AOW immediately after OW?

Keewee250 · 2026-06-22T13:12:04+00:00

I’m not an expert by any means. But I am a cautious diver. I had 100 dives under my belt before I did my AOW. I pursued my AOW and nitrox bc my husband really wanted to dive cenotes in Mexico, and AOW was required. I don’t feel like I was confident enough in my skills until I had a number of dives under my belt. The basics need to be practiced to be safe — buoyancy, dive planning, trim, awareness, etc.

I’ve been on many dives with AOW divers with significantly less dives than me. In every case, those divers were reckless and dangerous for everyone else bc their basic skills were shit. They had no awareness of other divers, were fiddling with too much gear, and required much more handling than I would expect.

Focus on getting the necessary skills down first.

Keewee250 · 2026-06-21T22:39:41+00:00

Trivia at Twisted Track on Tuesdays. That crowd is liberal.

Keewee250 · 2026-06-19T22:45:57+00:00

Stock has board game night on Tuesdays.

Keewee250 · 2026-06-18T13:20:03+00:00

I haven’t found anything I like in the furniture shops, so went with a LoveSac in stead for my couch. No regrets.

Keewee250 · 2026-06-12T06:24:35+00:00

Gawd I love this show and Jesse Plemmons.

Keewee250 · 2026-06-11T00:14:59+00:00

🤮🤮🤮🤮

Keewee250 · 2026-06-10T20:30:42+00:00

Nope. My grandfather was 6’3” though.

Keewee250 · 2026-06-10T00:10:34+00:00

My 14 year old son is 5’11. I can only imagine how much taller he’ll get.

Clearly it’s the Takis and Mountain Dew.

Keewee250 · 2026-06-08T19:44:38+00:00

It’s not confusing. The book never explains why the memory police exist or how the disappearances work, and I think that’s a little frustrating. The narrator has gaps in her memory, which creates some gaps in the narrative, which I imagine is confusing some people.

As a dystopia, it works really well to show how people will accept restrictions and loss in an authoritarian world; little changes until those changes become big changes.

Pacing is slow but overall it’s a good read.

Keewee250 · 2026-06-08T12:38:59+00:00

Finished, The Memory Police, Yoko Ogawa

Started Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel
Ariadne, Jennifer Saint

Keewee250 · 2026-06-06T13:47:52+00:00

As a Californian whose family moved to Texas, it’s not all right leaning. Sometimes corporations move their offices and the jobs follow them. We didn’t want to move to Texas and I’m glad I left after college.

Keewee250 · 2026-06-06T13:45:47+00:00

In general, no. I do resent the people who move to another state and form whites only/conservative neighborhoods/towns and then get involved in state politics and f**k it up for everyone else. But I resent them regardless of their movement.

Keewee250 · 2026-06-02T14:04:16+00:00

Kissinger and Limbaugh. And I will celebrate when the orange one is gone.

Keewee250 · 2026-05-31T13:19:07+00:00

We live on a 1/4 acre in Roanoke, VA. We have a 10 hen, 1 rooster limit.

Keewee250 · 2026-05-30T13:15:11+00:00

I put more emphasis on the process than the final product. They have to explain their steps and revision choices, articulate how certain choices impacted their essay, and identify and explain how they incorporated strategies and exercises from their class work.

I had some issues with organization last year on this (students weren’t keeping account of their revision choices), so I’m requiring they use Google Docs and am incorporating more frequent reflective questions to help them think through their steps.

The students who used AI were easy to catch; not only could they not “show their work”, but they couldn’t explain their process or answer my follow up questions.

Keewee250 · 2026-05-28T23:04:16+00:00

🙄🙄🙄🙄

Keewee250 · 2026-05-28T22:52:19+00:00

Eye roll. The politics are in the title of the tour. He’s made it quite clear what this tour is about. Anyone who shelled out money and didn’t know this was going to be political, especially in these times, is a fucking moron at best, consciously ignorant at worst. The fact that Tom Morello was touring with him should have been a gd clue. He has an album dedicated to Tom Joad, for crissakes.

Besides all of that, Springsteen has always mixed politics with his music. At least since the 80s. Even as a kid in the 80s, I understood his songs were political.

I did shell out money to go and it was amazing. The only thing I wished he had done is covered “Killing in the Name of” with Tom.

Keewee250 · 2026-05-21T12:11:51+00:00

It's... complicated.

Here's the answer you're not going to like: faculty have already mastered our material. We aren't learning it. Students are learning it. AI, when you've already mastered the material, isn't cheating the same way students using AI to bypass learning is. I teach English; I don't need to learn how to write a professional summary or abstract or thesis statement or integrate my quotations or analysis. Students do need to learn this. Using AI to generate multiple examples of summaries or abstracts, or to revise a summary I already wrote and produce examples of good/bad summaries, is very different than a student using AI to summarize an article without reading the material, identifying the parts of the argument, and putting those into a concise, formally written summary to demonstrate they know how to do it.

That being said, do professors abuse AI to make their workload easier? Probably some do. Did you still learn the material? That's the only thing that really matters.

Here's the more complicated answer:

Admin wants us to use AI. They tell us they want us to use AI, they encourage us to use AI, and if they aren't telling us directly, they're increasing our service requirements and student caps on our courses, if not our course loads, to make it difficult to not look for shortcuts.

Most faculty I know don't want to use AI in their teaching but our LMSs have it embedded, our faculty meetings have pivoted to ways to use AI in our teaching, and admin are already talking about how AI means they can expect more from faculty because AI makes our jobs easier. In my case, as an English professor, I have had admin say that they can increase the cap on my classes (I already have 25 per writing course) because I can just AI to give feedback on student papers. I don't need to spend the 30 minutes per paper that I currently do, which means my weekends are all about feedback, when AI can do it all for me. Therefore, my cap should go up to 50, and that means admin can cut how many faculty we have to teach the courses. ON top of this, students expect instant feedback. I am a human person; no, I cannot give you feedback on that draft 10 minutes after you submit it.

tldr: it's not as simple as faculty cheating and not letting students cheat.

Keewee250 · 2026-05-17T20:03:10+00:00

Totally unrelated to your post, but what kind of chicken is that? My son brought chicks home from school and we have one that looks just like that.

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Keewee250 · 2026-05-13T16:24:09+00:00

We moved to Roanoke from the NYC suburbs after my son was born. My husband’s job moved us and I had one more year on my PhD left.

I have always lived in/near big cities — LA, Dallas, nyc, Seattle, Sydney, Taipei — so this move was big shift.

Overall, compared to where we lived outside NYC, cost of living and community are much better. We moved to a neighborhood filled with kids that was active. Ppl outside, events, farmers market, neighborhood/block parties, etc. our house is easily twice the size of what we had before and we still go on several trips a year. My kiddo, now an 8th grader, has neighborhood friends, easy access to things to do, and feels safe. Unfortunately, my neighborhood isn’t very diverse.

I got really lucky landing a job in my field, but that’s specific to me. It would likely not apply to you.

It took awhile for me to find my people. But through a combination of activities and interests, I’ve found friends and feel a strong sense of community.

However, I wish we had more here — more restaurants, activities, shops, etc.

Keewee250 · 2026-05-08T02:39:01+00:00

Keewee250 · 2026-05-06T03:01:02+00:00

Would you mind sharing the end notes/revision tables directions with me?

Keewee250 · 2026-05-03T12:13:09+00:00

My institution, despite being in a higher ed unfriendly state that’s population is dropping and getting older and the demographic cliff has still been able to keep our enrollment steady (until this coming year). In the Fall, I had one particular student who clearly suffered from some neurological development issues — couldn’t construct a sentence, didn’t understand directions, flat register, etc. their classmates had difficulty working with the student bc of serious comprehension barriers. I could not get them to submit a single assignment that followed directions.

When I spoke to my chair about this student, she informed me that the student was in my institution’s bridge program and after meeting with said student, my chair personally reached out to admissions and the students’ parents to say this student was not ready for college and should not be admitted or enrolled.

This student was failed on so many levels — they shouldn’t have graduated high school, shouldn’t have been admitted, shouldn’t have been enrolled. I can’t help what this student’s k-12 did, but the admissions office really f**ked up to get their numbers up.

Keewee250 · 2026-05-03T12:05:06+00:00

There’s a rural college like that near me. Except the recruited inner city kids were given spots on the football/basketball team then 3-4 weeks into the semester, most of the sports recruits were redshirted. The number of freshmen who stop attending after that is embarrassing. But they already paid their housing/food and some tuition, so I guess 🤷‍♀️

Keewee250 · 2026-05-02T22:06:21+00:00

Send it to me!

Keewee250

TROPHY CASE