That’s a really rich article. This part especially stood out to me. Teah8ng something like English must be so hard these days.
I teach 18 year olds who range in reading levels from preschool to college, but the majority of them are in the lower half that range. I am devastated by what AI and social media have done to them. My kids don’t think anymore. They don’t have interests. Literally, when I ask them what they’re interested in, so many of them can’t name anything for me. Even my smartest kids insist that ChatGPT is good “when used correctly.” I ask them, “How does one use it correctly then?” They can’t answer the question. They don’t have original thoughts. They just parrot back what they’ve heard in TikToks. They try to show me “information” ChatGPT gave them. I ask them, “How do you know this is true?” They move their phone closer to me for emphasis, exclaiming, “Look, it says it right here!” They cannot understand what I am asking them. It breaks my heart for them and honestly it makes it hard to continue teaching. If I were to quit, it would be because of how technology has stunted kids and how hard it’s become to reach them because of that.
I am only 30 years old. I have a long road ahead of me to retirement. But it is so hard to ask kids to learn, read, and write, when so many adults are no longer doing the work it takes to ensure they are really learning, reading, and writing. And I get it. That work has suddenly become so challenging. It’s really not fair to us. But if we’re not willing to do it, we shouldn’t be in the classroom.
In case anyone doesn’t already know this: Columbia has always been the “Jewish” Ivy, the one that accepted Jewish students and professors long before the others did.
I have a friend who went to U Mich for his graduate degree says that they’ve been doing this shit for years. They surveilled him at one point, in fact, or tried to.
I was in the advanced math group in grade school, along with other girls. When we hit 12/13, all the girls except for me and one other dropped out. Their MOTHERS had told them that boys wouldn’t be interested in dating them if they were smarter, so they stopped doing their homework, studying for tests, etc.
In high school, the calculus teacher told me and the other girls in class that we should only do the AB Calculus exam, not the harder BC one. I got a 5 (out of 5) on the BC one, without studying specially for it, or getting any tutoring. None of the boys did.
It’s amazing that any girls pursue STEM, considering how much is stacked against them.
Learning more of the history behind Hidden Figures, what jumped out at me were the positions filled by women as support roles. Having monotonous tasks assigned to them was one way to get a foot in the door. My own IT career started with data entry, even though I had programming skills. A foundation of speed and accuracy in typing was initially a benefit (although it came back to haunt me later with GUI “features” like type-ahead). Still, on most teams I was the only woman among the programmers, until I moved into lead roles and recruited more.
What grinds my gears in promotions of STEM is the idea that anyone / anything can code after some training. IMO, language skills served me more than math - and programming is a blend of art and science. Everyone has a unique writing/coding style, and it might be necessary for tech workers to spend more time on maintenance - understanding and successfully modifying the work of others - than creating something new.
In other education news, this film about Robert Reich looks interesting:
