Marie Becker

Artist: Suerynn Lee A doctor pointing at an mri or cat scan and pointing at brain and while patient looks on - saying "this is most likely caused by the stress of having your symptoms constantly dismissed, but I wouldn't worry about it."

Artist: Suerynn Lee

This is again a reminder that college isn’t supposed to just teach you a job but is supposed to teach you how to think, because that job you’re training for might not exist when you graduate

Calliope, a brown tabby cat, is lying in her side, her head slightly under a pillow on her human’s bed. She looks bleary-eyed and extremely done with this week.

Us too

"WHAT PEOPLE NEED IS RESOURCES TO DO THE WORK THAT THEY ALREADY DO"

Yes I'm shouting because this is exactly it

lolsob, mine got to be 20ish pages before I burnt out--and I think I already included a link to yours.

Ugh, v. annoyed to realize my new school closes class evaluations before the last day of class.

I had Things to Say, especially about the amount of GenAI I was required to use (and pay for) in a class I had no ability to opt out of.

They are very good beans, thanks Fiasco

My brother refuses to take me seriously about setting me up with a colleague or friend in Ireland.

In the middle of accommodations. . .stuff right now ("maybe you aren't physically capable of this course, you should think about that") and this is giving me big feelings. Thank you.

this! besides, even if we grant (which I don't entirely) that AI prompt engineering and literacy are career skills we are obligated to teach, it makes so much more sense to teach the underlying skills and not haphazardly skip through them predicting down the line.

(literally felt queasy using Midjourney--kept wondering whose bones I was rifling through.)

:write personal statement to graduate program specifically about my concerns about generative AI and edutech and get accepted:

:for my first class, am required to use GenAI tools to produce a "creative manifesto" for my "personal brand."

So things are great for me right now!

I have never felt more kinship with a cat. Stupid injuries of silliness.

AND being told I might be too physically feeble to complete the program (less than five hours after being told, by the same prof that none of my concerns were “worth stressing about”)

Did not expect, tbh, that my first five weeks of this degree would involve both being required to use GenAI tools (something I specifically asked about before applying) AND pay for them (hilariously this is build up for an assignment about my “creative manifesto”) /1

No, a LOT of them think that. Science may be one of the most social forms of knowledge production we have. Arguably it’s at least as social as creative writing. Actual scientists will tell you this. Yet, millions of people think they can do science alone with an LLM.

Describe something you learned from lecture this week that you didn’t know just from doing the readings. Connect something you learned in 209 this week to something you are learning in another of your classes this semester. If Monday and Wednesday assigned readings were from two different texts, make connections between the two. Do they share themes? Forms? Tone? Historical context? Do you find them equally interesting? Look at the very first paragraph of one of our texts and discuss how the opening lays the groundwork for the rest of the work. Quote specific lines, phrases, or images. Using quotes from a text, persuade someone (friend or foe, your grandma or your senator) to change their mind about something important. Compose a 5 song playlist to accompany an assigned reading from this week, and write a few sentences for each song, explaining your choices. Describe an idea you had in response to the readings/lecture/discussions for our class this week- any idea, about literature, or the world, or yourself. How might you pursue this idea, in your studies or elsewhere? Choose a passage (no more than 10 lines) from the readings this week and rewrite it, changing at least one of the literary aspects such as: person (change from first to third-person or vice versa), tense (change from past to present etc), focalizing character (i.e. write it from a different character's perspective), style (adjectives, diction, description, tone). Then write 2-3 sentences about the effect of your changes. Compose a yelp review to strangers, or a letter to a specific person, or a booktok style video, recommending a novel/poem/play from this week’s reading. Write a letter to someone who has questioned your choice of majoring or minoring in English, explaining why you value what you’re learning. Include quotes / ideas from this week’s readings.

syllabus time, teaming up for the herculean efforts of reinventing writing assignments. here, some prompts for required weekly low stakes 250-500 word reflections/ process pieces that have proven relatively conducive to real writing in lit class. please share any similar suggestions in thread.

Very true—and even when they are ready to learn, if that readiness comes from the pressure/expectation of direct payoff, they get incredibly frustrated if what they are expected to learn is different then their priorities and preconceptions and that creates its own block.

core academic and thinking skills in a one-to-one match for "career readiness" has also done a lot of damage. And just taking away the external markers of that, the grades, by itself, in my experience/opinion, isn't enough by itself to unpack that, especially in a single college quarter or semester.

I don't know how to pinpoint it as a shift, but I also think that while grades/formal education have always had transactional aspects, the focus and pressure on everything being "content," on children being asked to think about their "personal brand," on constantly trying to tie (cont)

What It’s Like to Be a Student Who Hates ChatGPT “Everyone is using it”—almost everyone.

you've heard about the college kids who can't do anything without ChatGPT's help—but what about the students who oppose generative A.I. for myriad reasons and refuse to rely on it as a shortcut? well, I found and spoke with a few of them here: slate.com/life/2025/07...

This is something I struggle with a lot in thinking through these ideas. Especially that it is extremely hard for a single instructor to try to "unteach" the highly transactional mindset that a lot of students not only come in with, but is being cultivated in other courses or policies.

banging my head against the sign until my skull caves in and I obtain sweet release

Meanwhile, I enrolled in a masters program after specifically asking about their approach/philosophy on AI and apparently it changed. Love being told that in order to do the assignments for my "personal branding" I have to do something that is fundamentally against my personal brand!

That's so great! Congrats!

Stop asking billionaires questions, recording their answers and sharing their uninformed and/or racist and/or otherwise bigoted and nonsense ideas as journalism. It’s ridiculous. They are the most boring people. Oh wah I am a white man who has more money than I can spend and I’m so mad about it!

A short blogpost detailing my experience of censorship at the AI for Good Summit with links to both original and censored versions of slides and links to my talk

aial.ie/blog/2025-ai...

*nods* I do writing support for first-year college students, and I'm pretty good at figuring out what they are trying to comvey even when it's not what the text actually says and ask the right leading questions, but I would struggle to, uh, "compliment sandwich" this one.

Fascism is evil. Fascism is scary. Fascism is awful.

But goddamn it is also so fucking whiny and intellectually vapid and incredibly annoying.

It's my birthday and I'm spending it alone, trying to learn marketable skills because apparently everything I'm good at is going to be replaced by AI, in case anyone sees this and wants to send me some good wishes or cat pics or literary jokes or anything. It's fine.