

Ask HN: Why are there still human teachers?  - amichail

Shouldn't students learn via software that provides a personalized learning experience just right for their abilities?<p>If a student has a question that the software can't understand/answer, then it could be forwarded to a qualified human who is responsible for answering questions related to a certain subset of topics.
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scottw
HN readers are a _vastly_ different audience than Joe Student. I would bet
that over half (or more) are autodidacts, extremely capable learners with few
mental obstacles to motivation or learning.

All of the good research I've read on online learning is done with self-
selected groups of adults who would probably learn well regardless of their
modality. All of the research I've read on K-12 studies suggest that computer
use in the classroom lowers students' scores (though computer use as a
supplement outside of the classroom can improve scores).

Besides that, this ethereal "software that provides a personalized learning
experience just right for their abilities" doesn't exist.

I'd really really love for there to be some magical software that can figure
out what a child needs and start from there, and we could probably hit a
decent percentage of the population, especially those children created in our
own (autodidactical) image, but if you spend any time in K-12 schools (I'm a
founder and currently on the board of our local charter school and have 4 kids
of my own), you'll notice that children have _vastly_ different learning
abilities, interests, needs, etc.

I would guess that more than half of what a K-12 teacher does doesn't have
anything to do with teaching facts, but teaching about life and how to
motivate, how to behave, how to stop flicking boogers on your friends, how to
deal with disappointment when you can't "get it", etc. Learning for children
is much different than learning for adults. And we're not even addressing more
subjective education such as creativity, synthesis, and higher-order thinking
skills. These don't translate well to computers because they require direct
human judgement and some subjective evaluation.

~~~
nomoresecrets
I've rarely met people who are excellent at everything. For the areas they
have problems with, I imagine human teachers are great.

I imagine such people on HN who think they are 'brilliant' (see a recent
question) are actually only adept are certain subjects, sometimes quite a
narrow subset. I'm guessing they drop the other subjects asap.

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henrikschroder
I'm sorry you only had bad teachers. If you had had a good teacher sometime in
your life, you would not ask this question.

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elbenshira
Because humans are social beings. Sure, most of us are good at self-learning,
but a good teacher can provide so much more than a textbook can. A good
teacher is a mentor and a dispenser of wisdom (and opinion). They've been
there before, so they know what the hard stuff is, and where you might go
wrong in your thinking.

And it's more fun to learn from a person than from a book. There's
interaction. You can ask hard questions and they can provide profound answers
that lead to other questions. Try doing that with a textbook.

~~~
amichail
Why do you think the wisdom dispensed by some random teacher is worth
listening to?

Why not dispense wisdom via software from highly successful people?

~~~
ajdecon
Because wisdom (and, more to the point, advice and mentoring) is highly
context-dependent. It depends not only on your current understanding of the
material, which software has trouble measuring anyway, but also on the way you
are thinking about the particular problem and the types of related subjects
you have worked with. Not to mention your life situation and overall attitude
at the time. A good teacher can take all these into account, deciding when to
challenge a student versus focus on reinforcement, pulling in examples from
related material with which the student might be familiar, etc.

Software-based learning _might_ work for the subset of people and subjects
which can be commonly learned from textbooks by self-motivated individuals
now: things like programming, math, some science. But many people require the
social interaction, and many topics cannot be easily managed in a purely
information-dump approach.

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tommusic
One of the most difficult things to do is to create an effective mechanical
way of measuring that student has learned the subject matter.

Naturally for some subjects it is more straightforward than others, but the
problem is still challenging on balance.

Early childhood development requires a lot of psychological growth, in
addition to knowledge growth. Abstract thought is not always acquired at
different rates, and recognizing its emergence isn't very deterministic.

A solely software-based system also requires that the user provide honest
input. It's hard to diagnose a lying patient.

Some parts intuition, some parts adaptability.

As the ability of software to handle these tasks improves, it will surely
become a larger part of the equation. I don't think it will replace live
humans in my lifetime though.

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kirubakaran
I've found that the best thing teachers do for me is to nudge me out of my
comfort zone. I self-learned pretty much most of the things I know and I am
very self-motivated. I thought I don't need human teachers at all. Teachers in
my school seemed to just slow me down. Then I took a drawing course in a local
community college recently and realized that there is no way I would have
learned all that in that short span of time without my teacher. Since learning
drawing is something I'm not as comfortable with as I am with, say, learning
Physics or CS, I gained a lot by having a human teacher.

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cwb
The strict answer to your question has to do with humans being social,
motivation, and strong AI, I think.

However, if we allow teachers to stay in the picture, software could (and
should I think) be used more to support learning. It could improve students'
abilities significantly if done sensibly.

Data-mining would probably be useful to tune such a program, but I wouldn't
expect it to outcompete teachers on the structuring of materials and answering
students' questions any time soon.

The question on how to grade students is fascinating. There's an argument for
one long exam at the end of your studies: you get the grade corresponding to
your performance at the end of your studies. If you "get it" late in the
course you're not penalised for earlier performance and, more importantly, it
encourages you to take a long-term perspective on what you learn. I've
experienced both teacher + frequent non-standard test assessment in school and
one shot at two weeks of exams after 3 years at university. The former is
problematic because grades become uncalibrated (thus losing much of their
intended usefulness). My main concern with the latter is that you can end up
testing things you don't intend.

Calculating the grade from appropriate data captured over a long time would be
great -- comparisons and profiles could be both more detailed and more stable
than what a teacher could provide. (There are some things it couldn't test,
like handling the pressure of final exams.)

Do you think computers should have replaced teachers? Why do you think that
hasn't happend?

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mping
Teaching/learning is _far more_ than just acquiring knowledge. Just the mere
presence of a human being, let alone a sympathetic one, transforms the whole
learning experience.

A good teacher shapes the children's mind, inspires and motivates children to
do things that otherwise they would probably not dream of doing. I still
remember some of my old high-school and college teachers.

With that being said, I'm sure the learning/teaching experience can be vastly
increased by using appropriate software.

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bofh
I'm sorry about all of you, guys who think this is a stupid question. You are
all romantic people, saying there exist good teachers, and teacher is a friend
of a student and blahblahblah. But the reality is - most of the teachers are
BAD. I know much more examples of bad teachers, who even demotivate students,
instead of inspiring and teaching them. And it is better to use a program,
made by a good teacher, than to be taught by a bad teacher in person. And that
is what the good teachers should concentrate upon, writing good pedagogical
strategies for a teaching computer program. And don't be so ignorant - think
about Chinese - they would need hundred millions of good teachers, which is
not possible to have. And believe me, I had good teachers and I know what it
means. I learned math, which is the most complicated thing to learn, and I
still believe math teaching can be automatized to a big percent, without all
these sentimental tears of joy about how good the human teachers are. Don't be
so narrow-minded. In the future, there will be robots.

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justlearning
This is one of the reasons why we _need_ human teachers:

[http://bentilly.blogspot.com/2009/09/teaching-linear-
algebra...](http://bentilly.blogspot.com/2009/09/teaching-linear-algebra.html)

more at : <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=850485>

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ErrantX
Many people still have trouble with computer skills.

Even more people (me included) prefer printed and taught material to staring
at a PC screen all day.

Language is very expressive: you can teach things with the tone of your voice
that might take 20 lines of text just to describe.

Passion for a subject.

Social skills teaching.

~~~
SamAtt
_Passion for a subject_

This would be my best answer. I love technology and think it can do a lot but
it can't make you love a subject in the same way a great teacher makes you
love a subject. To this day I find one of my most profound interests is U.S.
History and that's largely due to my High School Teacher whose love of the
topic carried over into his teaching (and hence made me love the topic as much
as he did)

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hackerblues
What advantages do you think software offers in this respect that books don't?
All I can think of are: a) Logging successes/failures b) Suggesting questions

Both of these are partially replicated in books by a) Having a list of answers
at the end of the book the student can check their answers against and so mark
their own work. b) Students can look at the entire list of exercises and
choose whichever they think appropriate - the very height of a "personalized
learning experience"

Think about the reason we still have human teachers even though books have
been available for hundreds of years and you'll probably answer your own
question.

~~~
amichail
Software can adapt to student ability and evaluate student progress. The
software is like one long exam and the resulting grades should matter.

Moreover, the data obtained from this software can be used to improve it
(e.g., by making it better adapt to ability).

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buugs
My brother goes to a school where they use computers to work through lessons
at their own pace. There are humans lecturing (kind of a youtube with
powerpoint split video) and they solve the questioning problem by having
teachers for each subject in the same room as the students.

Personally I think this is a rather stupid way to do school because you don't
get that interaction that you would in a normal school, one such example would
be when a teacher asks you about the current subject and you have to quickly
use critical thinking to come up with an appropriate answer. This is
completely lost when such a learning system is used.

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bsdemon
One of the most stupid questions I've ever seen.

~~~
zackattack
amichail is deliberately trolling.

~~~
pg
It's not quite trolling.

~~~
zackattack
do you think he is engaging in dialectic?

~~~
pg
Dialogue, possibly, but I would not have said dialectic.

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imp
I think the biggest role that a teacher plays is baby sitter. Through 12th
grade, most of the class is there because they are required to be there. If
you could write software that sends kids to detention, then you might have a
good replacement.

Besides the social part, software probably could be a great way to teach some
subjects. Human teachers still exist to fill non-educational roles.

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rauljara
The success of such a scheme would depend on the quality of the software. I
could imagine software that would have many advantages over traditional
teachers. It would be a hell of a piece of machine learning, however. Given
what I've seen of the very best of the chatbots, it is a long, long way off.
If you really want to see this come to pass, I suggest you get programming.

~~~
roundsquare
Agreed. The best thing human teachers bring is their ability to adapt. Its not
about answering questions, but seeing where a student is having problems and
figuring out how best to solve that.

~~~
amichail
Perhaps machine learning with a massive data set would do a better job of
adapting?

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marze
Same reasons the Turing test hasn't been passed.

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hendler
To learn to be human.

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mgenzel
Also see a sci-fi story by Robert F. Young called "Thirty Days Has September".

