The outgoing year 2023 is known as the first year of AI in the era of artificial intelligence.
Bill Gates mentioned in his annual outlook that he has seen two impressive and revolutionary technology demonstrations in his life, one of which was the birth of Windows in the 80s, and the other was a meeting with OpenAI in 2023:
I was amazed to witness ChatGPT get 59 of the 60 multiple-choice questions on the AP Biology exam right and brilliantly write the answers to the six open-ended questions on the exam. We asked an outside expert to score the exam, and GPT got a perfect score of 5, which is equivalent to an A or A+ in a college-level biology course.
There is no doubt that AI is already changing the nature of learning and Xi and the mode of education little by little.
I may be one of the first high school students in China to use AI to teach themselves.
In the past nearly a year, I have used GPT-4, Remnote, Quizlet and other tools to complete the content of about 1 year of teaching in less than 2 months, and self-study SAT and A-level subjects.
What I didn't expect was that I became one of the first self-taught people to eat crabs, but I encountered a lot of challenges in the school exams.
What went wrong?
■William's first two articles on Guyu Planet were reprinted by "Youth Articles" and "Readers", and the impact of AI on education has attracted everyone's attention.
The first article onlookers watched the post-05 high school students save hundreds of thousands with AI, and they just want to sigh that the future is terrifying;
The second part of the 05 post-05 middle school students rely on AI to learn on their own to be a top student
What AI didn't teach me
Let's start with the background of self-study, for me, taking classes is a painful thing. More than 80% of my high school classes were in my sleep or desertion, and the reason is simple:
Classes are boring.
It's not a problem that the teacher doesn't teach well, I studied in Shanghai Lingke, an international high school in the first echelon of Shanghai, and the average teaching ability of the teacher is not bad, the problem lies in my own way of learning Xi.
Since I was a child, I have been a person who likes to control the rhythm and Xi of my own learning Xi on my own.
I like to make divergent associations about knowledge points (sometimes in a daze), I like to explore the knowledge points I am interested in regardless of time, and I like to throw questions first and then explore the "problem-oriented Xi learning method" of related knowledge.
However, at present, the teaching in domestic classrooms is linear, students are passive learner Xi s, and homework is constantly repeated.
What's even more interesting is that when I was studying for the A Level exams necessary for further education, I made an unexpected discovery:
If you want to get a high score in the exam, it is not enough to learn all the knowledge points by self-study.
For example, the following picture is a question I got before the AL chemistry exam, and students who have learned textbook knowledge can easily answer: as long as you rank the acidity of these three substances and explain the reason, you can get the first two points.
But when I opened the answer book, there was a score I hadn't envisioned.
That's right, to get a perfect score on this question, students would have to write a lot of extra rewriting the definition of acidity: the more acidic a substance is, the more it can provide protons.
A similar situation occurs in nearly a quarter of the entire paper.
To put it simply, for many of these topics, I have fully grasped all the knowledge points behind them. However, if you want to get a high score, you have to learn "how to answer questions with the right wording and framework" all over again.
None of this can be told to me by AI or textbooks.
It makes me feel quite helpless.
I had to find a chemistry teacher outside of school to make up for it. The teacher gave me a document of dozens of pages, which sorted out all the test points and score points that had appeared on the exam paper hundreds of times, and it took me a day to memorize them all.
The next day's big exam made me feel like a silent test-
I was like a clockwork printer, spraying ink on the test paper with great efficiency.
It's still funny to think about that scene now, laughing and laughing, and I can't laugh anymore.
Could it be that the meaning of the teacher's existence is just a list of test points of dozens of pages? Is it true that the test is the knowledge that students have Xi to fill in the knowledge points on the test paper after they have learned the knowledge points?
There are different paths inside and outside the system
Reason tells me that in the process of studying, maybe something is wrong.
It's not the students who need to get good grades to apply to college, it's not the teachers who want students to get results, it's not even the yardstick that measures students.
The core of the problem may lie in the expectations of students in the curriculum system.
Schools require students to have accurate memorization of factual knowledge, but ignore whether students have a thorough understanding of the knowledge points and their connections, and schools expect students to achieve excellent problem-solving skills, but often ignore the importance of divergent associations in students' minds.
Therefore, even if students have mastered sufficient knowledge through self-study, they may not be able to achieve top results in the exam, because there is no one to mark the exam.
This reveals some contradictions:
When good grades in exams become the goal of Xi, it is difficult for students to carry out effective Xi learning, just like learning Xi answering skills, which really does not improve me substantially.
I originally thought that this would be the case within the system, but I didn't expect it to be the same when I moved outside the system.
■A book that I liked recently elaborated on this paradox: excessive pursuit of grades makes it difficult to achieve academic success.
At a time when AI self-learning is becoming more and more important, self-learning is not about intellectual mastery, but about autonomy, which is not so easy.
This is also the reason why although there are so many online tools, there are more and more Xi supplement institutions.
I'm sure all parents have experienced how hard it is to get their children to stick to something they don't like. When I was in elementary school, my mother asked me to go downstairs and jump 500 ropes every day in order to make me taller. But not once did I finish the five hundred in earnest, but I made a few symbolic jumps and walked around a few laps, and finally came up cheerfully to do the errand.
I have reason to believe that most of the children are similar to me.
When you have to deduct an hour or two from his precious spare time to study on his own, he will surely burst into an amazing battle with you and try to escape.
What's more, for efficient self-study, a computer or tablet is certainly essential.
As the saying goes, it's fun to fight with people, fight wits and courage with your parents for your favorite games, comics, and novels, and obediently listen to your words and teach yourself?
The biggest gain of self-study is that it can help us develop various skills such as problem-solving and time planning, and help us to be comfortable in future university education and lifelong learning Xi.
It is not difficult to imagine that these valuable abilities can only be developed when students themselves take the initiative to face challenges head-on. If students are just "passive self-taught", it will only get half the result.
To sum up, in a word: the premise of long-term self-learning is that the child is currently willing to take the initiative to learn Xi.
Self-learning can help children who are already motivated to achieve "from 1 to 10", but the most difficult thing is the first step from zero to 1. I have to admit that this is indeed the hardest step.
■ The page when I usually study on my own, left: Khan Academy's course page, middle: Khanmigo, a large language model based on GPT-4, right: Remnote, a note-taking software with a flashcard function (there are other self-study resources and a lot of useful goods, which will be shared in the next article)
The contradiction of schooling
Looking back on the time I was preparing for the exam, what I gained the most was not the recitation and sprint before the exam, but the exploration and accumulation in the process of self-study.
To put it simply, self-study is a process of sharpening one's abilities.
Time management, problem-solving, self-control...... These skills are difficult to develop in a school life full of schedules and supervision, but they are extremely necessary in college and in the future life journey.
To put it deeper, the process of self-study is really a process of internal exploration and inspiration:
When I have a choice, I start thinking about what I want to learn and what I want to do in the future.
When I start to use initiative, I start thinking about how and why I want to learn Xi.
These thoughts and explorations can accelerate the incubation of students' internal drive and courage, which are the strengths that most of the students around me generally lack.
In contrast, knowledge is only a by-product of self-learning.
Unfortunately, most schools do not provide students with the time and freedom to study on their own.
I believe that the vast majority of schools have long been aware of the general lack of students' time management skills, self-control and internal motivation. But they often mask these problems with the external drive of schedules, supervision and exams.
However, while this is effective, it also makes it difficult to learn on your own in school.
When I was at school, I observed that there were a small number of students around me:
They are ready to explore themselves and have excellent self-learning talents, but they are trapped in the curriculum and classrooms, deprived of the space and time to explore themselves and swim in the sea of knowledge.
Some of them have the ambition to change the world, some have the potential to shake up a certain academic world, and many have understood who they are, where they came from, and where they are going.
They are the great theoretical physicists, computer scientists, materials scientists, politicians, philosophers and doers of the future, and they are also friends who have been with me for a long time.
Unfortunately, without the help of their families, these "tiger cubs" would have to be kept in cages and become standardized.
At this point, I would love to say thank you to my school (and the academic director at the time).
After fully understanding my situation and grades, they approved my request to switch to self-study, allowing me to get out of most of the boring classes.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of our high school education environments do not do a good job of helping these students who are more productive in self-study than in class.
After all, self-study requires a lot of freedom. Whether it's the freedom of time, or the freedom of space, but also the freedom of thought.
In my opinion, when I was still immature, I also understood Qian Xuesen's question: Why is it difficult to produce top scientists in China who are so good at learning?
Time is running out
Perhaps in the future, a new model of high school education will be able to solve the above problems. As one of my teachers conceived:
A student community, a large library, a place of freedom and resources.
There, learning Xi exists as an option anytime, anywhere. There, exams and university applications are no longer destinations, but the midpoint of the journey.
We will still be driven by the pressure of exams and GPAs, but more fundamentally, it will be the desire for knowledge, the desire to change the world, and improve ourselves.
Such a future is not far away in the world.
2023 is known as the first year of AI, and Bill Gates said that the road ahead will usher in a turning point in 2024, the most critical of which is that artificial intelligence is shaping the future.
The same is true of education, the transformation from "knowledge-oriented" to "ability-oriented", to the emergence of new forms of education, the enrichment of new evaluation indicators, the changes in university recruitment models, and the changes in the job search ability circle will become a new turning point.
■ Musk replied to netizens, "Both SpaceX and Tesla have found that the ability of American college graduates has decreased significantly in the past few years, and for this reason, he will run a science and engineering university, which is already being launched."
For us in China, it may take longer to accept innovative education.
I love the book "The Good Sheep", which shows us one possibility of education:
Climbing the peak along the current path, we will cultivate a group of elites with strong academic literacy, extraordinary competitiveness and empty hearts. They will be strong from the perspective of others, and they will be a group of sheep who seem to be glamorous.
On the other hand, when we let go of our attachment to "what kind of person I/my child want to become", and move forward on the road of education as our hearts point out, the future is completely unknown.
This may be alarming, but the child's heart will be full. The latter is the core and starting point of self-learning.
I suddenly remembered an English proverb that had been hung on the outer wall of my junior high school dormitory building, and although it had been washed white by the rain in reality, it had never faded in my heart:
Education is not filling a pail, but the lighting of a fire.
Education is not about filling a bucket of water, but about lighting a fire.
Unfortunately, even a self-taught high school student like me has felt some problems, and educators may have a better understanding of them:
Inside and outside the system, I have personally experienced education that pursues achievement to the point of knowledge, output to the point of motivation, and mediocre elite to the point of abundance of geeks.
What's even more unfortunate is that the turning point of the AI era has arrived, and there is not much time left for us to change.
■The pass rate of the ChatGPT4 exam has basically reached more than 80%, which is very fast.