Weekly Varia no. 15, 02/25/23

Posted on by Josh Nudell

I looked at my course evaluations again this week. Week six of the semester is a strange time to check evaluations, but I had to compile summary evaluations as part of my annual review. Now, the utility of evaluations are deeply mixed in that they often reflect a combination of what the students believed that they should have earned and how much work they believe that they should have put in to earn whatever grade they did receive. I also find that any course policy that deviates from whatever normative practice the students are familiar with is liable to be met with polarizing opinions, which results in some combination of angry and enthusiastic comments.

My favorite ever comment was from a student who said that they should give me a raise.

Polarizing is how I’d characterize the response to Specifications Grading. A lot of students reported that it was challenging, but in a way that was both fair allowed them to do their best work in learning the material, which is exactly the intent. Others found it grossly unfair, either because they had to put in more work to earn the high grade they wanted or because it “prevented” them from receiving their high grade (presumably because they didn’t want to complete optional revisions).

This has led me to mull over whether Specifications Grading is the best match for any class with papers. I am committed to the system at least for this semester and it undoubtedly results in the students honing their skills. But it also requires me to give copious feedback if I want the students to be able to meet the higher standards in their revisions, and this is hard to do at scale. However, I also don’t want to give back either the expectations for what students should be able to achieve by the end of the course or the flexibility that students unused to my teaching style sometimes find disorienting (yes, the extension is free, there is no trick involved). At the same time, even while acknowledging that no one professor can resolve the deep structural issues that lie behind the student mental health crisis, I hate to feel like I’m contributing to making the problem worse.

Then again, I had a handful of comments that explicitly commented about how I made things better in this respect so I must have done something right.

This week’s varia:

  • Javal Coleman writes in the SCS Blog about being the only Black person in a Classics Department and how that isolation makes one question their belonging.
  • This week in Pasts Imperfect, Matthew Canepa writes about the god Mithra, who will be the subject of an upcoming conference on the deity, along with the usual roundup of projects (including a very exciting mapping project on Cahokia). This conference looks excellent, particularly in its focus on undoing the damage done to our understanding of the god through obsession with identifying a “pure” tradition or conviction about unchanging religions. This was also the focus of Canepa’s excellent monograph, The Iranian Expanse (2018).
  • Arie Amaya-Akkermans writes a letter about the devastation at Antakya. He reports a particularly powerful opinion that the Turkish government will likely rebuild some of the antiquities to demonstrate its diversity and sophistication even while allowing the people to suffer.
  • Another earthquake struck Hatay province, already devastated by the earthquake that killed tens of thousands several weeks ago. I have no words.
  • A school resource officer found a loaded gun in a fourth-grader’s backpack after it was reported by other students, to whom the student was showing the gun.
  • Florida is considering a “Classical” Christian alternative to the SAT, in the latest of DeSantis’ aggressive attacks on education. My worry about this sort of thing isn’t so much that it will work—as long as parents are looking to send their kids to top schools elsewhere in the country, they’ll continue to take whatever tests those schools require, and whether the tests are worthwhile is a separate question—but that the actions of DeSantis and the people around him are rapidly pushing the Overton Window about education in a way that empowers people not just in Florida, but around the country, to indoctrinate and bully students.
  • Roald Dahl’s publisher is aiming to release revised editions of classic books that sand away the rough, insensitive edges to the man’s writing. The move is an entirely absurd reaction to the so-called culture wars, in my view, and disingenuous. Give context to the text as was if you want to account for changes in culture, but moderating everything to obscure an author’s politics and make a cash grab at making a sanitized version for use in school does a service to exactly nobody.
  • The office of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion at Vanderbilt’s Peabody College used ChatGPT to produce an email sent to students about the Michigan State shooting last week. The message was predictably cold and lacking in any specific guidance on resources to help the students who, unsurprisingly, are not amused. I’m not at all surprised that university departments are using AI this way, given the widespread misconception that AI text generation can replace actual writing even as many of these same schools are considering draconian consequences for students who submit AI-generated work. We’re way past irony on this topic already.
  • The Science Fiction magazine Clarkesworld has been overwhelmed by AI-generated short story submissions—all unpublishably bad. The magazine’s editor Neil Clarke speculates on the reasons for this trend in a blog post that also points out in an update that he suspended accepting submissions while working on a solution since the first three weeks of February saw nearly five times the submissions of January, which itself was twice the volume of December and that had been the highest on record to that point. John Scalzi also points out that SFF magazines are vulnerable because they still pay authors.
  • NPR is the latest journalism platform to announce layoffs, noting a 20 million dollar drop-off in sponsorship revenue and pessimistic outlooks for a bounce-back in funding levels. I have my issues with some of how NPR chooses to cover politics in particular, but it is an absolutely essential part of the journalism apparatus given its mandate to cover events in every state. The erosion of journalism in this country is a disturbing (and accelerating) trend that is already showing consequences in the likes of George Santos.
  • The New Yorker Profiles Itamar Ben-Gvir, the poster-child for Israel’s recent swerve to the hard, hard right and an activist for Jewish extremism. Worrying stuff.
  • After the bizarre saga that is Twitter Blue, Zuckerberg has decided to one-up Elon Musk with a paid subscription plan for Meta platforms for the low, low price of $11.99 a month. Unless you are using Facebook on an iPhone, in which case it’ll be $14.99. This is under the guise of ID-verification systems to help people build their brands. This latest move makes me glad that I deleted my Facebook account more than a decade ago. I still use Instagram, probably more than I should and would miss some interactions if I were forced away but let’s be real: the Instagram timeline is practically useless already. I assume this decision counts on Facebook being indispensable for millions of people, and a go-to platform for many types of interactions—as I have been annoyed by on more than one occasion. At least Meta is actually going to verify identifications.
  • The “He Gets Us” series of commercials touting Jesus’ humble humanity is bankrolled by a right-wing evangelical organization that has donors from the likes of the owner of Hobby Lobby. Unsurprising, but wiping away the patina of respectability and inviting questions about motive.

Album of the Week: Kacey Musgraves, Same Trailer Different Park (2013)

Currently Reading: Dan Saladino, Eating to Extinction (2021)

Weekly Varia no. 12, 02/04/23

Posted on by Josh Nudell

I turned 37 earlier this week. 37 is a curious age. I’m older than Alexander the Great was when he died, but not yet at the acme of my life (~40); no longer young, but also not old. I’m just an indeterminate middling age. Old enough for my beard to be starting to turn white, but young enough that a student mistook me for being a decade younger than I am. In his defense, I am the youngest person in my department. Nor was 37 an age that I imagined when I was younger. There were things I more or less expected by the ages of 25, 30, 32, 35, 50, but I skipped right past 37. Not that I correctly foretold much past the graduation of college, anyway. I could complain about plenty at this age and I both have made plenty of mistakes along the way and have plenty of developing left to do, but I also largely like the person I have become this decade. Now if only I can persuade him to get more sleep.

This week’s varia:

  • ChatGPT Roundup:
    • Rachel Elliot Rigolino says that AI tools mean that writing instruction should focus on students as editors. I agree in principle with the argument, though I could say the same thing about teaching them to edit their own writing. Likewise, you can only be a good editor if you have a good working knowledge of the skill.
    • Ben Crowell, a physics professor, writes about AI writing very similarly to what I’ve been saying: that substantive responses to student writing will push past the superficial fluency of the AI.
    • Google seems to be testing a new homepage that uses a chat AI interface. If it is anything like ChatGPT, this change is going to annoy me to no end.
    • Washington Post has a story about the historical chat AI. The article is a little “both sides,” giving the creator of the app the last word, but it does profile historians’ critiques.
    • A good piece in Slate about the college is going to respond to ChatGPT, even as the company that produces it is not thinking about college at all. I particularly like this line: “This assertion, that A.I. might “free up human workers to focus on more thoughtful—and ideally profitable—work,” is wrongheaded at the outset. When it comes to writing (and everything that can be done with it), it’s all grunt work. Having an idea, composing it into language, and checking to see whether that language matches our original idea is a metacognitive process that changes us. It puts us in dialogue with ourselves and often with others as well. To outsource idea generation to an A.I. machine is to miss the constant revision that reflection causes in our thinking.”
    • Teen Boys Beat Shit Out Of ChatGPT Servers After It Only Gets Them ‘C’ On Assignment
  • Ron DeSantis’ political appointees to the board of The New College in Florida fired the president Patricia Okker, replacing her with a DeSantis ally. Among other changes that they are aiming for, they want to place all hiring decisions in the hands of the President, alongside firing all faculty and subjecting them to selective rehiring. Setting aside the nebulous concept of academic freedom that applies on a sliding scale to professors, this is a ruthless assault on the fabric of higher education as an institution designed to impose a narrow definition of acceptable education, and a vision that DeSantis’ allies aim to expand to all public schools in Florida. John Warner has a good piece about the consequences of these changes, with an emphasis on how this is a political attack that will be a material detriment for students in small, meaningful ways like having someone to serve as a reference, despite DeSantis’ rhetoric.
  • Axios has a roundup of some evidence that the Humanities might be making a comeback, in terms of majors and how young people are trying to make sense of the world. A notable point is that some students are starting to see that a STEM degree does not guarantee a better job.
  • Teen Vogue continues its run of substantive articles with a good discussion of Reconstruction and how it is, or isn’t, taught in schools.
  • There are reports from Ohio of a home school ring that is using explicitly Nazi educational materials in their “schooling.” The group’s leader told a podcast that she was having trouble finding “Nazi approved school material for my home-schooled children.”
  • New Mexico’s legislature introduced a bill that would require schools to overhaul their ventilation systems. I know that I would feel much more comfortable teaching in a classroom with no windows open if I knew that the classroom had a state of the art filtration.
  • At Vice, Roshan Abraham reports on allegations that Avian flu was used as cover by major egg producers to raise prices dramatically beyond what was necessary. Eggs are one of a number of items I have noticed in the grocery store that have been going up in prince well beyond the rate of inflation, which makes this argument of particular note.
  • Colossal Biosciences, a start-up company trying to revive extinct species, has completed its Series B funding that injected another $150 million dollars. This story reminds me of the time that I explained to my closest friends (whose wedding I was officiating) on the RSVP that my doctor had me on an “extinct birds” diet, so all of my meals had to be acquired from a specific purveyor who had cloned extinct birds specifically so that people on this diet could eat them. It was not a short explanation. (I did, in fact, choose one of their options at the end, I’m not entirely without manners.)
  • The United States has concluded a deal with the Philippines for the use of four new bases, expanding at least the potential for a US military presence in the South China Sea.
  • The Pentagon announced that there is a Chinese surveillance balloon over Montana. I have no particular insight into what this means in terms of the slow-boiling conflict between the United States and China, but I wanted to include it in this list because it reminds me of the fascinating story from World War 2 about Fu Go, a Japanese program that dropped bombs on the continental United States.
  • One of my persistent complaints about public discourse in the United States is that it is entirely lacking in nuance or an awareness of context. This is how you get the story about the diner in Connecticut that the proprietor, a Mexican woman, named “Woke,” because it serves breakfast and coffee, you see, that has become a target of outrage and support because people assumed she was making a political statement. At least this misunderstanding runs both directions and Woke is receiving good business from people pushing back against that outrage.
  • The Netflix reality show Squidgame, a less fatal version of the hit show, stands accused of creating conditions that were much more challenging than contestants signed up for. On the one hand, most of these people were not paid for appearing on the show unless they won, which I do think is a problem, but, on the other hand, there is a deep irony that people eagerly signed up without considering this at least a possible outcome.
  • Recep Tayyip Erdogan is opening a museum…to himself.

Album of the Week: Amanda Shires, Take It Like A Man (seriously, listen to Amanda Shires)

Currently Reading: Fonda Lee, Jade War, Matthew Canepa, The Iranian Expanse

Assorted Links

Posted on by Josh Nudell
  1. Panel Recommends Varying University Tuition Based on Degrees, Job Prospects– In Florida there is a proposition to vary how much university tuition is by further subsidizing STEM degrees over humanities degrees. According to the panel chair there would not be any elimination of programs because “There will always be a need for them, but you better really want to do it, because you may have to pay more.” On one hand, I am sympathetic to their attempts to draw people to those degrees since there is a sense that the future is coming from them. On the other, doesn’t offering people money to take those degrees lead more people to them for the wrong reasons (particularly because many of those jobs already pay more)? I also disagree with the premise that this will not discourage students from going into the humanities since many students already receive pressure from their family to study something that will get them a job out of college and some hiring decisions for college departments are made on the basis of enrollment. If the cost of a humanities degree is higher than sciences then enrollment will likely dip, thus stagnating the department if not killing it outright.
  2. Ethnic Cleansing in Myanmar– A report in the economist of yet another part of the world that is experiencing ethnic cleansing over religious/cultural/immigration issues. The violence is being carried out against against the Rohingya, an ethnic group considered illegal immigrants by the Myanmarese government after being deprived of citizenship in 1982.
  3. The Problem with Rape Exemptions– An article in the Atlantic about how the extreme debate over whether candidates support the right to an abortion when a woman has been raped and the subsequent adoption of “rape exemptions” as a liberal marker misses the point. The article focuses on the onus of proving rape, but briefly notes the more insidious problem that desperately fighting for just this one acceptable version of an abortion starts out by limiting the woman’s right to choose in any situation and comes in asking for this one concession, rather than requiring lawmakers to have a good reason for each and every limit they place.
  4. Yemen: Journey to a land in limbo– A profile in the London Financial Times about Yemen since the Arab spring. The tagline from an activist is that the government is not strong, but neither are the people free.
  5. Nobs and Natives– A review of the book Prairie Fever about British Aristocrats who journeyed into the American west during the 19th century and their efforts to buy or steal land and reaffirm their racial superiority over the indigenous Americans.
  6. The Middle East’s Belly Dancing Recession– A story in the Atlantic with the tag line “how the Arab Spring has hobbled one of the world’s oldest dance forms.” Of course, the article actually examines the economic fallout from reduced tourism after the Arab Spring. Belly dancers, particularly those who moved to the middle east because of heightened job prospects as part of the tourism industry, have been hit hard and are considering leaving the area.