Teacher in private school using AI for everything.

[ShakespeareSallo]

As the title says really.

My now teenage child has attended a private school since 11, they are now in Year 10. It has been a great experience for them and worth the money. We aren’t rich by any means but afford it by making cut backs, we haven’t been on holiday for 5 years. VAT has hugely impacted us.

My child now has a teacher for a core subject which they haven’t had before. They bring their book home every week, and it is very obvious that the whole scheme of work and all of the worksheets and homework are AI generated. I am not a dinosaur, and I do use AI myself. However, this level of usage coming from my child’s teacher seems excessive, and I am not sure how much actual teaching is going on? My child has also said all of the PowerPoints used in lessons are obviously AI generated, and even that it has appeared as though the things on the PowerPoints the teacher is seeing for the first time alongside the students?!

Less of an issue, but I’ve also had some suspiciously AI looking and sounding emails from other members of staff in the school.

WIBU to arrange a meeting with the Head of Year to raise these concerns, or is this just the modern era of teaching?

Your child really does not get on with this teacher do they

Whilst I completely agree with you, I guess it’s all the more galling when you’re paying ££££ for the privilege.

Do you at least check the material that AI has produced for you? Please tell me you do!

I don't think anybody is suggesting that everything AI-generated is useless. It's just that, if you're paying a teacher for their knowledge, experience, skills and ability to specifically tailor their material to their students, and they're outsourcing most of it to a bot - one that pretty much anybody could use - they're clearly telling you that you don't really need them at all, and that the value that they can add personally is clearly very limited. You can effectively recreate most of what they can offer in minutes with, effectively, a 'magic spell'.

It's amazing how many people are utterly determined to make themselves and their livelihoods obsolete and throw themselves on to the scrapheap as soon as they possibly can.

I work in a private xchool, we are told to use AI.
Why not book a phonecall with thd teacher to discuss it ?

This. PowerPoints and worksheets are just tools, a means to an end. It’s how the teacher actually teaches the lesson which matters.

Why does using AI matter? I hope they’re all using AI and not wasting time writing them themselves - that would be mad.

😂

I think the acid test of this would be to ask if you would do the same at a face-to-face parents' evening. Would you feel confident speaking into a machine and asking the machine to summarise and rephrase what you'd said, and then relaying it to the parents sitting opposite you?

And asking them to do the same: speaking their questions and comments into the same machine and waiting for it to translate it into something that you can understand more easily and then relay that back to you?

Kind of like using Google Translate with speech when you're desperately trying to communicate with somebody else when neither of you share a common language... except in your case, you DO speak the same language; albeit you and/or they are not confident in your communication skills in your native tongue?

If you wouldn't quite assuredly race forward and do this without a moment's hesitation, why does the fact that you happen to be using email make any tangible difference? Might it be related to the fact that you can much more easily get away with it via email than you could in person, even when communicating with the exact same people? Needless to say, I'm assuming that you aren't an English or other Modern Languages teacher?

Especially when families haven’t been on holiday for 5 years in order to afford it.

What's the point in the students wasting their time by studying and learning it all themselves, or even bothering to turn up - when, apparently, they can just get AI to do everything for them in perpetuity anyway?

I would have no issue with a teacher using AI to more quickly produce a worksheet as long as they had given due consideration to the content. Same with presentations.

The only thing I would find concerning about your OP is the part where you mention the teacher may have been reading it for the first time in the lesson. This is not acceptable if true.

The irony being that the teacher would probably tell you they will get back to you with a considered response, or ask you to send them your concerns by email instead... and then just stick it all through AI rather than actually be a human communicating simply and honestly with another human.

Surely the same could be said for learning to do maths in our heads when we have calculators?

Just because the tool is there to make your life easier once you understand the concepts it doesn’t mean it’s not worth learning the concepts, nor does it mean the tool is inherently bad.

What is it that makes you think/know AI is being used?

funny example above. But how do we know less obvious AI is actually AI?

one thing I’ve noticed is how AI seems to say a lot, but often actually says very little. With a lot of enthusiasm, and confidence. I quite like the fact that we are beginning to intuit when AI has been used. Tho presumably, it being AI, it’ll keep improving its style, so we will keep getting duped?

Or you can write your own... AKA what I and my department do.

OP, YANBU.

So just the study materials? Teachers have been using/sharing free downloadable worksheets for decades - means they have more time to focus on the actual lesson planning, learning new topics, devising new content and to properly mark your child’s work. Moreover, if they are using AI to generate materials specific to those personally devised lesson and topic plans, they will actually be better focused/more specific than the awful generic stuff we used to have when I taught 20 years ago.

This is how AI ought to be used - to facilitate and enhance human learning, no?

Or they choose to work in private schools because either/or the pay is better and/or behaviour is better?

I have been told to run a lot of things through AI by my boss. Seen some lessons clearly done via AI which kids point out are wrong.

So do I.

Posters saying it’s not an issue because OP’s DS does well. Students in independent schools usually do well: they come from homes who take education seriously, they are invested and class sizes are small. I’ve never worked in an independent school, the workload and accountability in state schools is insane and teachers turn to AI. I’m sure independent teachers have huge responsibilities of different kinds but surely with smaller classes and better behaved students, you can relax a bit and actually TEACH? Proper thinking, reasoning and construction of argument are dying in state schools. I can tell you that for nothing! I believe in state education with all my heart but it’s losing its way. If you’re paying more for education, you’re right to expect more. State school kids deserve better too.

The teacher might not just want to share his lesson plan, and might not want pupils studying something before he’s taught it.

The difference is that the teacher can and will have created all their materials for years. Often at the detriment of their own family and children.
They know how to do everything they are using AI to do. They’re just using a short cut to get similar results. Children haven’t learnt those skills yet hence the difference.

Well, you're right in that the advent of pocket calculators (and latterly phones) has led to a sharp deterioration in the general public's mental arithmetic skills. However, I think a key difference is that the results that a calculator will give you are pure unambiguous facts. Even then, it has led to a lot of general innumeracy, in that people relied fully on the calculator, with no sense to notice mistakes if they've accidentally caught the wrong button, or the calculator glitches. In pre-barcode days, you would sometimes get disengaged shop assistants who would mistakenly press the wrong buttons and just state the amount showing - with not the slightest notion of anything being awry when asking you for £104.71 for your loaf of bread and pint of milk on the counter.

Teaching as a whole is about far more than just filling the students' heads with facts, with no personal human input, no room for thinking and no room for actually properly comprehending what you're learning.

We had a minority of teachers at school who would just write things from a textbook on to the blackboard and tell us to copy them into our books. Even at a young age, it was blatantly obvious to us that we were all wasting our time there, and we might as well have just been given the textbook (or a photocopy) to take home with us. In sharp contrast, we had other teachers who actually showed great enthusiasm in their subject and actively taught us in an enjoyable, easy to absorb and fully relatable human way. We truly looked forward to their lessons and turned up ready to learn. My own choices for which subjects I went on to study were most definitely heavily influenced by the teachers (of the latter kind), rather than purely the subjects themselves.

Why not say that then instead of saying you decide 5 minutes before the lesson, which gives the impression of being ill prepared and unprofessional?

Hearsay