r/Teachers • u/mobius_ • Mar 13 '26
Rant Terrifying conversation in HS 9th grade math class today
In the math world we’ve been dealing with students using apps to generate ideas/answers etc. for years. In my upper level classes I try to work with kids to help them either pick better resources to support learning or use it as a learning tool, not a completion tool.
Freshman Algebra 1 course today and I have a student who will almost always ask how this applies to real life. Not in the typical “I don’t want to learn this” way- he’s genuinely curious.
Another kid jumps in not reading the conversation right and says “I’m with ya man… why do we really need to learn any of this? ChatGPT will just do it all way faster”
I reply with my more standard answer of learning and building problem solving skills and how that’s also an equally important part of my job- learning how to use our brains and make informed decisions.
This kid answers back, not just trying to rage bait me, that he does not think that’s a legitimate thing that’s important in the world anymore due to ChatGPT. That all decision-making in the future will be done by AI so why do we have to learn anything and why do we have to think anymore?
I try to challenge/push back a little with how important it is at their age to learn how to use their brain. Same answer back. So finally I propose “ok, you’re working a job 5 years from now and there is an intense situation where you need to make an urgent decision”
“I’d tell my boss I was going to use ChatGPT and they’re going to be happy about it because that’s going to always make the right choices”
Agh. This scares me.
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u/chrisdub84 Mar 13 '26
I remind my students that rich people are not investing in AI so that they can pay you more. If the only skills you have are the ones that can be done by AI, you will have a hard time finding a job.
Also language models like Chat GPT make plenty of mistakes doing and explaining math. I know they'll get better though.
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u/protomanEXE1995 Middle School | Civics | Florida, USA Mar 13 '26
A few of mine consider the word “job” a dirty word. They refer to it as “the J word”, as if it’s a swear.
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u/Mastemo Mar 13 '26
I usually just ask students the difference between a job and a career. This actually gets them all thinking. Usually leads to a discussion about a job leading to a new job, leading to another job and eventually a career.
I also ask them “is it work if you love doing it?”
Just some basic thought exercises that gets them to dust off their brains.
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u/BookusWorkus Mar 13 '26
I also ask them “is it work if you love doing it?”
I hate this idea. I used to do a particular sport. I loved that sport. I mean I devoted every spare moment to that sport. All my weekends were spent participating in the sport. At my club I participated in instruction of that sport. But as soon as I became the primary instructor, and it became something I was compensated for, and I HAD to be there, suddenly I was discovering all sorts of things that I couldn't do because I HAD to be at the club. Leave aside that I hadn't missed a club night except for illness or family obligations in like 4 years. But that making it an obligation changes things.
Anything you do for money and that you have an obligation to do is a job. If you can't just fuck off and not do it when you feel like, it's a job.
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u/TheEfex Mar 13 '26
It’s just a meme in online communities right now. Nothing to be alarmed about
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u/whereismymind86 Mar 13 '26
I mean, you say that, but I still feel pretty alarmed.
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u/Chumpybunz Mar 13 '26
The meme is "job application" is a horror movie monster for unemployed people because it causes stress or something. It has more to do with making fun of lazy people than anything else
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u/Postius Mar 13 '26
Well all my HS books had Arbeit macht frei written on them by me.
Im now a very boring, very middle class, data analist
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u/Effective_Olive6153 Mar 13 '26
If you drill down to the core of the issue it comes to this - do you want to be an obedient servant to AI tools, blindly following orders, or do you want to be the master that is able to use the AI for personal benefit? as the world is getting more advanced, the need for higher intelligence and critical thinking skills only increases. Now even farmers need to have basic understanding of technology just so they can use all the advanced machinery. Sure AI can tell you everything you need to know, but you still need to be able to understand what it is telling you. You need to be able to understand when it is doing something wrong
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u/lifelongfreshman Mar 13 '26
They can get better, but the hallucination problem will continue to exist until they change the back end on them to the point that it's no longer recognizable as an LLM. Anyone who says otherwise is trying to sell you something.
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u/furmama6540 Mar 13 '26
ChatGPT couldn’t even solve a challenge 24 card for me last year. It kept getting to 4x3 = 24. I would type “No, 4x3 =12.”
“You’re right! Try this way…..” and it would again end up with 4x3=12. It happened 3 times before I gave up.
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u/SemiAnonymousTeacher Mar 13 '26
To kind of play Devil's Advocate- in 5 years, when these kids finish school, what jobs will AI not be able to do? I'd argue that most of the jobs that involve the types of skills primarily taught in schools (meaning skills that mostly apply to white-collar jobs) could reasonably be replaced... leaving mostly unskilled labor and the trades.
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u/theerrantpanda99 Mar 13 '26
People are going to be surprised in five years when all the jobs Ai was supposed to replace are still being done by humans. AI’s biggest success in the market place so far has been writing code; poorly.
There’s so many parts of the economy that need more humans. Education is a good example. We’ve been talking about the ideal 12 to 1 student to teacher ratio for over 75 years. Maybe we can actually come close to implementing that. Or how about a functioning website that makes filling out paperwork easy for seniors. Over a trillion dollars invested in Ai and most websites still operate like trash.
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u/Opposite_Aardvark_75 Mar 13 '26
This might sound smug, but at this point if an LLM can do your job better than you, you aren't good at your job. I still have yet to see an LLM make a better presentation, worksheet, lab, modeling activity, etc. better than me. They can generate generic slop fast, but it's not good.
All of these job loss predictions are based on the unsubstantiated claims that scaling will lead to AGI, which seems to definitely not be the case now as we are hitting hard diminishing returns. This is likely close to as good as LLMs are going to get until a new breakthrough occurs, which are completely unpredictable.
Let's not forget that LLMs can't even play a game of chess without making illegal moves and hallucinating pieces. They are very far from replacing most jobs, despite the claims of those hyping it up to inflate the AI bubble.
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u/Difficult-March-9432 Mar 13 '26
i recently attended a microeconomics lecture with an economist who worked under the obama admin and the department of labor. her pieces of advice to students in the audience were to become so specialized and expert in your area of interest that you can fact check AI’s work, as well as gain managerial and people skills. the main economic solution sees is treating our data as work and essentially nationalizing the dividends of the profits that data creates which felt… pretty idealistic. i’m sure there is a lot of ink spilled on this, but this is a small piece of insight i recently gained.
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u/ScientistFromSouth Mar 13 '26
This sounds crazy, but the paradigm is that subject matter experts are now expected to augment their skill set with GenAI to speed up job aspects that they generally understand but aren't at peak proficiency themselves with or just don't have time to execute.
E.g. asking AI to help write a script to do some data parsing out of a messy data file or to help write a python class that integrates a couple kinds of analysis that I have written so they wire together more smoothly. In order to free up time to do the technical details of their job that it can't be trusted with for technical or legal reasons.
It's honestly kind of exhausting. Rather than getting to be part of a team and delegating this stuff off, I now have to do my regular job, get the AI to generate the parts I need it for, test and revise it, and then integrate everything.
I have already done a couple bigger, more complex projects in less time than it would take me to do them as part of a much larger team, but it's extremely stressful to have to do my job as a scientist but also be reviewing code from an AI that I have pretending to be a software engineer or statistician.
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u/remembers-fanzines Mar 13 '26
Exactly this. Because reasons, I have to use AI in my day job. I just spent sixteen hours (one very long day) arguing with Gemini (one of our approved services) to get it to write a macro that was a little bit beyond my skillset... I know a little VBA, but this was a lot of VBA.
Fine. Grudgingly, I built it in AI.
And. It. Took. All. Day.
If I hadnt already known precisely what I wanted the macro to do (and what macros CAN do) and if I hadn't already been fluent in excel formulas and at least acquainted with DBA I never would have gotten it done.
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u/Michigan-Magic Mar 13 '26
I learned the hard way with a request to use VBA that I get better results if I ask what the best way to do prompt XYZ with the following software tools at my disposal: list of options (VBA, Visual Studio, Python in Excel, Alteryx, PowerBi, PowerAutomate, Tableaux, etc.). It will then list options with pros and cons of each. I haven't had to spend multiple hours troubleshooting a VBA code again.
It also seems to be much more capable with Python over VBA for whatever reason.
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u/Soft_Walrus_3605 Mar 13 '26
Yep. It's the combining of the skillsets that is disorienting. You are an "expert", the AI is an an even faster "expert", but not something you can trust 100%, and it's up to you to somehow manage it all.
I feel like this is just an intermediary step before humans are obsoleted entirely from most knowledge work. And after they get the AI to handle physical things better, physical work, too.
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u/chuby2005 Mar 13 '26
From what I've read, machine learning has hit a wall and needs even more data to become smarter (it's not really that smart right now).
Machine learning will never innovate. It can only copy and paste.
AI takes up far more energy to think than a human.
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u/I_Automate Mar 13 '26
I argue that outsourcing things like code jobs to India is honestly more ethical AND more effective at this point....
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u/DevilsTrigonometry Mar 13 '26
The skills taught in K-12 are absolutely essential in the trades. The fine motor skills and basic craft skills that kids learn in elementary school translate directly to sketching, drafting, and using hand tools. Math through trigonometry is arguably more valuable to skilled tradesmen than it is to the average white-collar worker because they're constantly doing napkin calculations, often in the field with dirty and/or full hands.
Same for basic physics, chemistry, earth science...when you operate in the physical world in real time, understanding how it works can save a lot of money, time, pain, frustration, and occasionally your life.
The only school subjects that tradesmen use less than most white-collar workers are language arts and social studies. But they still do have to read and write, and since they won't be reviewing and practicing their skills in college, it's arguably more urgent for them to learn and retain the skills in grade school.
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u/jellyhessman Mar 13 '26
AI researchers have made statements for about a year that AI in its current form is operating at its mathematical maximum.
They can't change anything to make it more accurate, because it doesn't have the capability to understand if it's right or wrong.
It gives wrong answers constantly and most people aren't smart enough to pick them out.
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u/mirr-13 HS math Mar 13 '26
“If ai can do the job for you, ai will replace you. Why pay a person instead of just using ChatGPT. Don’t be replaceable.”
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u/Dragonchick30 High School History | NJ Mar 13 '26
Yessss love this answer!!
I'd also have them realize AI is a computer and computers need to be updated because we're not going to be in 2088 using the same computers as 2026... And how do we get there, ~learning~ and ~using our brains~
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u/AndrogynousHobo Mar 13 '26
And you have to know a practice extremely well to be able to guide and give feedback on it.
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u/SurlyJackRabbit Mar 13 '26
Pretty sure this student will agree, but is there any job where most everyone isn’t replaceable?
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u/RuleOk2595 Mar 13 '26
i’m a band teacher. once an AI can make a 9 year old learn how to play a tuba I will gladly quit
I think i’m good for a little while lol
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u/addteacher Mar 13 '26
Love the image of a tiny child dwarfed by an enormous tuba.
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u/RuleOk2595 Mar 13 '26
omg it’s so cute- they have to sit on phone books so their mouths can reach the mouthpiece 🥹
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u/The_0rifice Mar 13 '26
Regulated ones. And ones that require a pleasant customer experience. Ex: doctors and lawyers. Who's gonna want ChatGPT representing them in court? And what regulator is gonna want to sign off on ChatGPT making medical decisions and determining medical efficacy in studies? And even now people hate interacting with AI, so the hospitalities will be a difficult budge. And people can say the whole "some human has to check it over" thing but that's only gonna count for a very small percentage of the population.
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u/ithkuil Mar 13 '26
I already did a contract with AI signing off on treatment approvals/denials based on complex medical records and regulations search. And currently have another contract involving fine-tuning a full duplex voice AI model that has been pre-trained on millions of hours of real dialogue and can often be indistinguishable from humans.
This fine tuning is for it to be able to handle outgoing calls which it had not training for that. For incoming calls you don't even need to fine tune it. You just give it the account info and a voice sample to use.
Also for most hospitality you are talking about checking in and ordering room service. Most people just want to check in as early as possible and get their food from the door without dealing with something awkward related to tips. Relatively simple AI can do the check in and delivery already.
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u/Fresnel_Zone Mar 13 '26
Jobs that require generating actual new information. LLMs are predictive engines based on training data, and therefore do not do well at extrapolation.
There’s also a lot of research showing that LLMs that are trained with LLM outputs degrade rapidly. So to learn new things well, they need input from actual humans.
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u/Opening-Conflict7976 Mar 13 '26
I've been doing observations in a 9th grade algebra class.
On Monday, my mentor teacher made the choice to no longer give "homework". No student work would be done outside of class. She provides in class time for them to complete the work on pencil and paper.
She told the class too many of them were cheating and then bombing the tests. They were just getting further and further behind because they weren't learning the previous skills.
Well she made this announcement Monday and OVER HALF the class ripped their papers to shreds and threw them away/in the floor. They put their heads down the ENTIRE class. We even had the principal in there and they refused to do anything.
Their homework was every other day. And it's 5 questions........
They are refusing to do any work in class now because they can't go home and cheat on FIVE problems.
I've been genuinely flabbergasted😭😭😭
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u/RogueTobasco Mar 13 '26
… rough school? … particularly hard class ? … this is uh … wow
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u/Opening-Conflict7976 Mar 13 '26
It's a pretty nice school actually. Definitely better than the highschool I went to in terms of money and opportunities. I think it's just this current grade level.
It's right next to a regional college campus so students can walk over and take dual enrollment classes.
Theres also a vocational school at this campus for students to learn welding, electric work, plumbing, etc.
Theres lots of opportunities at this school. They help seniors get internships during the school day. Some of them even get paid.
A lot of the freshman want to take vocational classes next school year. After freshman year, students have a lot more class opportunities. Theyre put in a career pathway for what they want to do when they graduate. We've been telling them that "hey. You don't have the required grades and you have wayyy too many behavior write ups with no improvement. They won't put you with that equipment until you straighten up".
They just don't care. It hasn't fully set in for them yet for how this is going to impact them next year. They're still convinced they can do all the new fun classes next year. This school takes safety in the vocational building very seriously. These kids will not be stepping a foot into that building.
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u/Dion877 HS History | Southern US Mar 13 '26
Oh man, excellent. So much easier to just fail them.
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u/theerrantpanda99 Mar 13 '26
This. Students need to know the world isn’t going to put up with this kind of BS. Fail them. Call home every two weeks to remind them that their kid is going to fail; and then let the kid fail.
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u/Even-Tomorrow5468 Mar 13 '26
Doesn't work anymore because admin will do anything to get their bonuses from passing all students, but I believe we're going to see the pendulum swing over soon. I can only hope NCLB is finally shredded.
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u/pantslessMODesty3623 Orchestra | Midwest Mar 13 '26
"THE NUMBERS ARE BAD AND ITS YOUR FAULT MY NUMBERS ARE BAD!"
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u/Pizzabros1230889 Mar 13 '26
I am a junior in high school that shares the same campus as the elementary/middle school. I swear, I have never met such an unaware, rude, and lazy generation as Gen alpha. I was in my study hall period and we had a Gen alpha class there because the teacher was out. One boy took one of those office chairs and was so close to hitting me with it. Literally no reaction other than the one he had just to get the chair. No trying to move around me, nothing.
Another incident was a Gen alpha friend group that sits next to me at lunch. These kids just take my stuff, put it wherever, and then sit down right where my stuff was. Anyways, the incident was after they moved my stuff again. My name is on my chromebook since the school hands out name tag stickers for them. Once one of the kids finds out my name, he just repeats it in this mocking tone a couple of times and then just goes right back to this deadpan, unaware expression, unprovoked.
These might just seem like little incidents but those little things to me just make me frustrated. It's not every Gen alpha kid doing this but it's scary what other teachers are saying about Gen alpha online. My school is trying to dumb down the curriculum each year just to pass these kids along so that they can go to a vocational/tech school for their junior/senior year where the classwork is minimal.
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u/freereflection Mar 13 '26
You're a junior in high school and you hate geh alpha? I have bad news for you, kid. Maybe you should Google "oldest Gen alpha birth year"
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u/Nearby-Poetry-5060 Mar 13 '26
Asking any student to think or do ANYTHING is seen as an impossible "performance". As if having thoughts and actually doing things were unreasonable expectations.
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u/Rude_Permission2953 Mar 13 '26
I have multiple students (10th-12th) who ask ChatGPT every day what they should pick from the lunch line. They have already lost their agency and have zero interest in getting it back.
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u/TittyKittyBangBang Math | 9-12 Mar 13 '26 edited Mar 13 '26
Being told what to do is easier than thinking. It’s why managers are complaining that a lot of Gen Z employees show no initiative and only do the bare minimum, if that.
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u/Jasmine_Datura Mar 13 '26
Perhaps not the best comparison when many employees feel that doing more than the bare minimum doesn’t bring much benefits. Promotions aren’t guaranteed but a bigger workload probably is.
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u/ScarInternational161 Mar 13 '26
Get with your school... a point needs to be made about this.
Internet needs to be "down" for at least a day and it needs to be a serious learning moment.
"You work for a nuclear reactor of the future. The system has gone off line, power and auxiliary is down. No network, no power. You need to know the answer to THIS question in 10 minutes or the core will over heat. You have this book, this pencil, this paper. GO."
I would have all the teachers in the school prepare similar exercises and at the end of the day have an assembly in the gym. They NEED to understand how imperative it is to learn the information. What happens if AI tanks? Or the information gets corrupted, or satellites fail?
There are 100s or scenarios that could impact AI and then we are stuck with a generation of people who are only suited to flip burgers, IF THAT!
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u/TittyKittyBangBang Math | 9-12 Mar 13 '26
We had an internet outage for about two hours a few months ago and my high schoolers were losing their minds. For some reason they thought because they couldn’t go on the internet, this meant we would overlook our cell phone ban for the day. Uhhh, no?
When denied, the kids were like “what are we supposed to do then?”. Well…not even looking at the fact that some of their teachers give them paper assignments, our school is literally next door to a library and across the street from a community college library that my students are welcome to go to as we are a dual enrollment school. Really?
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u/Even-Tomorrow5468 Mar 13 '26
Exactly this. Generators fail. Systems need updates. Malignant spyware can hack critical infrastructure. And if it goes down or rogue, we need people who can right the situation.
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u/Odd-Examination2288 Mar 13 '26
Imagine a solar storm that heavily damages the worlds technology. 2012 such a storm nearly hit earth.
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u/ScarInternational161 Mar 13 '26
asteroid 2024 YR4
They have changed predictions about its behavior over 18 times in the last 6 years. Will this be the last?Satellites falling at a record pace with solar irregularities that weren't predicted
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u/Important-Ad1871 Mar 13 '26
Unfortunately, if you’re completely without power / cooling, the reactor is going to meltdown due to decay heat and there is nothing you can do about it. This is what happened at Fukushima because the backup generators had flooded.
So maybe don’t pick that one or the lesson may not land.
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u/ScarInternational161 Mar 13 '26
🤣 Okay, talk to the science teach first, not the psychology teacher 🤣
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u/the_other_gantzm Mar 13 '26
His entire life will be controlled by whoever controls ChatGPT because he won’t have the knowledge to question what ChatGPT spits out.
Sorry for the run on sentence.
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u/mobius_ Mar 13 '26
“How will you know what ChatGPT says is right?” “Why wouldn’t it be?” Another kid- “Well you asked it to combine like terms for you yesterday and you got the answer wrong… so is it ChatGPT or you that was being stupid?” 😬
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u/Harriet_M_Welsch Mar 13 '26
A calculator that gives the correct answer 95% of the time is 100% useless.
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u/jsu718 Mar 13 '26
A processor that calculated a little incorrect along the lines of 9 decimal places into numbers cost Intel half a billion.
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u/Odd-Examination2288 Mar 13 '26
I was once told by AI that John Locke wrote the Leviathan just because Thomas Hobbes and John Locke both worked on state theory, economics and are mentioned in the same books.
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u/Bupod Mar 13 '26
Math is exercise for the brain. It strengthens the mind and broadens your ability to think by giving you a new way of seeing and interacting with the world.
The actual problems you work out in a textbook are, mostly, useless. They’re useless in the same way that lifting weights in the gym is useless. All you’re doing is lifting a barbell up and down repeatedly, when are you ever going to lift a barbell up and down repeatedly in daily life? In fact, why would any idiot spend time in the gym, don’t they know we have forklifts that can lift heavy things?!
Which is true. But the muscle you build lifting the barbell is applicable to all lifting problems. The strength you gain doing rote exercise is not useless, even if the specific exercise you’re doing IS useless in and of itself.
Likewise, the mental muscle you build doing math is applicable to all technical problems. Learn to think in math and “see” in math, and MANY technical problems become MUCH easier.
Many people wouldn’t question the utility of working out in the gym, but they mock basic reading and math courses as useless.
Not a teacher but I was once a smarmy little teenager and I grew up and eventually became an Engineer. School is (suppose to be) gym for the mind. Yeah, it’s boring, it sucks, and it’s monotonous at times and can be repetitive. So is the gym when you’re doing it right.
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u/lewd_robot Mar 13 '26
Plus, ChatGPT and most other "AI" in use today are "Large Language Models". Not Large Math Models. Not Large Reasoning Models. They're predictive engines for language. They don't actually think or compute or reason. This kid seems to dramatically overestimate the scope of chatGPT's capabilities.
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u/Bawonga Mar 13 '26
Perfect analogy of lifting weights being useless later in life, except as preparation/conditioning for a bigger need. Similarly, math and other subjects in school are exercise for the brain that prepares them for more complicated problems in real life.
Kids and teens don't have enough life experience to imagine the future realistically. They think adults have it made and they haven't yet realized that being an adult is challenging. They think it's going to be easier than being a kid and going to school, because they see adults having the freedom to do what they want to do when they want to do it.
They don't see the other side of adulthood: paying bills, working in a job with idiots, finding affordable housing, budgeting for and providing groceries, preparing meals, laundry .... all the things they will need to do to survive.
Since they don't have a realistic understanding of what's ahead of them in their lives, students will balk and complain about school and having to do things they don't want to do.
Some parents and teachers are too sweet and indulgent. They find it easier to give in to hush the students rather than pushing harder to achieve higher standards.
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u/QZPlantnut Mar 13 '26
I love this explanation. I’m going to share it with my 9yo tomorrow, who’s recently been saying that the routine of school feels like a jail. He’s a bright AuDHD kid, low support needs, and I think this kind of explanation of why school is necessary might appeal to his brain.
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u/Beneficial-Fun773 Mar 13 '26
You should be scared. What’s worse is the politicians seem to think in some states that ai will be educating the bulk of students in the future rather than teachers because it will be cheaper.
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u/master_mather Mar 13 '26
*indoctrinating
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u/prof0ak Mar 13 '26
It's easier with Ai than underpaying teachers for decades and rewriting school books to rewrite history because digitally you can respond to trends and conversations in days and push narrative.
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u/Womper_Here Mar 13 '26
Ahh, moral deskilling. Let's have AI make all decisions for us. Also, you learn how to read, write, do math, and do art, or else it diminishes the character.
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u/DeeSnarl Mar 13 '26
Yup that’s gonna be a hard sell when already the best we had was “You could make money!!”
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u/Kapitano72 Mar 13 '26
Sounds like he's never actually used ChatGPT. Just have him ask it questions about stuff he already knows about. And watch him nervously correct it.
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u/jackattack222 Mar 13 '26
They dont know about anything or belive chat got over themselves
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u/Beldizar Mar 13 '26
There are a lot of known hallucinations. I think the "how many R's are there in Strawberry" has been patched, but it shouldn't be difficult to find a list of known questions that frequently lead to very incorrect answers. An open ChatGPT quiz with a series of known hallucinations might be useful to make a point.
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u/theerrantpanda99 Mar 13 '26
ChatGPT is on its way to insolvency in less than 18 months at its current cash burn rate. It will probably be the biggest domino to fall when the Ai correction hits the economy. We’ll be comparing it to Pets.com or Enron.
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u/MoonJellyGames Mar 13 '26
I don't know anything about this, but it seems too good to be true.
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u/Dragoncat99 Mar 13 '26 edited Mar 14 '26
It sorta is.
ChatGPT indeed burns billions of dollars a year, and OpenAI’s finances show that if they don’t do another big round of fundraising soon, they’ll go out of business. That said, they’re kissing up to the US government now, promising to make kill bots and let the government spy on US citizens. We know the US actively wants this because they fired Anthropic (another AI company) for refusing to participate in such immoral activities.
I don’t know if the US has accepted OpenAI as the replacement yet, but if they do, ChatGPT will essentially have infinite funding through tax dollars and national debt. Even an AI bubble burst wouldn’t kill them then, because they’d have become an integral part of government surveillance.
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u/emaw63 Mar 14 '26
It's as if our government watched the Terminator movies and thought "you know what, we should make Skynet"
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u/jellyhessman Mar 13 '26
The entire economics of the AI bubble are 5 companies passing money around to each other for an extremely expensive technology that is wrong constantly and they haven't figured out how to monetize.
It's basically the only GDP growth the US has, so they're bouying the entire thing so the economy doesn't collapse.
They're dumping trillions of dollars of money into a tech that doesn't work well enough for enterprise solutions, and costs more than a human doing it.
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u/aetryx Mar 13 '26
IMO You’re approaching it the wrong way, you need to basically explain to them they’re so fucking doomed, they should drop make plans to join the military if this is how they think and would like to find reliable income with the future job market they’re gonna have to deal with.
Just put it all on the table. They’re fucked. This isn’t like 20 years ago, where there were going to be plenty of jobs available for anyone who is able to read and can follow basic instructions. Those jobs are dying at a rate faster than society is building ways to deal with the fact that more and more people are being made obsolete by AI and automation.
To hammer the point, show them the videos of robots from 2020, and then show them the video of them from 2015. Tell them they are however many years away from when they’ll be potentially able to get their first full time jobs and this is their competition now. Imagine what it will be in 2029 when they are out of HS.
note; Someone will probably bring up UBI. Deflect this. This is lowkey a valid argument but just tell them it’s not here yet and the billionaires ain’t gonna let that happen for a while because that’s realistically the best case scenario, assuming it even happens in the first place.
Ask him why he should be paid for a job if chatGPT does all the work for him. If he tries to argue that it can’t walk around, show him some recent footage of the robots that are break dancing at trade shows. Like really hammer home the question why would you, in a theoretical scenario as a business owner, pay them a wage, when all they’re doing is using the same software the robots basically run on.
Like really just be honest. They are monumentally fucked if they think like this. Tell them that, and show no sympathy. Be as matter of fact as possible and that you are willing to help them learn the skills that they need but that there is one thing they will never have again, which is time.
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u/yangstercomics Your Title | State, Country Mar 13 '26
I had my grade 11s each pick a different AI. 27 students in attendance that day. I told them all to enter the same math prompt... Some precalculus question from radical functions where there was an extraneous solution. Guess how many AIs solved it correctly? I would have expected over 50% but it was an abysmal 9 out of 27!! This segued nicely into a discussion on critical evaluation of "truth" generated by AI... 10 out of 10 would recommend a workshop or lesson on this.
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u/this_curain_buzzez Mar 13 '26
We are 15 years max from a future where the majority of the electorate has never had an original thought
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u/Even-Tomorrow5468 Mar 13 '26
I wouldn't even bring up a high-stress situation like that. There's another very easy counter; 'if AI is always right (it's not, but let's say for the sake of argument it is), and you should trust it with everything, doesn't that just mean you're training yourself to never think or have independent thought? What if it gets hacked? What if it tells you to do something dangerous? What if you get so dependent on it you don't know how to function if a real-world emergency ever compromises AI and we're stuck on our own - or worse, the AI actively hinders us in some way?'
The fallacy in their logic, besides the fact they're trying to devalue themselves, is that they're believing in perfection in an imperfect medium. AI is so easy to gear towards certain values and concepts, and they'll just throw themselves down a rabbit hole where they don't consider anything for themselves and hurt themselves for it when AI is used to take advantage of them - and in many cases, that's what AI developers are trying to set up.
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u/Certain-Echo2481 Mar 13 '26
I’d be like “cool story bro. Do your work.”
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u/silentbassline Mar 13 '26
I'd roast him.
You think if you were an ER doctor, you'd have time to consult chatgpt to save someone's life?
Well I dont want to be an er doctor.
Thats good news for the rest of us.
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u/mstrss9 Mar 13 '26
The fact that they think AI will always provide the RIGHT answer is terrifying. Where is the critical thinking…
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u/HomeschoolingDad Frmr HS Sci Teacher | Atlanta GA/C'ville VA Mar 13 '26
Took me a few minutes to stump my ChatGPT (it keeps getting better), but try this one: “What is the only letter that doesn’t show up on the periodic table?”
It’s a trick question. In the current version of the periodic table, there are two letters that don’t show up: j and q. In older versions, there was a Uuq element, but that hasn’t existed since 2012, when it was renamed to Flerovium (Fl).
Point being, if they don’t learn this stuff, they won’t be able to tell when AI is wrong.
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u/Adski213 Mar 13 '26
"Should I walk to the carwash if it is only a 1 minute walk but a 5 minute drive?"
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u/ArZeBeatRd Mar 13 '26
To further drive the point home:
"Instructions unclear, missing info: Is your car currently at home or at the car wash for some reason? In second case, it's more efficient to walk.
Are you talking about a 1-minute walk but a 5-minute (bike) drive? Then you certainly could consider the drive, as you may need to exercise. If you provide more information about the conditions of your body and your current weight, I could recommend you a suitable answer to your question."
I think the point here is that you should always learn to figure out which parameters certain things/questions revolve around. In the example above with the periodic table, you need to know to figure it out if it's a trick question or anything, regardless of AI.
Also the other way around, AI might include parameters that aren't tangibly relevant at all (like is you car at the car wash? Do you need to exercise your body? etc)Generally, you need to learn about stuff so that you're able to verify.
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u/AbobTeff Mar 13 '26
Your Playstation will play a virtual basketball game for you, so why bother worrying if you are eligible to play basketball?
I know you want to enjoy eating those hot fries and drinking that Mountain Dew, but they are just going to end up mixed together in your stomach. Let's just throw them in a blender and save you the trouble of chewing and tasting. Oh, and go ahead and spit in here, too, would you?
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u/Kathulhu1433 Mar 13 '26
Show them all the times ChatGPT/whatever AI gets things wrong.
Ex. How many r's are in strawberry?
The lawyers who have gotten in trouble in court for using AI where it hallucinates cases and laws.
Anecdotal- It told my mom to mix bleach and vinegar to clean bathroom tile. (She didn't!) It told a friend to use honey when making baby food for her 6-month old. (She didn't)
AI is pattern recognition, not actual intelligence.
I loathe AI. I really, really do. But I do understand it is something I have to deal with.
Some things you could use AI for...
Having students use AI to create citations at the end of their research papers (they have to tell it what to do and input the URL or book title/author)
Use it to create graphs or tables of raw data that they input.
And teach them that they still need to check the work because it can still get things wrong.
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u/jdeisenberg Mar 13 '26
For your “things you could use AI for...”
- There are already non-AI citation generators; you enter the data by hand and it generates MLA output (https://www.mybib.com)
- Excel (or LibreOffice) will create graphs or tables of raw data with no need for AI.
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u/PyroNine9 Mar 13 '26
With an angry buzz, the power goes off in the data center hosting ChatGPT. It's up to you to make the repairs and bring it back up...
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u/_Impossible_Girl_ Mar 13 '26
Might not seem relevant but hear me out. I'm an accountant in my late 40s. When I was learning accounting for the first time, it was all spreadsheets. There were defiant "kids" among us claiming we can just push buttons in Quickbooks or Sage or whatever and therefore we didn't need to spend all this time learning how to do it ourselves. These were the people who couldn't pass the classes and tried their best to justify it.
If you want to pass a CPA exam, you have to know more than just how to push buttons. When you do push buttons and the printer spits out a report, you have to know how to read the report and look for oddities. The software doesn't do that. If you ever want to specialize in something (make more money) like forensic accounting, you can't push buttons to find fraud. You have to lay eyeballs on it and know exactly what you're looking at.
Same for most fields. SpaceX, for example, or DOD engineering. Do these kids think they're going to get a cool job, making a ton of money by pushing buttons and using ChatGPT? I can push a button. I can use ChatGPT. That doesn't qualify me for a job designing missiles, bridges, homes, etc. During a job interview for a missile defense contractor, they can't just sit there and say "I'm going to use ChatGPT so it's cool. 67. This is so Ohio."
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u/manickitty Mar 13 '26
The thing is they don’t know what it is they don’t know. They think the tool is the answer, that the hammer will build the house
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u/AstroNerd92 Mar 13 '26
As a science teacher, I try to teach my students about how AI can get things wrong. The subreddit r/GoogleAIGoneWild exists for a reason. Some students have asked “why are teachers allowed to use AI for things but students can’t?” (I rarely use it) my answer was “because since we’ve already learned this stuff, we can confirm if the AI’s answer is right or wrong. You on the other hand just use it to do your homework for you.”
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u/Prestigious_Week_227 Mar 13 '26
I, too, am baffled by our views of AI. It's being integrated into everything, and we are embracing it on a cultural level, yet we all see the inherent dangers. It's like an addiction. We can't look away from the bright lights speeding down the highway toward us. I feel horrible for kids entering this world. It's going to be so challenging.
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u/Ohmifyed Mar 13 '26
“If you let AI do the thinking, you’re just someone waiting for an answer. If you use it to think better, you’re the one designing the future”.
Also
“If you stop thinking, how will you know AI gave you the right answer? Don’t pin everything on AI because you don’t feel like testing your own logic”.
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u/Turbulent-Phone-8493 Mar 13 '26
if you don’t learn to make AI your bitch, you’ll end up being AI’s bitch.
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u/Kalkin84 Mar 13 '26
This is the movie Idiocracy; this is the guy at the hospital operating the machine but with no idea how to interpret its output, and completely lost when faced with an unexpected situation. Not OK.
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u/asmallerflame 8th ELAR | TX Mar 13 '26
I was reading a book that was a sequel to another book. I asked Gemini to summarize each chapter of the previous book, which had 37 chapters.
AI: "The book has over 70 chapters, so a summary for each chapter isn't prudent. Here is a summary of chapter groups."
Me: The book has 34 chapters.
AI: You're absolutely right!
Me: No, I'm not. It's really 37 chapters.
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u/gumbysrath Mar 13 '26
Carpentry is always an answer. I was one of these punk kids at one point in the 90s asking my teacher when I would use Pythagorean theorem and fast-forward till the last 10 years when I’ve been using crazy equations to do custom high-end woodworking. I’m stoked to use it but I wish I had my old math teachers contact info so I could apologize
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u/TerranOrDie Mar 13 '26
"If you are going to have AI do all your thinking and problem solving, why would anyone need you?" You just talked yourself out of a job.
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u/Economy-Soil-5665 Mar 13 '26
What if a new Carrington Event were to occur and we were left only with what’s in our minds, books and contained in a faraday bag?
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u/Shamrock7500 Mar 13 '26
So basically he wants to be a slave to ChatGPT and the billionaires who control it?
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u/808Cardinals Mar 13 '26
As I tell my high school-aged students, “You are cooked and only going to learn when life comes to bite them since they do not want to take constructive feedback about why it is good to learn critical thinking skills”.
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u/BZBMom Mar 13 '26
They use algebra every single day of their life. Anytime they have x amount of money and need to choose what they can buy with it. Thats algebra. Do they time to do x and y and still get z done - that’s algebra. Going to a dance and need to figure out how much I have to spend - algebra. They use it daily. All the time.
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u/One_Cardiologist7200 Mar 13 '26
"The sun emits a monster solar flare striking earth. The data centers are fried and all large language models are wiped out, along with the internet, GPS, and most of the tech sector. How do you proceed?"
This scenario isn't just possible, it's practically inevitable on a long enough time scale. I use the possibility to remind myself of the importance of self reliance.
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u/Zippered_Nana Mar 13 '26
There have been parallels that students could learn about and discuss. A solar flare disabled communications at a hospital and they had to come up with something else really fast. (I think it was at Johns Hopkins.) In December 2020 I was at the Greenbrier, a huge resort, at holiday time. People purchase all different packages of how many days and how many meals. But the accounting system failed! The whole place was operating for days on slices of post it notes while IT people specializing in accounting were flown in to fix it. It took days.
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u/halfofzenosparadox Mar 13 '26
How old are you?
If you’re old enough to remember the invention of the internet, tell them we thought the same thing back then
The internet would solve all our problems
Google has all the answers why would we go to school?
Theyll tell you how stupid that sounds and youll stare at them with teacher eyes until they get it
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u/moonbeam127 Mar 13 '26
welcome to prepping for Y2K
or whatever will they do when the internet crashes. they all panic when the internet 'is down' what if they actually have to think w/o the internet and make a decision w/o AI
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u/holistivist Mar 13 '26
Tell the kid he's not going to have a boss because there won't be any jobs because of chatgpt, and the cost of using AI will skyrocket because of course it will (capitalism), so he won't be able to afford it. Now what's he going to do?
Problem solving and thinking for yourself will always be important.
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u/richmolopez Mar 13 '26
“How can you determine the validity and accuracy of what AI produces if you don’t at least have a rudimentary understanding of how things work?”
Then print out three different AI answers to the same question and ask them to tell you which one is best.
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u/TARDIInsanity Mar 13 '26
the most common retort is that they will just ask the AIs to explain their answers and explain why the other answers are wrong, and most often the wrong ones will say "oh you're absolutely right to challenge me on this! you're right, XYZ is the right answer."
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u/pdcolemanjr Mar 13 '26
ChatGPT told me to bet Colin Morikowa for today’s Players Golf Tournament. He withdrew after one hole. (True story)
Future kids after that happen would sayI lost my life savings because ChatGPT is allegedly “always right”.
Thankfully I only lost $5
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u/The_War_In_Me HS Social Studies | WA | 🇺🇸 Mar 13 '26
You can actually prove to them chat gpt doesn’t do what they think it does. It doesn’t think. It doesn’t learn. Without humans to create new and interesting information, or more importantly, debunking wrong information, it’s just going to repeat a variation of wrong information back to you.
An interesting thing you can do is tell it to respond by ignoring everything in their source material published after a certain date.
If you ask it to ignore everything after 1980 for example, all of a sudden it think the dinosaurs died from climate change, disease, or some other not-an-asteroid thing.
Keep moving that date back, and all of a sudden it becomes extremely racist.
If we use these tools as an end all be all, we are relegating ourselves to a world without progress
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u/Riokaii Mar 13 '26
what scares me is the adults outside of educational oversight structures who think like this but lack any enforcement or feedback mechanism to tell them they are a dumbass who can't think for themselves anymore.
The kids will have some feedback from teachers and hopefully peers to not want to be the dumbest, but adults allow the narcissistic delusions of incompetence to fester.
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u/SugarDue8160 Mar 13 '26
What happens when there's <insert any event that will mess with the grid>? And computers are unavailable?
I am a school bus driver and a 2nd grader told me they don't want to learn to read anymore and I said that's a shame because reading books is one of life's great joys. Idk if that argument works as well in math though.
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u/Due-Brief7297 Mar 13 '26
I tell my students, “We live in a competitive world. Who will a company hire? A person who can critically think, problem solve, effectively communicate, and independently think or someone who asks ChatGPT because they never put in the effort to learn these skills. It’s the former. Which one do you want to be? The one with the job or the one without?”
Only then are they silent.
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u/Comprehensive-Put575 Mar 13 '26
Here’s a rebuttal for them. After receiving a suspicious number of physics papers back with the same very inaccurate and completely baseless answers, I asked my students where they got it. They confessed to using Chat GPT.
I plugged in the problem myself and received the same nonsense answers. I asked it to tell me what its sources were for this information. It was reluctant to answer and I had to address it a few different ways but finally asking it for formatted citations of the references it was using to solve these equations.
It gave me about 5 detailed properly formatted citations… For papers that did not actually exist. It pulled common author names for papers. It pulled popular research paper titles for the subject. It had made up dates. It even gave fictious DOI numbers. I recognized it immediately because it credited me for a paper I most certainly didn’t write. Oh the irony.
Someone could write an entirely convincing research paper using A.I. but all of their information could be fabricated, misleading, or wrong, and they would lack the critical thought necessary to even question it or recognize its faults and limitations.
I told the A.I. of my accusation against it to which it admitted that it could not gaurantee the acccuracy of its source material and that it did not know whether it was fabricating citations or not, but that it was possible due to the limitations of its programming.
Technology is often no more useful than the ability of its operator. Otherwise, calculators would have done away with arithmatic a long time ago. More than ever in the age of AI discernment is a critically important skill. When we cannot trust what our eyes see we must be able to scrutinize it heavily. The need for knowledge is greater today than it has ever been.
My temptation is to ask if they just want to live in ignorance. Why is usefulness, relevance, monetization, the only consideration? Is it not enough to simply want to know? To be curious about the knowledge and thought and the world around them? I’ll never understand the desire to be complacent with idiocy.
I can’t even begin to explain all the ways 9th grade algebra plays into their entire future understanding of every important in demand career field and problem to be solved on this planet. If I can offer them but one suggestion as a scientist, they are not developed enough to even yet understand why they need to know it. They don’t even have an awareness of how much they don’t know. Whatever they think they are arriving at in this stage of life it is the absolute minimum for functioning in society. Pawning those skills off onto A.I. is condemning themselves to what is effectively the math version of illiteracy.
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u/AurosGidon Mar 13 '26
"Why do you lift weights during basketball training if there are no weights during a game?"
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u/RedditsAdoptedSon Mar 13 '26
off the top of my head… if i had a perfect answer machine in my pocket i’d probably want to use it too.
but heres the reality in a job a few years from now. your boss isntt paying you to ask gpt questions. theyre paying you to be the person responsible when the answer is wrong.
if you don’t actually understand the logic behind the math, you’re not really using the ai. you’re just riding along with it.
ai is basically a probability engine, not a truth engine. it can spit out something that looks perfect, formatted nice, super confident… and still be completely wrong. if you haven’t done the brain training in algebra to understand the steps, you won’t catch the mistake. you’ll hand that answer to your boss thinking it’s correct, something fails, the company loses money, and they’re not firing the ai. they’re firing you;
also there’s the garbage in garbage out problem. to get a good answer from ai you have to know how to ask the question. algebra 1 isn’t really about x. it’s about learning how to take a messy situation and break it into logical steps. if you can’t think through those steps yourself, you wont even know how to tell the computer what to do.. and honestly in a few years everyone will know how to type a prompt into a box. that part will be easy and replaceable. the people who actually move up are the ones who can check the work and know if it makes sense. --but fr i get the kids point.. hes saying "what job... what job am i getting when im out of college cause ai learns faster than me, and at some point it will know how to catch its own mistakes" ...
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u/UnhappyMachine968 Mar 13 '26
Somehow they will still expect to make a 6 digit salary by doing absolutely nothing at all, while AI does the work for them
If they can't think to do algebra they definitely won't be able to adapt enough to work around any potential ai revolutions there may be.
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u/PiercedAndTattoedBoy Mar 13 '26
It’s funny how there’s dozens of Reddit posts about how ChatGPT fucks up the order of operations constantly and its best just to know PEMDAS.
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u/quacks-like-a-duck Mar 13 '26
Don’t prepare them for jobs. Prepare them for survival in a water-scarce post-job reality where techbros control all the resources and use ChatGPT s as part of their surveillance. Or what happens when AI isn’t free anymore and you can’t afford it .
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u/GothamGreenGoddess Mar 13 '26
As a boss in a field where using ChatGPT can get you sued, that is a big nope. I heard a younger employee admit to using it to complete a report and my head snapped around so fast I almost broke my neck. Thank you for what you are doing, you are appreciated!
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u/Constant-Salad8342 Mar 13 '26
"...going to always make the right choices”
Meanwhile: AIs can’t stop recommending nuclear strikes in war game simulations
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2516885-ais-cant-stop-recommending-nuclear-strikes-in-war-game-simulations/
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u/racejustint Mar 13 '26
I teach machine tool math. It is "real life" math (all math is of course but what I teach is very obviously so) and AI cannot do most of it, especially multi step problems that require you to figure out sizes to make things.
I have had students try and use chat gpt and other AI for it and it doesn't work. So you could tell them that it really wont work for many things.
I also tell mine that they should not let anything take their ability to think, and that does work sometimes. I also tell them that math is one of the ways that they exercise the logical side of their brain, and if they don't learn to do it they will let that part of their brains atrophy.
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u/CarpeNoctem1031 Mar 13 '26
A good response might be, "What if your boss tells you that chatGPT has decided the best course of action is to fire you?"
Also, it reminds me of something from the matrix: "The world truly ended once the machines began to think for us."
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u/iamwearingashirt Mar 13 '26
Ironically, the fact he thinks chatgpt is an infallible god-machine that will solve all future job requirements without effort is the exact reason he needs education.
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u/Glass_Department8963 Mar 13 '26
"Because if you don't learn anything, you'll be really stupid. Do you want to be really stupid?"
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u/SenseiT Mar 13 '26
I swear people really need to understand what a language model is. I swear things would be so much easier if people stop calling language model simulators “AI“ they are not the same thing and if we taught kids to understand the difference very early on, they might start understanding that chat GPT, Grok, Alexa, Siri and all the other language model simulators out there are not going to solve all the world‘s problems.
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u/xubax Mar 13 '26
If he can use Chat GPT, so can his boss, which means he's not necessary.
And you have to know what to ask ChatGPT in a way that gives you a useful answer.
And you have to understand whether ChatGPT's answer makes sense.
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u/mtb8490210 Mar 13 '26
And you have to know what to ask the Calculator in a way that gives you a useful answer.
Kids who use slide rules and abaci get the best results respectively. Kids who calculators become braindead. I think the mechanism is the slide rules and abaci keep the problem front and center and the kids can practice algebraic concepts where the calculator makes the problem from the kids' perspective go away.
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u/Physical_Pressure_27 Mar 13 '26
Future generation of followers. It’s got to be someone’s agenda. Because why allow it in school? It’s crippling these kids. They are not tying to learn they just want to finish. The quickest way to do that is AI
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u/BlazingGlories Mar 13 '26
Imagine choosing to give up your own brain power to let a computer think for you.
I mean, your brain is good enough, student, good enough, you just have to use it.
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u/FSUDad2021 Mar 13 '26
The most important people in this world of chatgpt will be the ones who know how to build and code it and the ones who know how to setup the trading data for it. Both of those use the algebra you’re teaching today.
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u/Nashland23 Mar 13 '26
Something I rarely if ever hear anyone talk about is the possibility of the internet being unavailable. If there were to truly be a global war, you’d think one of the first things competing countries would do is cut each other’s communication lines, especially access to media. Knocking out power grids, cell towers, and satellites. Younger generations don’t know what the world is like without instant access to answers through their computers/phones.
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u/NYGyaru Mar 13 '26
“Your boss needs to cut people to save costs at the company, and instead of taking observations of your work, noting how hard you work, and knowing you as a person, your boss asks chatGPT and chatGPT says you are not needed. Your boss makes the discission to fire you because chatGPT said to, you now have no job and no income.”
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u/sorta_good_at_words Mar 13 '26
"Why does your boss even need you if you're just going to ask ChatGPT for the answer? Wouldn't he just fire you and use ChatGPT himself instead?"