August is always distressing, but this time I'm sitting with a lot of stuff that feels heavier than usual. Please enjoy the following self-indulgent post where I process several of these topics; if my thinking resonates with yours at least a little bit, so much the better.

Milieu

What a stupid time this is. It feels like we are having the dumbest possible version of every conversation in American life, all at once and at maximum volume. Every company is evil now and so is the state. Everybody who is in charge of a thing has been selected specifically because they are manifestly opposed to the good functioning of that thing. Everything is a negative externality. There is no end in sight.

“Artificial intelligence”

Perhaps the single most fetid element of our swampy milieu is the techno-political enterprise whose backers call it “AI.”1 Situated amongst a host of fascinating technologies under the broad umbrella of machine learning, one particular approach suddenly attracted a ridiculous amount of attention and therefore money. Five to ten years later, through the reality-distorting effect of vast sums of venture capital, we are surrounded by machine-extruted text and text-extruding machines at every turn. It's like walking into a spiderweb, except cognitively and every twenty-four minutes.

Permission

I changed my mind about where the worst of the swamp smell is coming from: it's actually not the technology, but the societal permission structure that enables its use. Broadly speaking, it's okay to cheat now, because slash as long as it benefits particular segments of society. You can use an LLM to generate your essay, as long as you're paying your subscription fee to one of four or five enormous (and deeply unprofitable) companies.2 You can gamble on anything, as long as you do it on one of two euphemistically-named “prediction markets.” Cheating and gambling used to be for degenerates; now they are the subject of multi-channel advertising and multi-million sponsorship deals. The culture of elite impunity, long the province of the hoi oligoi, has trickled down – or perhaps been forcibly extruded from above – onto the unwashed masses.

Reinvention

In 2020, for reasons that are adequately explained by the phrase “in 2020,” I was forced to completely reinvent my teaching, which was not fun and also not good for my students. Due to our present milieu, I feel like I have to do it all over again six years later. Further, and this is the important part in a craft whose thoughtful practitioners constantly reinvent themselves and their practice, I feel like all the directions in which I must reinvent are directly contrary to my vision of good teaching.

LLMs

I've written before about this but it sure hasn't gotten any better. And also I'm kinda thinking, what if I just didn't.

Assessment

I fundamentally don't believe in in-class timed testing. I think there are so many confounds – ADHD, athletics, gamifying test-taking skills, performance anxiety, and just plain bad days, to name five off the top of my head – that there's just no way that performance on an in-class timed test is a good measure of anything that I am happy to call “understanding.” Nevertheless, last year, I felt forced to implement such assessment strategies because, as previously discussed, it's just okay to cheat now.

What a tremendous waste of instructional time this was! Cramming in all these tests pushed multiple cool and interesting topics out, I had to give short shrift to a couple of others, and don't even talk to me about the clusterfuck that was my office hours during the last two weeks of each semester.

Technology

Computers have made it easier and more effective to teach a lot of things. Desmos is a miracle. Geogebra too. Exploding Dots revolutionized what it is to teach place value. Webwork and now Doenet enable rapid and sophisticated feedback on a scale that was impossible to conceptualize before.

Meanwhile, I'm considering a complete screen ban for my classes this semester.

Because, right next door to the Desmos applet or the cool Doenet activity, there's the entire rest of the internet. If one is ever even slightly bored with calculus, one can with two to three keystrokes start shopping for Luke Bryan tickets or poasting with all one's friends on social medias or watching a livestream of the Champions League game.

What's more, if you have in your pocket a glowing rectangle that serves as a portal to what has been carefully sold to us as The Magic Answer-Generating Machine, when you encounter a situation that requires hard thinking, you must certainly be at least tempted to reach therein instead of thinking for forty-three more seconds. But, see, my entire job is to get people to think for forty-three more seconds.

I'm good at teaching, I work hard to engage students, and I honestly like technology for a lot of teaching purposes, but I simply can't compete.

Canvas

I've been dancing around the issue of Canvas (or LMSs generally). I use Canvas a lot and generally like it.3 In particular, Speedgrader genuinely makes it a lot easier and faster (especially with the use of text expanders!) to collect student work, provide individualized feedback, and do so in a way that is transparent for both me and students.

But now, Canvas is owned by a manifestly evil private equity company that is almost certainly going to monetize its data, probably for training data for LLMs that will further precaritize academic careers. Cool, cool cool cool.

I'm about five inches away from posting all my stuff on github and collecting student work on paper, which will take me five times longer to deal with, open me up to losing or misplacing submissions, and generally fuck up every process for giving feedback that I have developed over the past ten years of teaching.

Moving forward

I don't know, man. Maybe I will just become a hermit.

  1. I am putting this term in scare quotes because it is neither: it must by design plagiarize the massive corpus of human-generated language that constitutes its training data, and a model of language is not a model of the cognitive processes that produce language, but those are not conversations that anybody is particularly interested in having. ↩

  2. Which, it's no surprise that each of these companies offers student discounts. ↩

  3. Even though, as Winston Churchill once definitely said, Canvas is the worst learning management system except for all those others that have been tried from time to time. I have, for instance, invented countless silly workarounds to Canvas's insistence that every assignment must be scored with a number of points. ↩