A teen caught up on a missed Pre-Calc lesson in 40 minutes with Claude

Dissident Teacher@educatedandfree

On AI tutoring, from a veteran public school teacher:

My son was absent from school two Fridays ago, which meant he missed specific instruction on a new topic in Pre-Calc. He had a quiz on it Friday, three days ago. Thursday night, he seriously cut his hand at work (nipped an artery; Urgent Care docs took care of it toote de suite). He's fine, but he was worried he couldn't get enough practice in before the quiz because of voluminous bandaging and the stint in urgentcare.

Enter Claude. When we got home, we sat at the computer and he gave the very simple prompt, "Teach this concept to me."

Claude went through it with him slowly, then gave him practice problems. When my son went wrong in solving one, Claude pointed out his error, gave him the probable reason he made that error, and spooled up another problem to practice on. My son kept at this until he felt confident and was consistently getting practice problems right, as graded by Claude.

At the end of the session, after ~40 minutes, he said, "I bet I have this down better than my friends who only got it in class."

I think he's probably right. I'll let you all know how the quiz went when he gets it back.

When you have a learner who knows what it takes to get to mastery on a topic, they can study on their own. When you have a student who doesn't know what they don't know -- either because of absences, a lack of focus, or poor instruction -- using AI like this can be a huge game-changer.

As a teacher, this is a gigantic win. If I know that I can send a kid home to Claude or Grok or Gemini (YMMV) after teaching them how to prompt for a particular topic in my class, I can get the weakest students closer to the average kids. Once they're closer, I can leverage AI to move the average kids up closer to the best performers.

That means I can speed up the class.

That means ALL the kids can learn more in the same amount of time.

I understasnd the teachers who fear they will be replaced by AI. But a teacher who can outpace AI -- a subject expert with the creativity that comes with expertise and knowledge of her students and the community -- can leverage AI for huge gains in the WHOLE MASS of students. This is much, much better than attempting to triage by teaching to the top OR the middle OR the bottom of the class.

American teachers are currently incentivized to teach to the bottom. This is a huge waste of time for the on- or near-grade-level students and especially the gifted kids in our classrooms.

Play with this teachers. It can be done, and done well. But you have to bring your content expertise to the problem. If you don't have content expertise, you're right to be fearful. So develop it, as fast as you can.

Meanwhile, periodic formative and comprehensive summative assessments should happen in class, on paper, with no phones or laptops, so the teacher knows she's seeing what the kids know, not what they can produce with AI.

AI at home under a parent's supervision is a win for American education, if the American K-12 establishment can dump its sclerotic, fear-driven, adult-employee-centric habits.