Rather than banning AI, I'm showing students how to use it effectively as a personalized TA. I'm giving them this AGENTS.md file:

https://gist.github.com/1cg/a6c6f2276a1fe5ee172282580a44a7ac

And showing them how to use AI to summarize the slides into a quiz review sheet, generate example questions with answer walk throughs, etc.

Of course I can't ensure they aren't just having AI do the projects, but I tell them that if they do that they are cheating themselves: the projects are designed to draw them into the art of programming and give them decent, real-world coding experience that they will need, even if they end up working at a higher level in the future.

AI can be a very effective tool for education if used properly. I have used it to create a ton of extremely useful visualizations (e.g. how twos complement works) that I wouldn't have otherwise. But it is obviously extremely dangerous as well.

"It is impossible to design a system so perfect that no one needs to be good."

This is the key part. I'm doing a part-time graduate degree at a major university right now, and it's fascinating to watch the week-to-week pressure AI is putting on the education establishment. When your job as a student is to read case studies and think about them, but Google Drive says "here's an automatic summary of the key points" before you even open the file, it takes a very determined student to ignore that and actually read the material. And if no one reads the original material, the class discussion is a complete waste of time, with everyone bringing up the same trite points, and the whole exercise becomes a facade.

Schools are struggling to figure out how to let students use AI tools to be more productive while still learning how to think. The students (especially undergrads) are incredibly good at doing as little work as possible. And until you get to the end-of-PhD level, there's basically nothing you encounter in your learning journey that ChatGPT can't perfectly summarize and analyze in 1 second, removing the requirement for you to do anything.

This isn't even about AI being "good" or "bad". We still teach children how to add numbers before we give them calculators because it's a useful skill. But now these AI thinking-calculators are injecting themselves into every text box and screen, making them impossible to avoid. If the answer pops up in the sidebar before you even ask the question, what kind of masochist is going to bother learning how to read and think?

If the sole purpose of college is to rank students, and funnel them to high prestige jobs that have no use for what they actually learn in college then what the students are doing is rational.

If however the student is actually there to learn, he knows that using ChatGPT accomplishes nothing. In fact all this proves is that most students in most colleges are not there to learn. Which begs the question why are they even going to college? Maybe this institution is outdated. Surely there is a cheaper and more time efficient way to ranking students for companies.

My strategy was to print out copies of an unassigned shorter poem by an author covered in lecture. Then I’d hand it out at the beginning of class, and we’d spend the whole time walking through a close reading of that poem.

It kept students engaged, since it was a collaborative process of building up an interpretation on the basis of observation, and anyone is capable of noticing patterns and features that can be fed into an interpretation. They all had something to contribute, and they’d help me to notice things I’d never registered before. It was great fun, honestly. (At least for me, but also, I think, for some of them.) I’d also like to think it helped in some small way to cultivate practices of attention, at least for a couple of hours a week.

Unfortunately, you can’t perform the same exercise with a longer work that necessitates reading beforehand, but you can at least break out sections for the same purpose.

I didn't get it. How can printing avoid AI? And more importantly is this AI-resistance sustainable?

"TYCO Print is a printing service where professors can upload course files for TYCO to print out for students as they order. Shorter packets can cost around $20, while longer packets can cost upwards of $150 when ordered with the cheapest binding option."

And later in OA it states that the cost to a student is $0.12 per double sided sheet of printing.

In all of my teaching career here in the UK, the provision of handouts has been a central cost. Latterly I'd send a pdf file with instructions and the resulting 200+ packs of 180 sides would be delivered on a trolley printed, stapled with covers. The cost was rounding error compared to the cost of providing an hour of teaching in a classroom (wage costs, support staff costs, building costs including amortisation &c).

How is this happening?

>Shorter packets can cost around $20, while longer packets can cost upwards of $150 when ordered with the cheapest binding option

Does a student need to print out multiple TYCO Packets ? If so, only the very rich could afford this. I think educations should go back to printed books and submitting you work to the Prof. on paper.

But submitting printed pages back to the Prof. for homework will avoid the school saying "Submit only Word Documents". That way a student can use the method they prefer, avoiding buying expensive software. One can then use just a simple free text editor if they want. Or even a typewriter :)

I concur completely with Fadiman's comment as that has been my experience despite that I have been using computer screens and computers for many decades and that I am totally at ease with them for reading and composing documentation.

Books and printed materials have physical presence and tactility about them that are missing from display screens. It is hard to explain but handling the physical object, pointing to paragraphs on printed pages, underlining text with a pencil and sticking postit notes into page margins adds an ergonomic factor that is more conducive to learning and understanding than when one interacts with screens (including those where one can write directly to the screen with a stylus).

I have no doubt about this, as I've noticed over the years if I write down what I'm thinking with my hand onto paper I am more likely to understand and remember it better than when I'm typing it.

It's as if typing doesn't provide as tighter coupling with my brain as does writing by hand. There is something about handwriting and the motional feedback from my fingers that makes me have a closer and more intimate relationship with the text.

That's not to say I don't use screens—I do but generally to write summaries after I've first worked out ideas on paper (this is especially relevant when mathematics is involved—I'm more cognitively involved when using pencil and paper).

We continue to teach children (at least in the EU) to write by hand, to do calculations manually throughout their entire schooling, when in real life, aside from the occasional scrap note, all writing is done on computers and calculations are done by machine as well. And, of course, no one teaches these latter skills.

The result on a large scale is that we have an increasingly incompetent population on average, with teaching staff competing to see who can revert the most to the past and refusing to see that the more they do this, the worse the incompetent graduates they produce.

The computer, desktop, FLOSS, is the quintessential epistemological tool of the present, just as paper was in the past. The world changes, and those who fall behind are selected out by history; come to terms with that. Not only, those who lag behind ensure that few push forward an evolution for their own interest, which typically conflicts with that of the majority.

1. Instead of putting up all sorts of barriers between students and ChatGPT, have students explicitly use ChatGPT to complete the homework

2. Then compare the diversity in the ChatGPT output

3. If the ChatGPT output is extremely similar, then the game is to critique that ChatGPT output, find out gaps in ChatGPT's work, insights it missed and what it could have done better

4.If the ChatGPT output is diverse, how do we figure out which is better? What caused the diversity? Are all the outputs accurate or are there errors in some?

Similarly, when it comes to coding, instead of worrying that ChatGPT can zero shot quicksort and memcpy perfectly, why not game it:

1. Write some test cases that could make that specific implementation of `quicksort` or `memcpy` fail

2. Could we design the input data such that quicksort hits its worst case runtime?

3. Is there an algorithm that would sort faster than quicksort for that specific input?

4. Could there be architectures where the assumptions that make quicksort "quick", fail to hold true? Instead, something simpler and worse on paper like a "cache aware sort" actually work faster in practice than quicksort?

I have multiple paragraphs more of thought on this topic but will leave it at this for now to calibrate if my thoughts are in the minority

And the line

> Regarding the printing cost, Newton and Shirkhani both emphasized that Yale has programs to help students who need financial assistance paying for printing.

Does not solve the issue. Not every school has programs like that, they aren't always easy to take advantage of, and often have extra hoops to jump through.

It's really hard to not see this through the same lense as the scam of textbooks and other required (paid) readings for classes. Even more so when the professor wrote the book and/or gets a kickback. See also: new editions every year that are required so you can buy used or an online key that is one-time-use and costs as much as the book.

This obv isn’t a push by parents because I can’t imagine parents I know want their kids in front of a screen all day. At best they’re indifferent. My only guess is the teachers unions that don’t want teachers grading and creating lesson plans and all the other work they used to do.

And since this trend kid scores or performance has not gotten better, so what gives?

Can anyone comment if it’s as bad as this and what’s behind it.

>This semester, Newton has removed the option to bring iPads to class, except for accessibility needs, as a part of the general movement in the “Reading and Writing the Modern Essay” seminars to “swim against the tide of AI use,” reduce “the infiltration of tech,” and “go back to pen and paper,” she said.

Is this about teaching efficiency or managing the teacher's feelings? If "the infiltration of tech" allowed for better learning, would this teacher even be open to it?

This isn't my article nor do I know this Educator but I like her approach and actions taken:

https://www.npr.org/2026/01/28/nx-s1-5631779/ai-schools-teac...

This made sense a couple of decades ago. Today, it's just bizarre to be spending $150 on a phonebook-sized packet of reading materials. So much paper and toner.

This is what iPads and Kindles are for.

> TYCO Print is a printing service where professors can upload course files for TYCO to print out for students as they order. Shorter packets can cost around $20, while longer packets can cost upwards of $150 when ordered with the cheapest binding option.

Lol $150 for reading packets? Not even textbooks? Seriously the whole system can fuck off.

What could it mean for an "option" to be "required"?

You see a policy, and your clever brains come up with a way to get around it, "proving" that the new methodology is not perfect and therefore not valuable.

So wrong. Come on people, think about it -- to an extent ALL WE DO is "friction." Any shift towards difficulty can be gained, but also nearly all of the time it provides a valuable differentiator in terms of motivation, etc.