[MarcScott]

I'm thinking of going back into teaching because of ChatGPT.

I created an entire scheme of work for my wife today, including all the lesson plans, and next I'll work on some student resources and quizzes. It took about thirty minutes. She'll need to check them over to make sure they're okay, but still a massive time saver.

I've taken photos of my son's revision activities and had ChatGPT mark them. It's surprisingly accurate given his awful handwriting.

Report writing becomes a thing of the past, as I can upload a CSV of grades along with a sentence or two of description, and have it generate unique reports for each student.

This would all allow me to do what I used to love. I can just spend my time with students in the classroom, engaging them, teaching them, discussing with them. I won't be bringing home mounds of paperwork, that eats into my evenings and weekends. I'll go into work each day feeling fresh and ready to actually educate kids.

ChatGPT takes away the busy work from both teachers and students.

[SoftTalker]

Why would anyone pay you to be a teacher when they could just use ChatGPT directly. Prompt it to develop a lesson plan to learn whatever, create the learning materials, and then evaluate their mastery of it. And be endlessly available, nights and weekends, for further discussion and help with any difficulties?

[vonunov]

>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

[righthand]

When I “scan for correctness” a code change (ex code review), I do my best to look for code correctness. Often that change has to go through product review for visual correctness. A lot of my scanning is brief and determining logic with the variables I know. However I often exclude the cases that have already been tested through e2e and unit tests. These tests are valuable to ensure regressions don’t occur.

Please tell me what validation and regression testing can you guarantee by having an LLM generate a lesson plan? Why is it important to have your own unique generated lesson plan, even if that lesson plan is just a common template with synonyms swapped out?

You’ve eliminated a bunch of extra work for yourself but have no long standing regression check from the output of this generator.

These “actually LLMs are great for X topic” comments are just here for evangelism then? What do students gain from having you generate partially random lesson plans? Please don’t tell me “time savings”.