Ask HN: Why are there still human teachers?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=905867

by amichail • 17 years ago

13 31 17 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Shouldn't students learn via software that provides a personalized learning experience just right for their abilities?

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.

kirubakaran• 17 years ago

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.

rauljara• 17 years ago

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• 17 years ago

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.

amichail3• 17 years ago

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

elbenshira• 17 years ago

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.

amichail3• 17 years ago

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• 17 years ago

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.

mgenzel2• 17 years ago

Because highly successful people are not necessarily those who can teach (and also, are 'human teachers' anyway). Teaching is inspiration, empathy, enthusiasm, wit, patience. You could be a Nobel Prize laureate and have none of these, and you'd make a perfect snooze-worthy drone (witness some highly decorated profs at some top universities). I'm going to assume you don't have any children because I think otherwise you would see how much a difference person's personality has on the child's ability to learn.

Granted, many teachers suck. In the U.S. we don't have a system that rewards good teaching.

Also granted, the ability of the current technology to bring amazing (human!) teachers to the masses is great and growing. But, teaching is a two-way street, and you can't have much of that with 1 to 1 million ratio.

mkelly• 17 years ago

The relationship between a teacher and student is an interpersonal relationship. It's like a friendship. The effect of a good teacher, as I see it, is not that you get more knowledgeable about a field. You can do that from a book or the internet. It's to motivate you, to make you excited about a field, because they showed you what they thought was exciting about it and you agreed.

Bad teachers can make you hate a particular field for the rest of your life.

imp• 17 years ago

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.

buugs• 17 years ago

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.

ErrantX• 17 years ago

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• 17 years ago

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)

tommusic• 17 years ago

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.

henrikschroder• 17 years ago

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.

scottw• 17 years ago

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• 17 years ago

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.

mping• 17 years ago

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.

bsdemon• 17 years ago

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

zackattack2• 17 years ago

amichail is deliberately trolling.

pg2• 17 years ago

It's not quite trolling.

justlearning• 17 years ago

This is one of the reasons why we need human teachers:

http://bentilly.blogspot.com/2009/09/teaching-linear-algebra...

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

hendler• 17 years ago

To learn to be human.

marze• 17 years ago

Same reasons the Turing test hasn't been passed.

mgenzel2• 17 years ago

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

hackerblues• 17 years ago

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.

amichail3• 17 years ago

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).

cwb• 17 years ago

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?

bofh• 17 years ago

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.

Ask HN: Why are there still human teachers?

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