Governor Cuomo couldn’t sleep, so he turned on a movie. It was scary. It was about machines talking back to people, machines smarter than people. Then he figured out that machines should teach children. Every child should have his or her own machine. That way, machines that are way smarter than people can teach children.
Makes sense? No.
Can someone please help Governor Cuomo get a good night’s sleep? What’s troubling him?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Its time for (voting) machines to do away with Cuomo.
Mr. Como here is some advice: The only machine you should be concerned with is a treadmill. Now hurry up and get to work.
Wow – there is something seriously wrong with this man.
Cuomo*
Maybe there is already a machine clever enough to do Cuomo’s job.
Has anyone pushing this stuff asked children if they prefer it to human beings? I haven’t seen the slightest indication from my son that he wants to take online courses in school.
They had a personalized learning reading program in the younger grades that involved the kids doing work alone with a computer “at their own pace and according to their ability” and once the novelty wore off he treated it like a chore.
Sounds a bit like Skinner’s Teaching Machines: http://aubreydaniels.com/institute/sites/aubreydaniels.com.institute/files/History%20of%20teaching%20machines.pdf
Andrew should start texting himself to see if he’s awake.
Was anyone in school in the 50s as I was and saw the teaching machines come in? They were going to revolutionize teaching. I’ll bet there still rests in a district basement somewhere one of those special desks and most used bookstores have one or more of the textbooks that “guide” you. Someone needs to tell the reformistas that the revolution has done come and went.
pbarret: I assume you’re familiar with the following—
“Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it.” [Edmund Burke]
Better known in its George Santayana version:
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
To be amended, in present circumstances, as “rheephormsters cannot remember the failures of the past so they condemn us to relive them.”
I must say, though, that a Yogist perspective on this question would be helpful…
¿😳?
Yogi Berra. Of course. “It’s like déjà vu all over again.” Further buttressed by the keen insight that “The future ain’t what it used to be.”
😏
And don’t think that the “thought leaders” and enablers and enforcers of the self-described “education reform” movement aren’t up on their Yogi-isms. What gem of philosophical wisdom do you think the NJ Comm. of Ed was basing himself on when he declared “Whatever we’re doing, we need to double down”?
That infallible guide to word and deed that every worthy rheephormster always takes into account:
“When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”
😎
The Governor has the intellect of a banana.
Bananas are smarter — smarter than anyone who thinks computers are “transformative” or even slightly useful in the classroom– than Cuomo. Seriously, the banana peel alone has more amino acids than the brain of a techie.
Apparently, Cuomo thinks of NYS teachers as a bureaucratic “government machine” that is “my machine, I built you and I operate you.”
But the “government machine” rebels against Cuomo. That is an astonishing picture, partly because it reveals such pathetic egotism.
But then, in Cuomo’s imagination, the struggle over so-called education “reform” is a kind of battle between robots. Cuomo imagines a bigger and badder machine (like Ultron in the Avengers movie, I guess) that beats up the “government machine,” punishing it for its rebellion.
This second vision is even more pathetic. As a monster movie, it’s not good.
I’m all for having a poetic visionary view of the world, however one pictures this. But Cuomo’s fantasy vision is so banal.
In all seriousness however, let it be known that Cuomo’s (and all the reformers’) pure vision has been articulated and broadcast quite legibly. They envision a corporate-vended classroom, dominated by corpoprate-vended technology, without a unionized teacher anywhere in sight. Its clear. Its stated. Its the end goal.
There are thousands of conversations, locally and statewide about technology in the classroom. Alot of earnest conversations that all take it as a given the technology is fundamentally necessary and good for the modern classroom. It is within these seemingly depoliticized discussions that the real door is being opened for the Cuomo-vision above.
Technology in the classroom is a foil. Its not a thing. I’d argue its not necessary. We need an education centered on those basic human/humane things like discussion, analysis, reading, etc. And no, thats not a luddite position.
I agree NYSTEACHER. Coincidently I went to an inservice this AM on how to use the Chromebooks our district purchased recently. Roughly 800 kids in the districty and they bought 300 of these lovely little laptops at 300 bucks a pop that do little more than connect one to the internet. Not sure but they look outdated already out of the box.
I suppose there is a practical application for my 5th graders, but I’m struggling to find one.
IMHO we’d be better off spending the money on field trips, which we’ve eliminated, or hiring another Art teacher. or……… (fill in the blank.)
All the administration gives a shit about is covering their asses by collecting tons of insignificant data and following the edicts of the Governor.
I’m done in June, my fear is that new teachers will think this is the way it’s supposed to be.
A sad state of affairs indeed.
@tuppercooks
Google says, “The internet is magic.”
I am being trained on Chromebooks as well. I am no computer maven, but I certainly see no need to hook kindergarten students up to Chromebooks.
It’s always sort of shocking to me that these powerful people are so easily sold a bunch of marketing slogans. The best schools, graduate degrees, rooms full of experts and advisers and they happily clamber aboard any fad that comes down the pike.
It’s scary to me because it goes against any notion one had that this is a “meritocracy” and really leaves so much to chance.
It’s time for teachers to “rage against the machine.” That Cuomo watches science fiction is fine; that he is influenced by it and admits it is a concern. Maybe all the processed foods from Sandra Lee’s cooking have gone to his head?
The machine we built is supposed to prevent radical disruption – because as admirable as it is to want to dismantle it, the “flavor of the moment” doesn’t necessarily reflect either what is good, or what the electorate wants. Change is supposed to be slow precisely because there are many unintended consequences when you make massive shifts. Can he truly think of no downside to sticking kids in front of computers all day? Not the least of which, is, how do you collaborate with a computer – problem solve with a machine that can’t possibly guide you to an answer that is “yours”?.
There is a reason we can’t change the constitution with any real frequency, and laws are slow to be implemented even if they can be rapidly adopted.
If you can blow up the machine, it becomes VERY easy to say every few years “what my predecessor built stunk, I will redo it from the ground up” and disrupt the entire state with every election rather than building it towards where we generally want to go, and that process would also drive away his coveted “best and brightest” from working with government precisely because of the instability.
Case in point, how many things has Cuomo implemented that were both radical, and ended up not working? And his worry is that there are too many checks on his power?
Cuomo’s default seems to not be that we should thoughtfully and carefully adjust things and try to make the pieces fit together. Instead I’ll bulldoze stuff, and if what I put in its place rapidly doesn’t work, the problem is I wasn’t able to blow up enough stuff. We need to do MORE of what isn’t working because the reason it isn’t working is we didn’t do enough of it.
I’ve given up looking for logic.
“The Empire State”
The Empire State
Is really great
Cuz robots run the ed
They calculate
The teachers’ fate
And never need be fed
And Andy Boy, was up too late
Watching TV in his bed
He should have been sound asleep
Instead of F’in with State Ed
I’m sorry, Mario. I’m afraid we can’t do that.
Cuomo’s vision wouldn’t have anything to do with Silicon Valley campaign donations, would it?
I guess Andrew never had time to read Harry Harlow’s study on the impact Wire Mothers had on the development of monkeys. This from Wikipedia:
Harlow’s experiments were controversial; they included cultivating infant monkeys in isolation chambers for up to 24 months, from which they emerged intensely disturbed. Some researchers cite the experiments as a factor in the rise of the animal liberation movement in the United States. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Harlow as the 26th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.
Substitute young children for monkeys; wire mother’s for computers and isolation; and opting out for liberation.
No, he’s too busy tweeting to himself, “Andy, you’re one smart guy!”
Harlow’s experiments were controversial; they included cultivating infant monkeys in isolation chambers for up to 24 months, from which they emerged intensely disturbed.”
My, what a surprise.
It’s pretty clear who the real monkey was.
He must have seen “Ex Machina”. Doesn’t he know that his master, Bill Gates, has even expressed concern for Artificial Intelligence smarter than humans—that those machines smarter than humans will do what the AI in Ex Machina did to humans. She killed them.
Doesn’t Cuomo get it? An AI is more dangerous than a sociopath or psychopath because computers smarter than humans will Terminate all humans.
Any machine humans build that is smarter than humans will be more ruthless. Look at the evolution of modern humans to discover that that means.
What has Bill Gates said? Bill Gates is a passionate technology advocate (big surprise), but his predictions about the future of computing aren’t uniformly positive.
Bill Gates on dangers of artificial intelligence: ‘I don’t understand why some people are not concerned’ And yet this hypocrite also wants to turn our children over the computers that will teach them like they are all widgets on a factory assembly line.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2015/01/28/bill-gates-on-dangers-of-artificial-intelligence-dont-understand-why-some-people-are-not-concerned/
It seems to me the safest way to avoid this is to make sure children are taught by humans, teachers in front of students in a class that only uses computers as a tool that teachers decide to use when necessary.
Gates sees computers and robots as dull witted low paying servants, but once you open the door to letting robots and computers teach our children, the next step will be to make them smarter because in corporate school-reform-think that will lead to higher test scores.
Even Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk warn about artificial intelligence. The smarter we make computers the closer we come to an AI, and some greedy fool like Cuomo, thinking that will lead to more profits will go ahead and do it—open that Pandora’s box.
Bottom line:
The Gov, like many others, is planning to minimize and purge all public work forces. So, that future pensions are minimal and “faithful machines” will teach children, who will learn to be robotic followers, not independent thinkers. Then the Gov can brainwash these “educated” children, along with their posterity, to vote for him and all others like him that want to dehumanize the world for the sake of profit and bottom-line. Heck, if he’s good at envisioning and implementing his plan, he could even get Bill Gates grandkids to vote for his successors (one tyrant usurper swallowing up the other).
I think you are on the right track, Rick. Cheap cyber units for the masses will produce obedient drones.
“It’s just as you prophesized! The planets of our solar system, incinerating. Like flaming globes, Sigmund. Like flaming globes! Ah, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha….”
A totally relevant research piece:
Title: “Pupils learn poorly when using most computer programs”
Link:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/10/151026112057.htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sciencedaily%2Fcomputers_math%2Fmathematics+%28Mathematics+News+–+ScienceDaily%29
RIGHT ON, article.
ONE word: NUTS! I’ll write it again: NUTS! What drugs is Cuomo on?
I love this story about women in Iceland going on strike for a day (in 1975) to remind the country of their importance. Perhaps teachers could take a “day off” and let the computers handle the kids for a day.
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-34602822
To Mamie Krupczak Allegretti:
I am second to this motion. Yes, all teachers from K-12 to PSE should unite to have one day off on one designated day – Teacher appreciation ‘s Day – Back2basic
Can he be more of a moron?
Is he majority backed by techies (Gates)?
All of the technology in the world should never replace human beings. You know what is wrong with the world right now? Too much social media. Too many phone apps. Too much insulation from human interaction.
Would I choose to have my child instructed by a computer program? No. Cuomo’s ideas become more idiotic daily. I wonder who is writing his speeches.
If Cuomo wants to go to back to sleep, let him take a little hemlock. That should do it!
In the meantime, I feel the following quotes are apropos to the short-circuited mind of our governor.
“One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man [teacher]”. –Elbert Hubbard
“Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.” –Aldous Huxley
“The human spirit must prevail over technology.” –Albert Einstein
The marketing of the forthcoming system sounds suspiciously like a diet drink.
Less testing! More quality! College and Career Readiness for Everyone!
Less Calories! More Filling! Eat anything you want!
Act now!
Heavy on convincing marketing – I’ve yet to see any substance to their claims yet. How in the world can Elia/Cuomo even CLAIM they CAN do “less testing more quality testing” if they haven’t DONE it yet and don’t have an example of someone who has that is directly applicable to NYS?
Meanwhile Cuomo dreams of Robots (Do androids dream of electric sheep?) because he apparently sees us all as replicants.
Is it just me, or is Science Fiction starting to meld with reality? And that’s not really a good thing since most science fiction is cautionary and dystopian – not just futuristic.
Cuomo is a pseudo-Democrat and pseudo-technocrat.
It’s amazing, or fitting, that someone who spends all if his time controlling people with buttons, levers and writs, and advocating for technological solutions across the board, knows so little of people and technology.
“There are two novels that can change a fourteen-year old’s life : The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged . One is a childish fantasy (science fiction) that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, crippled adulthood…. The other involves orcs.” John Rogers