Time Passages

I was out and about running errands today, and so I took the opportunity to tune into AT40 on the 70s station. They were airing the show from this week in 1979, which was oddly coincidental since earlier in the day I had listened to an album by Dan Fogelberg which one of my roommates played over and over again when we were doing our winter term in St. Moritz in January of 1979. 

I confess that I think of that idyllic resort town more often than you might expect. Despite the fact that I never learned to ski, and avoiding that requirement was rather fraught each of the three Januaries I spent there, I have St. Moritz as one of the places on my weather app, and I check in every few months. 

I hadn't heard the Fogelberg album in at least 40 years, but I put it on when Apple music played "Run for the Roses" as part of a Linda Ronstadt station it was generating. When he sang, "It's the chance of a lifetime in a lifetime of chance," I was hooked by the antimetabole and was curious to revisit the Nether Land album that Amy played so faithfully those two weeks.

Not three days ago, another friend from high school texted me with a question about that January term, and last Sunday when I was getting a massage, all I could think about was St. Moritz: the snow packed streets, the hot chocolate, the ski bahn, the hotel, the classes, the gerstensuppe, the cross country ski instructor (Ooplah! she said when we fell, Come, ve go, she said at the beginning of every lesson; it was weird. 

After my massage, I checked the snowpack and the webcams to see how the season was unfolding there. The main mountain, Piz Nair, is some 5,000 feet above sea level, and so this year at least, Corviglia and Corvatsch have avoided the green pistes that other lower altitude alpine resorts have suffered.

And now, here I was this afternoon hearing the 40 most popular songs of the last week I ever spent there. And there was one last nutty coincidence. The last time I listened to the Top 40 was on the way home from the beach at Thanksgiving. My sister and Heidi and I rode together through the fields of the eastern shore nd sang along to the hits from that week in 1978. Well, some of those songs were still on the countdown today, because that was the same timeline, just eight weeks earlier.

And the number one song today? "Le Freak".

Fitting, I suppose.

Highly Irregular

A friend with a sick child asked Heidi to come by and stay with the baby while she went out to get some medicine and groceries, so I dropped Heidi over there on our way home from work. When I got home, Lucy was happy to see me, but stunned when Heidi did not come into the house right behind me. I leashed her up for a quick potty break, and she headed directly over to the car and gave it a sound sniffing, seemingly convinced that Heidi would emerge at any moment. 

We took a quick spin around the neighborhood and got the mail, but when we arrived back at the house, Lucy bolted up the stairs to see if Heidi had appeared, yet. Just then a neighbor came by and offered to take Lucy for a walk with her dog. We leashed her up again, and as she headed out the door with her friends both human and canine, she took a moment and looked back, head atilt, wondering what else in the world this day could possibly bring!

Virtual Fail

As a follow up to my snow day prediction question the other day, the warm-up today was to make an argument for or against virtual learning on snow days. 

Oh my! I could have predicted that the students would be unanimously in favor of keeping snow days, but I wasn't really prepared for how violently they are opposed to virtual learning. 

Student after student told tales of shutting off the camera and walking away, and watching TV or playing games during class. They described kicking their teachers off the call and randomly muting their classmates. Worst of all, they are convinced that they didn't learn nearly enough in the time that they were away from the school building. "I'd rather go to school in July than learn virtually," one student announced passionately, and there were nods of agreement.

"It was just a boring waste of time," another added.

"You could always turn your camera on and do your best to participate and learn," I suggested.

"No way!" replied the first student. "We're kids!"

AI for the Win

Today was the day when I got to see what that recalcitrant student thought about the story I had ChatboxGPT write for him. The experience did not disappoint.

I handed it to him casually while the other students were busy gathering evidence to support their previously written claims about the characters they had chosen last week. When I checked in with him a little while later he told me he had not yet read it. "What have you been doing all this time?" I asked.

"I've been previewing it," he informed me.

"Oh," I nodded, "to make sure there's nothing you don't like in there. I don't think there is, is there?"

"No," he admitted. "I'm going to read it now."

"What did you think?" I asked when I saw him shift in his seat and lift his head.

He looked at his feet; I could tell he was a bit conflicted. 

"Did that kid do the right thing?"

As much as he dislikes me and my class, he couldn't resist talking about the ethics of the story. He had some questions, and he began to annotate the text. When he left at the end of class, he put the story in his binder.

"Good work today!" I told him on his way out of the room. "I think you made some progress on the essay."

He shrugged and walked wordlessly out the door.

But he did like that story. 

(Interested? You can read it here.)

Pro-Snow Days

The warm up question today went something like this: January shmanuary where are the snow days! and then it asked students to predict the first snow day we would have this year. Not surprisingly, there was a scatter of guesses for the days between now and the beginning of March as well as a number of pessimistic students who predicted no snow days at all this year. 

The conversation was as heated as the predictions were frosted-- everyone wished for that moment of waking up in the quiet hush of sweeping flakes and the news that school was closed. "But what does this have to do with argument?" someone asked in every class.

"I read recently that there is a bill in the state general assembly to get rid of them. Some lawmakers want schools to require virtual learning on the days when the buildings are closed," I told them

"Noooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!" the outcry was loud.

"Well," I shrugged, "you can always write a letter to your representative. Start gathering your evidence and reasoning now!"

Assistive Technology

I woke this morning to the alarming news, via push-notification, from the NY Times that A.I. chatbots are forcing educators to rethink how we teach. The article explained that ChatGPT, the popular chatbot released by OpenAI in early December 2022, is able to answer questions and compose text in such an effective way as to pose a threat to traditional homework assignments. This bot can do math problems, research questions, and write essays all in simple and disarmingly-human sounding sentences. 

Suddenly eager to find out more about this technology which has been only on the periphery of my attention until now, I clicked to another recent article from the Times, which had 10 writing samples and challenged readers to identify them as either the work of a real student or a chatbot. The authors had asked a fourth-grade teacher; a professional writing tutor; a Stanford education professor; and Judy Blume, to see if they could tell which was which. None of them was right every time. I got 9 out of 10.

My next stop was the bot itself, which, not surprisingly with all its recent media attention was over capacity. I had to try several times before I could set up an account and start playing with it. The wait was absolutely worth it, though. When I finally got on, I tested several questions and prompts related to our current essay unit, trying to see what my students might find, if they knew where to look. 

The bot and I had some interesting exchanges about the characters in "Thank You M'am" and "Raymond's Run", but it was flat out wrong about more than a couple of its assertions about Squeaky. That made me feel better, and it was just fabricating ideas about the main character in the story "Vanquishing the Hungry Chinese Zombie". It misgendered her and spat out a bunch of hooey about saving her village, which was very similar to the patently wrong information it included in a claim about the character of Spark in "Bouncing the Grinning Goat". I literally laughed out loud at how wrong the dumb bot was.

So there was that quantum of solace, but as I thought more about my students, I focused on the one kid who won't write about any of the assigned stories for a variety of reasons, and I wondered if I could get the bot to tailor a story to his penchants. Well. It was a learning curve, and I required the bot to give me at least 15 revisions, none of which were perfect. I was able, however to stitch together a tale of 1500 words or so that has a character he may find relatable, and who accomplishes something he might find admirable, but with methods that are unquestionably unethical. That's a claim waiting to happen-- do the ends justify the means?

The writing? Is not remarkable, despite my instructions to add dialogue and figurative language, which the bot did. What the composition lacks is concrete details and present actions; it tells instead of shows, and I did not have the desire to revise for artistry. 

On the other hand, I cannot wait to see what this conundrum of a kid thinks of the story, which, by the way, is called "The Ends and the Means" by A. I. Chabeaux. Clearly, there will be a part 2 to this blog post, if not that story.

Cursed

The Bills were ahead by a hard-fought 10 points at the end of the third quarter when we stood up to go. We were at friends', celebrating their dog's birthday and the NFL playoffs, as well as getting in some baby time with their adorable 10-month-old.

"What?" asked our host. "You can't go now! There's still the whole fourth quarter to go!"

"I have some school work to do," Heidi apologized.

"Plus?" I added, "you don't really want Heidi anywhere around this football game. She's a jinx!"

His eyes widened and Heidi laughed. "It's true," she admitted, "the Bills never win when I watch."

"Well, thanks for coming," he said. "See you later!"