Australian tutoring chain closes, tells parents to use ChatGPT and Gemini instead

Tutoring is another situation where it can succeed wildly or fail miserably, and it will depend more on the harness than the model.

Tutoring is a process, and the end result is that the student gains a demonstrable new capability. The how isn't as important as the end result. If we end up with a bunch of people with increased personal capabilities, it's a win. If we're lazy and we end up with a bunch of people leaning on crutches, we failed.

Time will tell, I guess.

This isn't binary, teachers have limited bandwidth and supplementing real teaching with AI supported research can work.

Students need to understand what AI is and is not.

Something got lost as we transitioned from parents telling their kids to 'go play and do not come back until dinner is ready' to us handholding & driving our kids from one social/sport activity to the next.

While it causes fights with my kids, I blank refuse to do certain things for them (fix their internet connection, repair a toy or bike) I'll give them the tools and they know to ask when they get stuck.

The act of learning through failure is a dying art these days. It's 'teach to the test', stressed out teachers, parents having too much to do compounded by taking on second, third jobs in this economy.

Teaching our kids how to leverage AI is something parents should invest in. Its part of a broader education landscape.

A friend of mine put his kid into a school called Alpha [1]. It has no teachers, only guides (?), who are well paid grads but not formally teachers. Kids go in in the morning, do two hours of computer study with an AI program, and the guide only steps in if the kid has a question or doubt the system cannot answer.

Then there's recess and afternoon is all taken up with "Life Skills" classes such as entrepreneurship and the likes.

Kids are tested weekly and progress through grades at will. For example, his kid would officially be in 3rd grade, but she's doing 3rd reading, 5th grade math, and 4th grade writing. She can easily test 3rd grade topics now.

I am ambiguous about this model. Love the "learn as much as you want" even if it means learning 2, 3 grades ahead, but the no-teacher rule and so much computer use seems a little strange. Also if the kid is not extremely self-motivated, they will be left by the side of the road by the school.

[1] - https://alpha.school/

Edit: It's 40k a year.

I'm all for saving money where you can, but these models really aren't great for learning because they love giving you answers and it's so easy to get an answer, but the process to get to the answer is how you actually learn. Unless you put guardrails in place to actually learn, I don't think this advice is good.

I've been using chatgpt to tutor my son to improve his writing skills. It actually works quite well and the lessons adapt to his skill level. I seeded it with the curriculum and marking guidelines for his school year. Each lesson is timeboxed to 30 minutes and he stops if the lesson goes over time. I then feed this back into chatgpt and it adapts the lessons appropriately. It's helped quite a bit with a definite improvement in his writing skills. He actually wants to do this instead of school as he feels he gets a lot more out of it!

A calculator, Youtube and iPad tried to replace teachers. They all failed but this time it's different.

I just tried ChatGPT on a simple find an error in the proof question today and it completely butchered it ignoring the main constraint that two variables a and b were natural numbers. It said, "a and b might not be natural numbers" and then went on to produce a very elaborate, completely wrong answer.