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by vonunov 622 days ago
>further discussion and help with any difficulties

This is the part where you "draw the rest of the teacher"(1)

The part where all the magic happens. Public school teachers' day jobs anymore are rather focused on curriculum delivery and exam prep. They cherish the chances to actually engage in teaching -- not (necessarily) lecturing, not traffic-policing the classroom, not admin overhead, but connecting with a student and their understanding of a thing, and navigating the ways to conceptualize and illustrate it, and the ecstasy of the Click, and the pride of watching them sail forth into brilliance. That's the whole part of teaching that anyone ever became a teacher for (I hope, but not optimistically) -- namely, the part involving teaching.

If this seems unclear, it could be a semantic thing. Here, "teaching" refers to the actual essence of the profession, its locus of fundamental distinction from other professions, and the true target of a passion or fascination for teaching. Much as everything a doctor or developer does at their job cannot accurately be described as "practicing medicine" or "developing software". Some of the activities that are not the essential teaching or developing or practicing medicine are necessary, or at least ancillary, but there's not-insignificant amounts of stuff occupying the "not exactly what I got into this for"-to-"actively a waste of time" range.

I'm not trying to say that a One True Pure Essence of the Sacred Art of Teaching exists and is the sole motivator for all teachers everywhere forever, or anything. It's just that it seems like you thoroughly gathered up all the parts that are distinctly not seen as teaching proper (at least in my world, which I hope isn't an unusual perspective) and said something like, look, GPT can do all the support-work/busy-work/paper-work. What do we need the teacher for anymore? After all, GPT has got to be faster than the teacher at coming up with different ways to phrase explanations too, right? And so it is, I don't doubt that. But good teaching goes way deeper, and I have my doubts that an LLM is near the point of being able to act upon a nuanced theory-of-mind of a student's current understanding of a concept in context of their previous experience and learning/personality style and aptitudes. For example.

Maybe we overlap the same page, so let me not be uncharitable: There are surely many people employed as teachers who seldom teach anything to anyone (as opposed to, say, merely informing them of it). I would agree that their work is well within GPT's wheelhouse, and all speed to them on the way out, along with the content marketers who write pretend-useful articles all day, et al.

1. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/how-to-draw-an-owl