improvement in student achievement. But adding AI to the tech-driven education system poses a great threat to a child’s cognitive development and safety.

According to Harvard University, “Brains are built over time, from the bottom up. The brain’s basic architecture is constructed through an ongoing process that begins before birth and continues into adulthood. After a period of especially rapid growth in the first few years, the brain refines itself through a process called pruning, making its circuits more efficient.” These “use it or lose it” developmental phases of the brain happen in early childhood and through adolescence. If an adolescent depends on AI to think for his academic success, rather than his developing brain, his brain, and he will be shortchanged. Harvard says, “While the process of building new connections and pruning unused ones continues throughout life, the connections that form early provide either a strong or weak foundation for the connections that form later.”

It continues here with a lot more intestering facts about brains and AI

Ivy League Fatigue: Harvard Is Now Offering Remedial Math Courses

The Harvard losers can’t even do math. It’s what happens when you go woke (among the many reasons). This is supposed to be an elite institution of learning. Instead, it is an indoctrination center for the left.

Harvard: where the U.S. sends it’s best, it’s brightest and…it’s remedial math students?

That seems to be the case as social media has been abuzz in recent days over the university’s choice to offer a new Math course, called MA5, heading into the new year. The Harvard Crimson first wrote about the introduction of the new course back in September of last year, but discussion over the course has caught fire on X in recent days.

The course is called Math MA5, and it is an introductory course addressing gaps in students’ algebra skills, according to Brendan A. Kelly, Director of Introductory Math.

Which begs the question: why are students getting into Harvard incapable of doing algebra, which generally starts in junior high or high school?

Running alongside Math MA and MB, MA5 will have a five-day schedule, with students meeting “one of two instructors all five days” for “a variety of different activities” on Tuesdays and Thursdays, the Crimson wrote last year. 

Kelly cited the Covid-19 pandemic as a factor in students’ struggles, saying, “The last two years, we saw students who were in Math MA and faced a challenge that was unreasonable given the supports we had in the course.” The goal is to “create a course that really helps students step up to their aspirations.” 

While structured differently, MA5 will align with Math M. “Math MA5 is actually embedded in Math M,” Kelly said. “They’ll have the same psets, they’ll have the same office hours, they’ll have MQC, they’ll take the same exams… So if you’re in MA5, you will experience Math M.”

The Crimson says that freshmen placing into Math MA or 1A had to take an additional skills check to guide enrollment recommendations.

Kelly said the department “investigated a number of different strategies” before deciding to enhance Math M rather than add a prerequisite. “What we thought was the best thing to do… was to add more time and support into MA for students who would need it.”

The goal is to help students overcome early challenges. “If the first one doesn’t go well, it can really make these lasting waves in their pathways,” Kelly said. “We want to make sure that students are on a path to success starting from their first day.”

more on the story of the dumbasses that go there

Homeschooling, The Antidote For Notoriously Inadequate Public School Systems

Our public school system has been decaying for decades.  My parent’s education was actually better than mine for fundamentals.  I only benefited from more current knowledge and information…..and considerable hard work.  When it’s easy to cruise through school as it is now fundamentally flawed (and the US ranks very low compared to the world in math and vocabulary scores), the facts are indicating that the kids learn less.  It has come out that 80% of high school kids in NYC can’t read.

Some have taken a step to leave this indoctrination and are Home Schooling their kids.  If you’ve followed the spelling bee championships, home schooled kids regularly win.  It’s a parent’s duty to do the best for their kids, whatever it takes.

Here is an article from the USA Today describing the dynamics and results of going down this path:

“What about home schooling? You know, it’s not just for scary religious people any more.” That’s a line from Buffy The Vampire Slayer, and it should strike fear into the hearts, not of vampires, but of public-school administrators everywhere.

The fact is, Americans across the country — but especially in large, urban school systems — are voting with their feet and abandoning traditional public schools, to the point that teachers are facing layoffs. Some are going to charter schools, which are still public but are run more flexibly. Some are leaving for private schools. But many others are going another step beyond traditional education, and switching to online school or even pure home schooling.

And, as Buffy so accurately noted, it’s not just “scary religious people.” In fact, rather than scary, those religious people are looking more like trendsetters. A recent piece in The Atlantic told of purely secular parents’ decision to take their kids out of New York public schools and home school instead:

Click on the link above for the full story

Update: California public schools are poisoning the minds of youth now also.

Update: Georgia cheats on SAT’s costing careers of students and educators