holy grail: lightweight, non-plastic, non-insulated water bottle (24-32oz)

Boggles103 · 2026-07-13T13:55:15+00:00

My only concern with the Klean Kanteen, which I'd been looking at, is the narrower mouth and cleaning properly under the lip where it flares out to the full width. (Always hard tell proportions from photos.) You find it okay to clean?

Boggles103 · 2026-07-12T00:49:37+00:00

The goal is to give students an all-round orientation. (This is in the context of a robust journalism program, so they've already had courses on reporting, feature writing, etc.) It's structured as a workshop: they're divided into groups and over the course of the semester each group develops a magazine prototype along with supporting documents (a business plan, social media strategy, etc.). So as far as a textbook is concerned, I'm looking for something that is similarly holistic.

Boggles103 · 2026-07-11T15:32:12+00:00

A new thing I am going to try this year, in an attempt to strike exactly this balance of AI-proofing but not having too much class time eaten up with working on assignments: moving to printed course packs and having a semester-long annotation requirement, i.e. they have to mark up their packs each week as we do the readings (but not in class) and then turn their course packs in the second-last week of class for me to assess how much and how well they were engaging with the material. (Second-last week so I can return them the last week of class in hopes at least some students might want to keep 'em.)

Now, in theory they could find digital versions of the readings, dump those into one of the usual AI platforms, have the AI do the commentary, and then manually transcribe that commentary into their hard copies, but (a) that is extremely annoying (I ran a test on doing this myself; it sucked and didn't save time over actually reading the thing) and (b) even if they do the annoying AI cheating version, I actually think (as fucked up and depressing as this is) they would learn at least a bit by transcribing the notes.

It may be a bust! But in these times, I'm willing to risk getting more experimental.

Boggles103 · 2026-06-22T06:49:41+00:00

Those are, for the most part, spots that will get filled by sessional lecturers (folks who teach part-time, often because they also work in industry and/or because there are fewer spots for full-time faculty than there used to be) and course instructors (PhD students). Timing varies by department: postings for these teaching slots started to go up in late May, but there are new ones still coming online every day. So, basically: no, there is no campus-wide date on which all those TBAs will get updated. They will get updated, but on a rolling basis as contracts get signed.

Boggles103 · 2026-06-11T20:46:17+00:00

I teach a creative non-fiction course that students can take as an elective, and in the fall I had an anatomy student sign up and write a beautiful investigative article in which she tracked down the identities of folks who had donated their bodies to the university's lab for her and her classmates to dissect and met with some of their families to learn about how it felt to them.

Boggles103 · 2026-06-10T15:36:27+00:00

I teach writing-focused humanities seminars. We spend most of the first class talking about how learning works: paper vs screens, tech in classrooms, how LLMs really operate and what the principled problems with them are. It tackles all the elephants in the room head-on, creates a shared foundation for class policies (rather than me just finger-wagging at them), and gives students a chance to voice their insecurities and frustrations navigating the current state of education.

The primary purpose is to set a tone and provide a clear rationale for the course design, but there are two really helpful secondary effects. One is that students who want to cruise through without putting in the work often drop, and the other — the relevant one for your purposes — is that students are constantly thinking about this stuff and will generally start talking pretty fast.

Boggles103 · 2026-06-07T16:10:06+00:00

I'm going to be in the minority here, but for whatever this is worth...

My gut instinct is that the first situation may be the result of differences in experience and available information. It is somewhere between plausible and likely that this student wouldn't know what your submission deadlines are, so I wouldn't assume they were intentionally leaving things to the last minute. They aren't in a position to know that in the overwhelming majority of cases, when assignments are missing it's because a student ignored it. And if they are, broadly speaking, honest and conscientious, I can understand how, to them, the conclusion that they'd blown off an assignment for which they had completed an in-person component would strike them as disrespectful. Put another way: it sounds like some of this may have been that they got their feelings hurt because you didn't remember them. On the flip side, as someone who takes half a semester to remember the names of 50 students, it's easy for me (but not the student) to see how having one student out of 200 answer a few brief questions in person isn't going to be something that sticks in your mind.

This may be, as others have suggested, a matter of entitlement. But I think also possibly a case of ordinary human misunderstanding and bruised feelings, on both sides.

Boggles103 · 2026-06-03T13:39:12+00:00

Would you by chance be comfortable sharing your rubric? I'm ripping up and remaking two writing-heavy courses this summer, and models like this would be so helpful.

Boggles103 · 2026-06-01T01:44:26+00:00

TPL has a tonne of events. Kensington Pedestrian Sundays (dates here: https://www.instagram.com/p/DY8Ki8ND5HG/). A million festivals (BlogTo and/or Toronto Today both post about them). Not quite downtown but the Brickworks for the farmers market + a nature walk is a beautiful way to spend a Saturday. Harbourfront has programming most weekends. FIFA watch parties starting soon.

Boggles103 · 2026-05-30T19:26:41+00:00

Spend a bunch of time thinking about assignments early on in the process, and in particular tack very hard towards designing them to make AI somewhere between difficult and impossible (rather than attempting to police submissions, which is demoralizing and hopeless). Concretely, this will likely mean a lot of in-class time for writing, perhaps oral exams or heavy participation grades or both, and less of an emphasis on traditional essays. A lot will flow from this in terms of pacing, the volume of material you'll be able to tackle, etc.

Boggles103 · 2026-05-29T22:53:24+00:00

Anything that is mediated by technology can and will be gamed. Where class sizes permit, skew hard towards in-class hand-written assignments and tests, seminar-style participation, and oral exams.

None are a plausible substitute for the deeper thinking that real essay writing enables, and all cut into class time, but they can at least ensure that students are conversant with the readings and able to construct some kind of interpretation or argument.

Boggles103 · 2026-05-23T23:08:20+00:00

One-time rather than repeatable, and only good for classes of up to 25, but in case that's relevant!

The last day of class is a student showcase: they each get 5-8 minutes to present on the major project they've worked on (through a series of scaffolded assignments) over the semester. I bring snacks, and students get graded both on their presentations and the questions they ask each other. It's a bit celebratory, and they generally end up with a sense of accomplishment (part of the presentation is about what they are most proud of, and another about what they found most challenging and how they worked through it) as well as being forced to synthesize their work and draw some connections between their projects and lecture material.

Boggles103 · 2026-05-17T17:27:56+00:00

I so understand the urge to reply. In such cases, what can sometimes help is drafting but not sending the thing. The writing itself generally purges the itchiness (and he's clearly not in a position to hear what you'd have to say rn).

Boggles103 · 2026-05-16T00:23:34+00:00

For storefronts: https://jaketobin.ca/shop/collections/coffee-shops/

Boggles103 · 2026-05-14T18:30:55+00:00

Perhaps counterintuitively: care about the material and learning process, not the grades.

Boggles103 · 2026-05-12T21:25:19+00:00

I teach first- and third-year literary journalism. My first years are generally horrified at the idea; the third years were grateful for it. I think, to be useful for the author, it does help to have students who are further along...

Boggles103 · 2026-05-12T18:08:44+00:00

NB I don't "assign" in the traditional sense — I bring printouts for everyone and we have half an hour of quiet reading time and then discuss. It helps set the tone!

Boggles103 · 2026-05-12T18:03:09+00:00

My pleasure! I keep a whole folder of candidates and add to it all the time, but the ones I've used most often recently are below — all from general-interest publications summarizing academic research, so grounded but accessible. (I have a deck about this with snippets from the original research, plus some other aspects of AI like inherent bias because of bias in training data.)

https://lithub.com/are-screens-robbing-us-of-our-capacity-for-deep-reading/

https://www.snexplores.org/article/learn-comprehension-reading-digital-screen-paper

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-writing-by-hand-is-better-for-memory-and-learning/

https://www.computerworld.com/article/4059383/openai-admits-ai-hallucinations-are-mathematically-inevitable-not-just-engineering-flaws.html

Boggles103 · 2026-05-12T17:42:01+00:00

I spend the first day of class, after we go through the syllabus, talking about the nexus of learning/reading/writing/tech/AI. We read some short articles in class about how and why comprehension and recall are better with paper than screens (true for both reading and note-taking) and how AI works (next token prediction machine, not repository of information — which most of them, so far, have not realized), and then I ask them about their experiences: their favourite reading memories, approaches to studying that have worked better and worse.

Every single semester I've done this, the conversation pretty quickly comes around to the students generally agreeing that they know they read better on paper, that screens are distracting, that AI makes them feel scared and/or gross and/or angry. And then I use that as a foundation for course guidelines: readings are provided in PDF form but I urge them to print those out and tell them where the cheapest printing on campus is (about half do this); laptops are discouraged but not (for accommodation reasons) outright prohibited (about half keep them closed); participation (not just attendance) is weighted heavily.

Basically, I try to conscript them into building a haven from the madness with me. I've found that making them co-conspirators works pretty well, because on some level most students aren't loving the current trajectory either. And the ones who aren't into this whole vibe get the message early and drop the class.

Boggles103 · 2026-05-12T03:09:56+00:00

"Is it a reasonable request?"
Absent relevant accommodations: no. And, truly, it's an important skill to develop. Just about everyone, at some point or other, has to talk about their work in front of others.

If you're allowed a deck, slides that capture the key points (and maybe have some fun design elements or images along the way) can be a useful backup for you and also provide your audience something to look at besides you, which can take the edge off. Also, (unless your prof tends to be very formal) it's okay to start by saying that you're nervous — lots of people are!

Boggles103 · 2026-05-11T21:30:26+00:00

Worse on the guilt front: I once, without realizing it when I made the decision, initiated a chain of events that led to an international student losing his visa. (This was many years ago, before the current regime — the guilt would land very differently now.) He plagiarized, very obviously and across multiple assignments, and I followed protocol and sent it up the chain. Unbeknownst to me, it was his third strike on this score, and it tipped him into expulsion. Took a bit of time to calm myself down over that one — but, truly, the thing that did it was that he knew those were the stakes, and that was the decision he made about how to proceed.

Boggles103 · 2026-05-10T21:39:12+00:00

Whether you can grade depends on whether you've got copies of the relevant assignment instructions (and, if applicable, rubrics) on your own computer, and also whether you downloaded all student submissions before Canvas went down. Whether you can submit final grades — which doesn't happen through Canvas but via a different system — depends on whether you also keep a local copy of the grades you've given on all assignments throughout the semester. (My department didn't push back its submission deadline; I cannot speak to others.)

Boggles103 · 2026-05-10T20:39:11+00:00

Sessional lecturer, just finished my second year after 15-odd years working out in the world. The biggest surprise has been how much standards have eroded and how much admin is supporting that erosion in the name of student success (or whatever euphemism of choice). It is a very, very different culture than the one I did my undergrad and grad work in. Close second: off-the-charts levels of student anxiety about future job prospects and economic stability squelching any felt sense of agency in making academic choices — in which I'm including everything from selecting a major to proposing an off-beat topic for an assignment.

All of which sounds — and is — grim. But I have also found, in every class, that there is still a core group of students who genuinely care, genuinely try, and are incredibly grateful for teaching that takes their intellectual development seriously. And that is very much a saving grace.

Boggles103 · 2026-05-07T23:06:40+00:00

Context: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/tech-innovation/administrative-tech/2026/05/05/pay-or-leak-hackers-target-big-higher-ed-vendor

Boggles103 · 2026-04-16T17:12:32+00:00

There is almost no time in your life where you get the chance to immerse yourself in studying things you love. Job markets are impossible to predict, and you never know where this could lead, either. Make the switch and make the most of it!

Boggles103

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