![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
A long day
Both kids had therapy. T.’s went long, so he skipped his virtual piano lesson. R. and I went out to dinner after A.’s therapy. And then there was homework.
But it went really well! A. stuck around for current events club, which is only extremely marginally about current events and is mostly her getting more time with her buddies in connections, or, as she calls it, she’s there for the connections chaos. One of the kids was trying to figure out a way to boot linux on his school provided chromebook. He did not succeed, but along the way, A. learned a bunch of things.
A. and I talked about her upcoming essay in English on _Patron Saints of Nothing_. She really disliked the book for a whole lot of reasons, some of which sound to me like there are real problems and others which sound like the author did a good job but A. is not really the target audience. I told her that her essay could be on how much she hated the book and why, and that helped her really connect with the assignment instead of just resenting it. I have also been trying to really understand what the goal of essay writing, in school or wherever else it might subsequently be used for, might be. I mean, _obviously I am aware of what I am doing here_! Duh. Equally, I am quite certain this wasn’t anyone’s idea of why I was being taught to write essays in school. It has not escaped me that chatGPT answers look suspiciously like an automated 3-5 paragraph essay more often than not. And there was a recent The New Warehouse episode (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-new-warehouse-podcast/id1455808373) in which LoPresti from Takt describes a recent AI component of Takt intended to support managers in their communications with workers and also in writing performance reviews that was a delightful example of automating the assembly of relevant data points into a draft for a human to check and then either submit or use as the basis for an in person discussion of some sort.
As with everything, once it is automated, I’m gonna ask a bunch of questions about, so why teach people to do it manually anyway? Also, AI production of writing forcibly reminds us over and over and over again that the format is largely unimportant but the selection of the list items included in the format is crucial. The essay tends to conceal that early work in finding and curating the list items, and of course by so concealing introduces many opportunities for shenanigans. I exploited the fuck out of that as a teenager by writing essays which meticulously hit every specified requirement but were absolutely never imagined as in any way when the teacher was assigning that essay (highly recommend, btw, especially if you have confidence that you can appeal all bad grades successfully — I don’t mean grade grubbing. I mean, you produce an A+ essay that is bonkers but precisely compliant in every way. Occasionally, you will get a humor-free teacher who D or F’s you, and you have to be able to get that fixed if you want to have the GPA necessary to get the scholarships you need because you’re poor and you need help going to college. And you _really_ have to be meticulous about noting every single requirement specified in the class and for the assignment in question, because some people _will_ use any opportunity to ding you when you abuse their assignment this way).
The answers to my questions have been fairly poor, much like answers to questions about cursive or long division or spelling or grammar or really anything else that it’s inexpensive to access fully automated versions of. I have concluded that the value of an essay does not lie in the essay product; it lies entirely in the selection process leading up to the product. And that’s particularly terrible as a conclusion, because virtually all of the pedagogy is focused on the product and streamlining the process of searching for and curating what goes into that product.
Anyway. I don’t know that there’s any useful lesson here. I would _observe_ that the somewhat horrifying events associated with efforts to teach “small group academic discussion” align very well with my observations around essays. I feel like both of these demonstrate the inevitable gear smashing associated with transitioning from “rigorous”, “product oriented” education to SEL. We really need to end up in a world in which we can share our feelings and collectively problem solve, but we are still educating to a world in which feelings are denied and we are required to comply with policy set from above. We’ve been moving along this path for generations, and we’ll keep making progress, but it sure feels slow.
But it went really well! A. stuck around for current events club, which is only extremely marginally about current events and is mostly her getting more time with her buddies in connections, or, as she calls it, she’s there for the connections chaos. One of the kids was trying to figure out a way to boot linux on his school provided chromebook. He did not succeed, but along the way, A. learned a bunch of things.
A. and I talked about her upcoming essay in English on _Patron Saints of Nothing_. She really disliked the book for a whole lot of reasons, some of which sound to me like there are real problems and others which sound like the author did a good job but A. is not really the target audience. I told her that her essay could be on how much she hated the book and why, and that helped her really connect with the assignment instead of just resenting it. I have also been trying to really understand what the goal of essay writing, in school or wherever else it might subsequently be used for, might be. I mean, _obviously I am aware of what I am doing here_! Duh. Equally, I am quite certain this wasn’t anyone’s idea of why I was being taught to write essays in school. It has not escaped me that chatGPT answers look suspiciously like an automated 3-5 paragraph essay more often than not. And there was a recent The New Warehouse episode (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-new-warehouse-podcast/id1455808373) in which LoPresti from Takt describes a recent AI component of Takt intended to support managers in their communications with workers and also in writing performance reviews that was a delightful example of automating the assembly of relevant data points into a draft for a human to check and then either submit or use as the basis for an in person discussion of some sort.
As with everything, once it is automated, I’m gonna ask a bunch of questions about, so why teach people to do it manually anyway? Also, AI production of writing forcibly reminds us over and over and over again that the format is largely unimportant but the selection of the list items included in the format is crucial. The essay tends to conceal that early work in finding and curating the list items, and of course by so concealing introduces many opportunities for shenanigans. I exploited the fuck out of that as a teenager by writing essays which meticulously hit every specified requirement but were absolutely never imagined as in any way when the teacher was assigning that essay (highly recommend, btw, especially if you have confidence that you can appeal all bad grades successfully — I don’t mean grade grubbing. I mean, you produce an A+ essay that is bonkers but precisely compliant in every way. Occasionally, you will get a humor-free teacher who D or F’s you, and you have to be able to get that fixed if you want to have the GPA necessary to get the scholarships you need because you’re poor and you need help going to college. And you _really_ have to be meticulous about noting every single requirement specified in the class and for the assignment in question, because some people _will_ use any opportunity to ding you when you abuse their assignment this way).
The answers to my questions have been fairly poor, much like answers to questions about cursive or long division or spelling or grammar or really anything else that it’s inexpensive to access fully automated versions of. I have concluded that the value of an essay does not lie in the essay product; it lies entirely in the selection process leading up to the product. And that’s particularly terrible as a conclusion, because virtually all of the pedagogy is focused on the product and streamlining the process of searching for and curating what goes into that product.
Anyway. I don’t know that there’s any useful lesson here. I would _observe_ that the somewhat horrifying events associated with efforts to teach “small group academic discussion” align very well with my observations around essays. I feel like both of these demonstrate the inevitable gear smashing associated with transitioning from “rigorous”, “product oriented” education to SEL. We really need to end up in a world in which we can share our feelings and collectively problem solve, but we are still educating to a world in which feelings are denied and we are required to comply with policy set from above. We’ve been moving along this path for generations, and we’ll keep making progress, but it sure feels slow.