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You Have a Free Teaching Assistant and You Are Not Using It

If you paid someone a salary and they sat idle all day, you would call it waste. The prompt that turns a chatbot into the private tutor centres used to charge extra for.

April 28, 20264 min read

If you employed someone, paid them monthly, and they sat around doing nothing all day, would you call that a waste?

Every day you do not talk to an AI assistant, you are wasting exactly that employee. If you are not paying, it is willing to work for you for free and you are not asking it to. If you are paying, the waste is worse.

The prompt I give my students

Act as my English teaching assistant. Explain sentences I do not understand, and show me how to say things in English.

In class, when someone asks me what a sentence means, I will often say: go ask the AI.

Not because I cannot be bothered to answer, but because I want them to build a habit. Out in the world, that tool is always with them and I am not. Whenever you meet something you do not know, ask it.

Two phrases worth remembering

meaning when you want to know what a word or sentence means.

how to say when you write out a Vietnamese sentence and want to know how to express it in English.

Why this is a big deal

At language centres, a private tutor used to be something you paid extra for, if it was available at all. Now everyone has one for free.

If you want to go further, write it a proper job description setting out exactly what you want it to do while you study.

Over time, whenever you meet English anywhere, a line of text on a bus, something online, you just ask. That is you having learned something, without ever sitting down with pen and paper to study.