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"what did students do before smartphones/tablets?"
"what did students do before laptops?"
"what did students do before the internet?"

it's not at all weird to me that this could have been uttered fully seriously.

Edit: only difference are those other technologies still requires critical thinking and won't magically write your assignments. Unless plagiarized.

Grew up before the internet.

One thing I have come to realize is how much of history I learned passively from movies and comic books. The first time I saw Edgar Allan Poe was in an The Atom comic, and Julius Cesar was in a cartoon. Pretty much everyone I knew first hear classical music when they played it behind Bugs Bunny.

These days, there's a tiny handful of historically based shows and movies compared to earlier times.

I have no doubt about it...

Since computers became common, it's seemed like an increasing number of people don't know how to, and don't think they should have to, learn skills.

Nah, people have been cheating and faking it forever.

It makes the dumb even dumber. In 10 years we will see the effect of it, just like ipad babies.

In the U.S., the issue is that our education system is already fundamentally broken and doing a terrible job of teaching kids. Adding LLMs to that is like striking a match in the tinderbox.

I teach collegiate intro programming classes, I can say it definitely seems that way. My office hours will be an absolute ghost town, nobody has any questions for me in class, and then when a project is due about 1/3 of the submissions are AI slop.

I know cheating has always been rampant, but I've never seen it this bad before.

at least it took a bit more effort than just a prompt or two.

lucky if your search terms just bring up someone else's work I suppose lol

It's called git gudding now.

Teach him to fail. Those kids are afraid of failing because somewhere in life someone traumatized them so they don't like to ever fail at anything.

My youngest (now 27) has a bit of a problem with that. The issue is that he's smart and most things always came easy to him. He'd do those giant writing assignments the night before that are supposed to be worked on for weeks and still get the high grade. Hardly ever seemed to study, but got solid A's. But when something comes along that he's not automatically good at, he gets super frustrated. He wanted to learn the guitar in high school (I play a little), so we bought him one and some basic instruction, but he hated it because it didn't come naturally. It's a decoration on his wall.

I will give him this though: he decided a few years back that he wanted to learn to draw, and that didn't come naturally, but he's continued to work at it and has gotten pretty decent. So it's something a person can get past.

"I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times." - Bruce Lee

Edit, in the same spirit: "The difference between a novice and a master is that the master has failed more times than the novice has even tried." - No idea who

Follow me for more Karate Kid-level inspirational quotes.

People who can come through with decent work under completely unrealistic deadline pressure become all-stars.

I did this for my last company. We were about to lose our biggest client because we (not including me) had agreed to an impossible deadline to deliver a piece of software for them. I spent two weeks basically living at work and we (meaning mostly I) were able to deliver a bare-minimum product on time and keep our contract with the client alive. This kept our company intact long enough for us to be acquired by a major west coast tech giant - at which point I was rewarded with a layoff notice, while my bosses got millions in stock grants. I got a severance which was basically equal to what I would have been eligible to get from unemployment, which meant I didn't get any unemployment but at least I didn't have to pretend to look for work for six months.

I did it with no illusions about what my reward might or might not be. I just don't like being involved in any way with project failures.

It works for everything. My dad made me tie a thousand knots because my shoelaces kept coming untied and now as an adult I am super in-demand in our local bdsm scene.

...everything else looked like shit, but the hands were amazing!

Except, the nerd will probably do the school work correctly.

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."

I get the point, but often the answer to "what did you do before ___ was invented?" Is "we suffered and died". Like vaccines for example.