I’m not sure this approach is the right one, but the problem resonates with me.

I vividly remember hitting some blocker (7th grade chem, 4th grade reading, 2nd grade dinosaurs), where I had a question that the teacher dismissed.

My mind was stuck (blocked) as it couldn’t get past the question I had, and in a public school setting, it wasn’t worth the time for the teacher to dive down the tangent (or they simply weren’t prepared).

My hope for LLMs in education, is that they can supplement traditional curriculums such that students can go “off the rails” while still being nudged back to the desired outcome.

- How do we know electrons “spin”?

- Why does that word behave differently than others (in English)?

- How big is a sauropod compared to a blue whale?

I’ve found that on my own journey through education, it’s these sparks of interest that drive towards deeper understanding, rather than surface level rote memorization.

TFA says: “What if students had the power to shape their own learning journey?”

In the context of nonfiction/textbooks, this is already possible!

I didn’t read “How to read a book”[0] until high school, but it opened the world for me on another silly blocker I had, which is that material should be consumed start to finish.

Hopefully with “AI” more students will learn that there are many paths towards understanding the world, and not just the curriculum in front of them.

[0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Read_a_Book

Another anecdote: In university, I ended up taking Circuits 1&2 before Calc 4 (diff. eqs).

This was fantastic, because everything I learned about Laplace, Fourier, etc. had an immediate connection to another area of interest, which made the class much more engaging.

That book was great on the second read-through.