Reblogged gradling
I can’t stop thinking about these grad students, who are still detained. US academics should be moving heaven and earth to fight this.
Reblogged hrimceald
tell me my prof didn’t upload the reading by photocopying his kindle reader page by page
bruh
Reblogged seananmcguire
I assigned a writing prompt a few weeks ago that asked my students to reflect on a time when someone believed in them or when they believed in someone else. One of my students began to panic.
“I have to ask Google the prompt to get some ideas if I can’t just use AI,” she pleaded and then began typing into the search box on her screen, “A time when someone believed in you.”
“It’s about you,” I told her. “You’ve got your life experiences inside of your own mind.” It hadn’t occurred to her — even with my gentle reminder — to look within her own imagination to generate ideas. One of the reasons why I assigned the prompt is because learning to think for herself now, in high school, will help her build confidence and think through more complicated problems as she gets older — even when she’s no longer in a classroom situation.
She’s only in ninth grade, yet she’s already become accustomed to outsourcing her own mind to digital technologies, and it frightens me.
When I teach students how to write, I’m also teaching them how to think. Through fits and starts (a process that can be both frustrating and rewarding), high school English teachers like me help students get to know themselves better when they use language to figure out what they think and how they feel.
. . .
If you believe, as I do, that writing is thinking — and thinking is everything — things aren’t looking too good for our students or for the educators trying to teach them. In addition to teaching high school, I’m also a college instructor, and I see this behavior in my older students as well.
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This! This is what scares me the most about AI! Physical exertion is difficult if someone isn't used to it, and it gets easier the more often it's done. When it's done often enough, it becomes a habit. Mental exertion is exactly the same. Thinking is a learned skill just like a sport is, and an entire generation is growing up without that most critical skill.
An unthinking populace is a more easily controlled populace.
Reblogged djeheuty-bros
President Trump issued an executive order on Friday with few apparent analogues in White House history. The order rescinded a directive Trump had signed just one week earlier — already unusual by itself — directing government officials to target the white-shoe law firm Paul Weiss, by revoking security clearances held by the firm’s lawyers, limiting their access to government buildings, reviewing government contracts with the firm, and even, “to the extent permitted by law,” urging agencies to refrain from hiring the firm’s employees.
Three reasons were given for the initial order. One was the firm’s emphasis on diversity in hiring, although Trump’s own order acknowledged that that hardly made the firm unique: “nearly every other large, influential, or industry leading law firm” shares that emphasis, the president wrote. The two other reasons are what set the firm apart: its involvement in a pro bono lawsuit against the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers for their role in the January 6th attack, and its hiring of Mark Pomerantz, a prosecutor who worked on the New York criminal investigation of Trump that ultimately led to his first indictment. It was an extraordinary move by the federal government to target a law firm because it had hired people and brought lawsuits the government disagreed with. But what came next was equally extraordinary: the president personally entered into an agreement with the firm, a private company, to shape its business practices. In his Friday follow-up order, Trump announced that Paul Weiss had “indicated that it will engage in a remarkable change of course.” His initial order would be undone as a result.
[...] As I wrote on Friday, details matter: President Trump often tries to exaggerate his own accomplishments, which is why it’s important to look at the fine print to see how much has actually changed (or, in this case, to compare the fine prints against each other). But there is also a broader truth at play here: Even by Paul Weiss’ own admission — no matter the precise concessions — Trump was able to exact a pound of flesh from a private adversary by threatening a governmental crackdown. “The executive order could easily have destroyed our firm. It brought the full weight of the government down on our firm, our people, and our clients,” Karp wrote in his email, which was obtained by the Original Jurisdiction newsletter. Paul Weiss initially planned to challenge the order, as law firm Perkins Coie is doing with a similar Trump directive, Karp added, but in the end: “We did exactly what we advise our clients to do in ‘bet the company’ litigation every day,” he said. “We talked with the Administration to see if we could achieve a lasting settlement that would not require us to compromise our core values and fundamental principles.” Paul Weiss is not the only elite institution making this calculation. Hours after Trump issued his follow-up executive order Friday, Columbia University announced a flurry of policy changes, including a ban on students wearing face masks at protests, changes to the school’s disciplinary process, and a new official overseeing its department of Middle East, South Asian and African Studies. These changes matched almost exactly a list of demands the Trump administration had sent Columbia in a letter the week before, as part of an ongoing dispute over $400 million in federal funding that the administration had revoked from Columbia. According to the letter, fulfillment of the demands would not be enough to restore the funding; rather, it would be considered a “precondition for formal negotiations regarding Columbia University’s continued financial relationship with the United States.” The recent changes by Paul Weiss and Columbia University follow other moves since Trump’s second election by private companies and foreign governments alike to adapt — or submit — to Trump’s transactional approach. Jeff Bezos, another first-term Trump antagonist, has transformed the opinion section at his Washington Post newspaper, while his company Amazon has agreed to pay $40 million to license a documentary on Melania Trump. (Much of the sum will go the first lady directly). ABC News agreed to give $15 million to Trump’s presidential library to settle a defamation lawsuit. A recent White House statement noted four times that Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky thanked the president during a joint phone call. These decisions are all the more striking because they mark such a separation from the “resistance” posed to Trump by many academic and corporate institutions in his first term. Yes, Trump is more popular than he was last time — but only barely. According to the Silver Bulletin newsletter, Trump’s approval rating stood at 43.4% approve/50.9% disapprove at this point in his first term. It stands at 47.5% approve/49.7% disapprove today.
[...] Instead, much of the difference can be explained by the difference in Trump’s own actions: his willingness to push the envelope farther than he did in his first term — to revoke funding, or security clearances, or military aid, until he secures satisfactory concessions. And with each previously antagonistic institution that has folded, Trump has only grown more emboldened: his administration is now threatening funding to other universities, hoping for more Columbia-style changes. He also signed a memo Friday directing officials to expand his campaign against law firms. “Well, the law firms all want to make deals,” he told reporters that day.
Gabe Fleisher wrote in Wake Up To Politics today about the shameful caving of elite institutions to Tyrant 47’s regime, such as Columbia University and Paul Weiss.
See Also:
Source: wakeuptopolitics.com
Reblogged seananmcguire
how i'm handling my students using AI to write papers:
-don't accuse them on using AI from the get-go and instead ask them to informally define all the huge words that they used in their essay which i know they don't know the meaning of
-ask to see their original file where they "wrote" the essay. go to version history to see if it was just copy and pasted and then just edited a bit. i keep an eye out for the shit like "certainly! here's an essay about...."
-if they own up to it, they can re-do the assignment for a higher grade even if there will be an automatic penalty. if they don't, i process it like plagiarism and get my supervisor involved.
And this is much better than the immediate accusations. Some students have a good vocabulary. Stop accusing them of faking their essays without proof, and this is a good way to check.
Fellow students please stop using AI, go back to promising not to kill the school nerd if they do all your homework or something.
Reblogged
I once wrote a 1500 word essay on something I'd forgotten to read in the 40 minutes before class. Including the time it took to read the thing I'd forgotten to read.
I got an A on that paper.
Writing is a skill. Skill is muscle. If you don't use a muscle, it atrophies. If you are a student and you are tempted to use genAI to cheese an assignment, I am begging you for your own sake to not do it.
This is not a moral stance about genAI (which is shit at what it's ostensibly for, and full of lies and evil, and fueled by art theft and burning rainforests, and there is no good reason to ever use it for anything; that's the moral reason for why you shouldn't use it), it is a purely pragmatic stance based on the fact that if you use it you will never learn the single most essential skill that is used in every single workplace.
You will never learn to bullshit.
And if you cannot bullshit, you will not understand when you are being fed bullshit by others.
For your own sake you must learn to do your own thinking, your own bullshitting, because our trashfire society runs on bullshit and for your own good you must become fluent in it, because very few people will bother to translate it for you. It was asinine in the late 90s, and it is asinine today, but it is the central truth of adult society: everything is bullshit, and you need to know what is going on beneath the bullshit, and you need to be able to bullshit back if necessary.
I know that the expectations being placed on you are ever-increasing, and I know that it does not seem rational to put effort into explaining the plot of a Charles Dickens novel to someone who has read the thing 50 times and will read 50 identical essays about it over the weekend. I know you are being handed ever-greater heaps of what is functionally mindless busywork because of an institutional obsession with metrics that don't actually measure learning in a useful way. High school was nightmarish in the 90s and I am fully aware that it has only gotten worse.
Nevertheless, you must try, if only for your own sake. Curiosity is your best hope, and dogged determination your best weapon. Learn, please, if only out of spite.
I was able to get an A on that paper because I was able to skim the reading, figure out what it was about, and bullshit for 1500 words in the space of 40 minutes.
Imagine what you can do if you learn to bullshit like I can bullshit.
Skill is muscle. If you don't use a muscle, it atrophies.
The most basic, fundamental, inescapable consequences in life are those that come from how we all choose to spend our limited time. You get good at the things you do a lot. If there are things you want to be good at, you need to put time and effort into practicing them, or you will become bad at them. That is just how things work.
You want to be good at communicating with people? Be thoughtful and focused when you talk with people or when you write messages to them.
You want to be good at reasoning, thinking, and reflecting so that you're... I dunno... competent and not so easy to scam or dupe? You're going to have to put persistent time and effort into practicing those skills.
Reblogged doodleholic
Reblogged seananmcguire
Gentle reminder to any students that follow me, that generative AI's aren't thinking entities. These programs don't know what you're asking of it, or what it is delivering to you.
They're built on pattern recognition. What sort of words and phrases usually accompany these keywords.
If you ask a chatbot about something, it can give you the equivalent answer to saying 2 + 2 = 5.
Except you and I have enough knowledge of math to know that that isn't a correct answer.
But! What if you don't know enough about the subject to verify the answer? Think about it.
Don't use these things for your schoolwork. I know school sucks. I hated sitting in the library in college and pour over books on a subject I didn't give a shit about. Even more so once my depression really started to kick in. But I know I have valuable tools from that time to look up information, think critically about it, and reference my sources.
"AI" is a buzzword meant to evoke the glitzy sci-fi association we have with that word. But it's not a thinking entity.
It's a program that is fed other people's hard work without their permission or credit, and then spits it back out according to what its programming says is a common pattern, even if that means making up references to works that doesn't exist.
It's a mimic that doesn't know what it's doing. It's just copying shapes.
(And for all that is good, don't insult handicapped and neurodivergent people by crying "it's ableist to criticise use of generative AI". Fuck off.)
Reblogged
Students: Don't "Do Your Own Research"
This may seem like a provocative title. But here's the thing. I teach mostly humanities survey courses, to mostly non-majors. And frequently, I find myself saying/writing, in response to submitted work, some version of: "How on earth did you reach this conclusion from the evidence provided?"
And often, the student will say: "Well, I was doing research, and..."
They were not doing research. They were looking at random internet websites. These two things are not the same. Even in the rare cases where they've actually been looking at reputable secondary sources, they often misinterpret the evidence. Because I haven't trained them in reading scholarly literature. Because these are introductory survey classes and we aren't there yet.
What students usually tell me, as an excuse for wandering off into the thickets of the internet instead of doing the assignment as designed, is that they "needed more context." Which tells me that they assume they know more about how to effectively design an introductory survey course than I do. I disagree. The result is that no one is happy, and everyone has wasted their time: the students reading random stuff on the internet, and me trying to grade assignments that don't do the work.
When students tell me they "needed more context," they often say that this is because they didn't understand the assigned readings. And I tell them, invariably: then read them again. Email me with a question. Sign up for tutoring. Discuss the readings with a classmate. Literally anything will be a better use of time than asking the internet. And now, college students of Tumblr, I am telling you the same thing.
Reblogged
Anyone who has spent time at a medium-sized private university knows the weight of bureaucratic faculty meetings. An administrator tells you finances are bad, urges you to do more outreach/admissions work and emphasises that student success is the most important thing in the world. Then you learn that your student success budget is being slashed.
"Trump’s assault on US universities: five views from the chainsaw’s teeth," Times Higher Education, Hiller et al.
Reblogged seananmcguire
I'm going to add to this with advice for any teacher running into this situation.
Ask to borrow the kid's computer for a second, and use the AI. Pick a word, then pick a letter that is not in that word. Ask chatGPT how many times that letter appears in said word. (Avoid "how many Ns in Mayonnaise" because that went viral and got trained out.) Hell, give ChatGPT multiple tries. Ask it to demonstrate each time that letter appears in a word.
Let the entire class witness chatGPT fail. Because it cannot count. It cannot spell. It cannot think. Please put your lesson plans aside for a class and use it as a learning opportunity.
To add to your arsenal for educating these kids, please look into the concept of AI hallucination. AI cannot perceive things and has no ability to think critically, which means it cannot tell what's real and what's not. Really drill into these kids that they are better off asking advice from a toddler.
I used the characterAI bot instead of chatGPT in this case, but chatGPT has the same issues, because neither bot is capable of thinking about what it's saying.
Calling these things "artificial intelligence" is a core part of the problem. They are not intelligent in any sense of the word. They are less intelligent than the spell check and grammar check functions in Microsoft Word circa 2010.
Reblogged directactionforhope
Putting a highlight on this part specifically, teach children that they have the ability to fight back
Reblogged magistralucis
beanixwright-deactivated2022030
hot flaming take i’m abt to slap you with: it’s not acceptable to punish children for their grades, no matter the circumstances.
beanixwright-deactivated2022030
lost a follower for this one!
Any situation in which the grades are "bad enough to punish" is a situation in which your child is already struggling, and needs, more than anything, your support and affection.
If you punish them you will teach them nothing but how to loathe
And that their worth is dependent on what they can accomplish.
Reblogged doodleholic
There’s a scientific journal called “Get me off Your Fucking Mailing List”.
In 2005, computer scientists David Mazières and Eddie Kohler created this highly profane ten-page paper as a joke, to send in replying to unwanted conference invitations. It literally just contains that seven-word phrase over and over, along with a nice flow chart and scatter-plot graph.
An Australian computer scientist named Peter Vamplew sent it to the International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology in response to spam from the journal. Apparently, he thought the editors might simply open and read it.
Instead, they automatically accepted the paper — with an anonymous reviewer rating it as “excellent” — and requested a fee of $150. While this incident is pretty hilarious, it’s a sign of a bigger problem in science publishing. This journal is one of many online-only, for-profit operations that take advantage of inexperienced researchers under pressure to publish their work in any outlet that seems superficially legitimate.
Source: vox.com
