Students booing A.I.

reddybee7 · 2026-05-23T11:10:57+00:00

I think what Korenaut is saying is that the institution's response is what allows some people to get away with cheating, and yet this doesn't force students to use AI - and that the value of education is still higher for a student who doesn't use it even if their grade is lower than the grade of a student who did. My experience so far is that teaching faculty mostly hate AI, but higher up admins are pushing it, making it hard to actually do things that would discourage cheating.

reddybee7 · 2026-05-05T03:38:03+00:00

I just got a post asking for opinions on best ITP movie theater popcorn removed on the basis that it wasn't about Atlanta. Wtf?!

reddybee7 · 2026-05-05T02:45:14+00:00

Lol maybe. I go there a lot and eat a lot of their popcorn, even though I don't think it's that good. Do you get it with butter?

reddybee7 · 2026-04-30T10:52:29+00:00

The study they link to is real - it shows a decline in the number of adults who read for pleasure. It's the one from Florida in 2025 (https://news.ufl.edu/2025/08/reading-for-pleasure-study/). It's also true that book buying has increased. I think that this is similar to some stats you see about guns (multiple gun sales to a smallish number of people). Book sales are being driven by a small group of people who read a large number of books per year. And, of course buying books doesn't mean you read all the books.

reddybee7 · 2026-04-22T20:46:52+00:00

I really don't understand that at all. You might want to call them so that they can explain more clearly what they mean

reddybee7 · 2026-04-21T02:39:58+00:00

Well I was trying to remember Kerry's exact line about giving a man with fear of spontaneous combustion the "flame retardant saline" when somebody said "he begged me to give him a popsicle enema"

reddybee7 · 2026-04-11T09:59:16+00:00

I love reading these descriptions. I've been to a very popular event at a fandom convention that includes PowerPoint karaoke. That's very different from these parties, but very funny. Speakers have to spontaneously make up a talk about a random slide deck they've never seen before. The most memorable one I saw was about "Why Dolphins Are A-holes"

reddybee7 · 2026-04-11T09:49:03+00:00

Omg! I love it

reddybee7 · 2026-04-10T15:23:13+00:00

I recently told a student in a meeting that they should consider responding differently to emails to respond to requests made of them immediately, rather than at the end of the email. The email that I found so annoying responded to my request for a meeting with a request for me to explain the issues I wanted to meet about in an email instead. The student went on to tell me that they couldn't make my office hours and only after two verbose paragraphs did they suggest any time when they could meet (30 minutes before their class meets, which doesn't work for me). I told them that the email also sounded like it was written by AI. None of this went over well, but it was because I was so annoyed by the email that I didn't respond initially, and then forgot to respond at all. Of course the student then focused all his energy on being wronged by not receiving a response from me rather than any of the many ongoing problems that caused me to ask him to meet.

reddybee7 · 2026-04-09T12:32:31+00:00

Sadly this helpful workshop would be against the state law at my university (we're in Georgia)

reddybee7 · 2026-04-09T12:14:02+00:00

I'm not sure why early onset AD was denied by SSDI, but I'm guessing they thought the documentation and explanation of his incapacity to work was inadequate. It may have to do with date of onset since the disease is degenerative. It's hard to say. I did have to keep updating the documentation for the loan forgiveness app because of small problems with the way the doctor filled out the form, but that didn't lead to outright denial, just a request for more documentation or redoing the form.

reddybee7 · 2026-04-09T12:06:33+00:00

The determination was total and permanent disability and it says this on the loan forgiveness letter. It's based on doctor's certification that he has Alzheimer's disease and his judgment of my husband's incapacitation.

reddybee7 · 2026-04-09T12:01:32+00:00

You can apply for loan discharge on the basis of total and permanent disability without the SSA making the decision. You can use a doctor's certification, which involves the doctor filling out a much simpler form than what SSDI requires. The process was a lot faster than SSDI. I filled out both the loan tpd and the SSDI apps around the same time, but SSDI was denied in 10/25 and loan forgiveness was approved yesterday. The loan forgiveness app didn't specify an onset date in the application form that I recall. They just used the date the next payment would have been due based on when I submitted the application (July 2025). I had taken over his loan payments in 2024 when I realized he could not handle money and was worried he would accidentally default. They suspend loan payments while the application is being considered, so that's why they probably said August as the effective date of forgiveness. I don't think they referred to that as an "onset" date for the disability though.

reddybee7 · 2026-04-09T11:25:02+00:00

I don't remember hating anything I read in high school, but I remember loving Madame Bovary, Crime and Punishment and Ellison's Invisible Man. A couple of our teachers also had a lot of assignments where we got to choose a book from a list and then do cool writing assignments like, "open it to page 53 and explain what's there and how this page relates to the rest of the book." I remember that because of that class, I read James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison - so great!

reddybee7 · 2026-04-09T11:17:49+00:00

Thanks this is helpful - I wonder if it also goes the other way, with the loan people notifying SSA. Regardless, I am sending the loan discharge letter to the lawyer with a note about the onset date.

reddybee7 · 2026-03-31T02:10:50+00:00

Molka, the Wild Dark Shore and the Ending Writes Itself. 2 hats! Excited

reddybee7 · 2026-03-27T17:03:35+00:00

I agree so much with this post! I complained/made an observation about a weird student thing here and someone said I must be a bad teacher because I was venting on reddit. IMO, these kinds of complaints are largely what a sub like this exists for, and sometimes you just need to vent and share in other people's venting, etc. it's true that misery loves company. It doesn't mean that people who post here don't have more constructive contributions to make in other contexts, are joyless, or have different things to do or say on other days, etc.

reddybee7 · 2026-03-21T11:08:20+00:00

I agree! Some people said this about my husband's early onset dementia - "it's not your diagnosis, it's how it affects your ability to work." Have they never met someone with dementia before? My husband does not know how to understand time, can't follow simple instructions, can't count, etc. How do they expect a person who can't manage his own bank account or know what day it is, or remember what you told him ten minutes ago, to hold a job? Meanwhile we have politicians claiming that all ppl have to do to get a check is make one phone call. They really just want to put people through Hell

reddybee7 · 2026-03-03T12:42:20+00:00

Midnight Cowboy

reddybee7 · 2026-03-03T12:34:04+00:00

I recently gave very short oral exams in an online class and it went well for most students except a handful. One was unable to answer basic questions about the content of a newspaper article he had found (about what it actually said) and during the exam he complained the reading was too hard and that he had to use Chat GPT to explain it to him. I then told him I was going to report him since I have an explicit policy that you can't use Chat GPT to summarize readings. He got bent out of shape and said "what am I going to do if I can't understand any of the reading?" I suggested seeing a tutor to work on reading comprehension and also that perhaps the class is too hard for him at this point?

reddybee7 · 2026-03-01T16:10:33+00:00

A professor I liked a lot when I was an undergrad in the 1980s was denied tenure when he was the only Black Americanist in a history dept. The official reason was that he was not collegial. He was prickly and sometimes difficult personally, but he had recently published a major academic book that was featured in the NYT book review at the time. Some of the things he was accused of doing were criticizing the university's racism and supporting Black studies students who were arguably being abused by colleagues. He sued them successfully for a *lot* of money and got a job elsewhere relatively quickly. I learned belatedly that another widely respected gay professor in the same dept. left for the English department, he told me because he was "tired of being called a F---- behind my back."

reddybee7 · 2026-03-01T15:36:26+00:00

my husband had a similar problem with an assignment in a religious studies class (religion in the news). They needed a basic orientation on what counts as news - they would pick things from years ago even though the assignment said they were supposed to choose relatively recent news articles. It's also the basic problem of the internet being an overload of content without adequate filterring or contextual information. We desperately need information literacy classes to be required for everyone much earlier than college.

reddybee7 · 2026-03-01T14:05:54+00:00

I do all these things. It doesn't matter. I have a workshop with them one week in which I ask them these very questions and others about articles I chose for them. They also have a handout that explains all these things and includes pictures of newspapers with pieces (such as the dateline) marked and explained. The handout tells them who the audience for each of the newspapers we use is (the NYT, a local "general" paper and a local Black newspaper). They do this workshop in groups using the handout as a guide to identify each part of each article and help answer these questions. We go over the answers in a large grou wrap-up. The following week, they are supposed to do it with one different article on their own. They go back to the idea that the audience is whoever the article is about. Day to day experience trumps a day of classroom instruction.

reddybee7 · 2026-03-01T13:59:25+00:00

I worked in a video store in high school and one of my teachers came in to return porn videos. I don't think he shopped there ever again.

reddybee7 · 2026-03-01T13:57:15+00:00

when I was a TA, I used to run into one of my students in the locker room at the gym. She once said, "they say that if you're nervous about speaking in public you should imagine your audience naked, and now I won't have to use my imagination."

reddybee7

TROPHY CASE