our best defense against AI bullshit is engaged pedagogy

For years now, every semester, regardless of which class I'm teaching, I spend the first couple of class periods asking the students to collaborate together on syllabus policy for attendance, late work, and overall assignment weighting for final grade calculation. I've done this with intro-level Philosophy, First Year Seminar, gen ed courses, upper-level courses--doesn't matter. I love it. The immediate benefits are: 

1. students actually know what the policies are and don't pretend ignorance throughout the semester as their first excuse and get-out-of-jail-free card;
2. students generally don't ask me to just ignore or break our policy when they run afoul of it;
3. the policies themselves are better: clear, comprehensive, student-friendly, incentive-based rather than punitive, and oriented toward achieving the real objective;
4. the meta-understanding produced by forcing them to identify the real objective (learning together) and work to articulate a practical policy applications to achieve this (once they understand how hard it is to make these decisions, they respect the whole idea of a syllabus a whole lot more); 
5. this is an intentional invitation into scholarly community and a gesture of respect for their agency;
6. they have to talk to each other, learn names, and work together on a common project for mutual benefit literally from Day 1.

I run this by putting students into small groups and giving them about 15 minutes to craft a policy proposal. It works best if you ask them to start with the question, "what is this for/what are we trying to achieve?" For example, attendance: what do we really want? We want everyone to come to class. What kind of policy will achieve this? Students are often stuck in the default "three excused absences and then x% of your final grade" mentality. First round results yield a lot of unimaginative variations on this kind of scheme. It is a great pleasure to listen to these and then say, "Nope. Not doing it. Not doing anything like that. Here's why: this doesn't achieve the objective. Are these policies going to motivate you to come to class? Hell no. We can do better. Back to the drawing board, get creative." Over the years, students have come up with all kinds of effective incentives: stickers, favorite junk food prizes, bonus points on the final grade for "streaks" of perfect attendance, possible exemption from the final exam for perfect attendance, bonus points for days of collective 100% attendance. These work because they are identifying actual motivators and along the way, getting the message that attendance is a prerequisite for real learning.

When I first started this, I really thought that the increase in attendance and reduction in student complaints/weaseling attempts were the main benefits--and honestly, that would be enough to keep me doing it. But the longer I've done this, the more important the last two items in my list above have begun to seem.

This semester, I decided to add another day for this process--this means we spent Week 1 (Thursday) and all of Week 2 (Tuesday and Thursday) on syllabus negotiation--and, because it's Women in Philosophy, I combined this with an assigned reading for Week 2, the Intro and Chapter 1 of bell hooks' Teaching to Transgress. Their regular Reading Response and in-class Written Reflection for this reading asked them to connect the dots between our first two weeks and the engaged pedagogy hooks describes.

The rest of the course is designed around providing maximum engagement and agency for the students. We begin Tuesdays with 15 minutes of small group discussion on the reading, which I do not monitor or participate in and is graded solely through periodic self- and peer-evaluation throughout the semester. They decided on the weighting for this component of their final grade. Their Term Project is wide open: who do you want to learn about? what sort of end result do you want to produce and share with the rest of us? do you want to team up or go it alone? We'll have a week of shared learning about various figures not already featured in our syllabus, that includes a participatory game show, two short creative film projects, a video essay, a professional Business presentation, a mood board, a scrapbook, ...you get the idea. 

For the first time in about 3 years, I have zero anxiety about students cutting corners with AI.

These students didn't just sign up for the class, they have signed on. They're determined to get that 100% attendance because the bonus that motivates them is exemption from the final exam. They're excited about the Term Project because they designed it, and they want to do it, which means they won't be trying to cut the corners with a bullshit machine that undermines their learning process. They do the reading because they're curious, and because they're accountable to each other for showing up prepared for discussion. 

We can try to "AI-proof" our syllabus and assignments with in-class writing and Blue Books, and while that's necessary, I think, it fails to address the really pernicious problem that the advent of the Bullshit Machine has exacerbated. The really pernicious problem is the default adversarial starting point of the classroom. We already existed in a not-great transactional default setting--students think they're in college to get a degree in order to get a job in order to maintain an existential illustion of socioeconomic security. Faculty put up with it because there's no other way to do the bits of our jobs that we do enjoy (research, teaching the handful of students who do actually want to learn). But the Bullshit Machine moves us from default transactional to default adversarial. Students are looking for ways to get away with it all right, and faculty are on high alert to prevent them. We're on opposing teams from the start, and the mutual suspicion forecloses any possibility of real learning happening. Because learning is collaborative.

So we can't solve this through syllabus policy, or assignment design. We have to solve the real problem, the perception that the classroom is a bullshit contest to see who can get away with what and who can catch who's trying to get away with it. 

We have to learn how to trust our students to do the work, and students have to learn to trust their professor is asking them to do worthwhile work, and learn to trust themselves that they can in fact do it. And the only way to do that is make it as plain as possible that the work is the point, and that there's only one team in the classroom and we're all on it together.

That's what the syllabus policy negotiation does better than anything else, and making the theoretical underpinning of it explicit this semester cemented this for Women in Philosophy in a way I've not seen before. Would it work as well in a gen-ed class? Maybe not; but it can't hurt, and I think every classroom ought to be sending the message that we are taking the work seriously, taking students seriously, and intend to accomplish something worthwhile in our time together. 

pedagogy in the unfortunate age of so-called AI

 Maybe it's impossible to truly "AI proof" a course, but that's not gonna stop a girl from trying.

I don't like quizzes as accountability mechanisms, so in upper-level courses I use reading responses: questions, quote, commentary is my format. Questions related to the reading, a quote with a page number cited, and commentary capturing the initial thoughts in response to the reading. I told them I wanted it to pull back the veil on their brain-workings, and that's it. No polish. That their audience is not me, but their own selves, and ffs not to try to be impressive. I want this to be RAW. UGLY. BRUTAL. USEFUL. REAL.

So Day 1 of my upper-level elective Women in Philosophy course I showed the students an example of What Dr. Thweatt Does Not Want in a Reading Response.

What Dr. Thweatt Does Not Want in a Reading Response is a ChatGPT generated document following my exact instructions for Reading Responses. ChatGPT flawlessly followed the structure of the assignment, provided multiple bullshit fake-performative non-questions, a quote with a fake citation, and a bullsit commentary written in the first person.(As a bonus, at the end of generating this for me, it offered to write a full essay. That's SO GROSS.)

Anyhow, when I put this on the screen as an example of What Dr. Thweatt Does Not Want, I asked my students what was wrong with it.

First comment: "it seems like these questions...aren't real questions. Like, they sound like they're based on the text but it's not like they are questions someone would actually be asking, if they were trying to understand the reading"

Second comment: "This feels perfomative"

Good. GOOD. Yes, yes, my chickens, you are preceiving correctly. 

So then I said, that's right. These aren't real questions. When you try to answer them, you can tell that there's not an actual question there, because there's nothing you can actually say in reply. It's just words strung together in grammatically correct ways with a question mark at the end. Then I said, the other thing, of course, that is wrong with this, is that this is ChatGPT.

And 5 students immediately said in unison, "I knew it!" And I said, that's right. You did know it, because this stuff stinks. It stinks because it's bullshit, and we're all pretty good bullshit detectors. YOU KNOW IT. AND I KNOW IT. AND IT'S NOT HARD TO SEE IT. SO DON'T DO THIS.

Just don't do it. It's not what I'm asking for. ChatGPT can't do what I'm asking for. And I can spot the difference. So let's just establish this as baseline on Day 1, okay?

We'll see if this helps? But it's also true that these students are taking this as an elective--no one has to be in here--and it's mostly upper-level students who are pretty highly motivated. So this skews the results, proabably. But I'm (temporarily) heartened by the attitudes observed here--serious students, the ones who are actually interested in learning new skills and material and critical thinking, grasp that the bullshit-machine shortcut leads nowhere and they are not impressed. 

So: some of the kids, at least, are all right.

Obedience, the primary civic virtue under fascism.

When we walk with the Right

In the light of their might,

What a Glorious Gain they repay! 

While We do what They Will,

They Protect Us all still,

All of Us who will Trust and Obey.

Trust and Obey! For there's no other way

to live in this A-Mur'-ca, but to Trust and Obey.

Not a Burden We bear!
Not a Sorrow We share!
Those with Problems, must quickly away!

Not a Grief or a Loss,
Not a Frown or a Cross,

Not for Us! We will Trust and Obey!

Trust and Obey! For there's no other way

to live in this A-Mur'-ca, but to Trust and Obey.

But We never can Prove

Those We Blame should Remove--
Yet We cannot afford to Delay;

For the favor He shows

For the Blessings bestowed,
Are for Us, Who will Trust and Obey.

Trust and Obey! For there's no other way

to live in this A-Mur'-ca, but to Trust and Obey.

And Enthralled, ever sweet,
We will sit at His feet,
Or We'll Walk by His side All the Way;

What He says We will do,

Where He sends We will go;
Never question! Only Trust and Obey!

Trust and Obey! For there's no other way

to live in this A-Mur'-ca, but to Trust and Obey.

Original "Trust and Obey" lyrics by John H. Sammis. The above parody is mine. 

default stance: believe women

That's it. That's the whole post.

Just start with, believing women. Go from there. 

do you think other people are real

When Techbro asks Papa-Techbro this question in Mountainhead, it's played for laughs, as if we should receive this line as absurd caricature, like no one, not even Elon Musk, is really that delusional, I mean, can't be, right?

I think we ought to start asking people this question, regularly, in the increasingly unmoored conversations around "AI" carried on by befuddled people who don't understand what it is they're talking about but nonetheless want to opine about "inevitable futures" and "interesting possibilities." 

This is the way to cut through the bullshit and get right to the problem, when talking to someone who wants to claim that ChatGPT is a perfectly decent way to cope with loneliness, or a great solution to a shortage of available therapists, or that we can't tell people it's impossible to fall in love with the chatbot they named Erika and trained to sext.

Really? In love with Erika the sext-bot?

So there's not any difference at all between falling in love with a genuinely-different-from-you other, whose reciprocation of your desire for relationship and mutual understanding is wholly voluntary, and the funhouse-techno-mirror of your own masturbatory ego-needs? 

So do you think other people are real, at all, or...?

beset by religion

Below is the scripted version of my remarks at the campus event organized by our local chapter of SDS today. 

I'm speaking today as someone who--y'all may not know this about me--in a former life, was a preacher. So today, I'm gonna preach.

To the people in this crowd who are religious believers of some sort, and to people not among this crowd--maybe over there on the sidewalk somewhere--who identify as religious believers. And to people here who do not identify with any particular set of religious beliefs or tradition.

On the role of religion and religious belief, in the public square, in this political moment.

I saw a yikyak post last week (and yes, I repent), and it said something like: "don't y'all give up on religion just bc you've been wounded by bad religion in the past"

It's absolutely true that religion is often a tool wielded by oppressors.

And it's also true that in every place and every time where religion is being used to oppress and harm, we also find religion and religious belief present on the side of the oppressed.

The question is not whether 'religion' is itself good or bad but whether your religious beliefs are properly oriented to the good and y'all this is the thing that drove a Younger Me into the study of theology because as a devout, and I mean deeply devoted, preacher's kid from Middle Tennessee who'd spent her whole life in the church, in college I was haunted by the question, what if the gospel, the definitive "good news," what if the gospel...isn't good for people? What happens when the good news isn't good?

See, I was starting to see, now that I was in college--now that I was no longer a child, and like the Apostle Paul, could no longer continue to think like a child--now that I was in the world and growing up, I could see that the things I had been taught to believe (and taught to teach others to believe) were causing harm to people. Weren't good news. Were promoting condemnation and judgment, not care; were promoting indifference to suffering, not action; were promoting exclusion, not inclusion; ignorance, in the name of piety, not curiosity or truth-seeking or wisdom. I was taught to be concerned with being "correct," and with making sure other people were too. And I was beginning to see that this concern was the wrong concern; that this concern was harmful, not life-giving.

In this moment, in this political time and place, religion is on all sides. We are beset by religion. Self-identifying white evangelical Christians voted for the current President in overwhelming numbers. This is a statement of fact. In this moment, this political time and place, 'religion' is publicly and loudly allied with the oppressor.

And yet it is also true that in this moment, this political time and place, people of faith--self-identified Christians and Jews and Muslims and Buddhists and Jains and Baha'i--are protesting and resisting and organizing and calling out the abuses and lawlessness and callousness and moral affronts of this government, not in spite of their beliefs but because of their beliefs, because their religious beliefs are properly oriented to the good.

So I want to say two more things: the first being, how do you know, if you're a religious person, whether you're the good kind or the bad kind? If your beliefs are truly good news, or bad news? How do you even know if you are wielding religion as an instrument of oppression? And the first thing to say in response to that is, well, are you even asking that question? Have you considered the possiblity that you might unwittingly be the bad guy, you might be the villain of the story? Or are you 100% convinced of your own righteousness? See that, right there, is your clue: You Might Be a Villain If... you are 100% convinced that of course not. The second thing I want to say in response is specifically Christian, from the book of James in the New Testament canon. James has a simple answer to this question. It's this: "religion that is pure and undefiled before god is this: visit the orphans and the widows in their affliction." And, "if you truly 'love your neighbor as yourself,'" then you're good but "if you show partiality"--to the rich over the poor, to your friends over you other neighbors, to the powerful over the helpless, to the citizens over the not-citizens--then, James says, "you sin." 

Y'all, it's just not that hard, it turns out. 

Are you loving your neighbor? Taking care of your neighbor? Or are you refusing to even recognize that person as a neighbor and instead calling them "illegal" and standing by while they get dragged by masked men into unmarked cars to be stuffed onto airplanes to be sent to countries they've never belonged to for crimes they never committed?

In that parable we call the "Good Samaritan," when Jesus was asked that famous follow-up evasive question--by a lawyer, naturally--attempting to find out the exact minimum of moral effort required of him to be properly neighborly, so he could do that and nothing more, Jesus flipped the script. He asked the lawyer instead, "who was the neighbor to" that man left for dead on the road. And the answer, grudgingly given, was "the one who cared for him."

Be the one who cares. That's how you know.

Finally, a word to those folks here who don't ascribe to religious beliefs of any particular sort: keep this space a big tent, keep this space a cyborg coalition, of every kind of believer and non-believer who has arrived, in their own way and for their own reasons, at the conclusion that this political moment, this time and place, demands their voice, their protest, their action, their care. Don't let's alienate each other over side quarrels when the moment demands joint action and solidarity. It is a mistake to think that you cannot ally for the common good with someone who's arrived at their understanding of the good from another path than yours. In the end, it's simple. The message is the same for the believer and the non-believer: just be the ones who care. Together, let's be the ones who care.

it's a birthday today

There's not much I can say about this, because unlike OG rudetruth, I am now aware that my kids do not appreciate being mentioned by me on social media and certainly refuse to be pictured in any way, ever, for any reason, no thank you very much MOM.

So, to acknowledge this moment of celebration, here's what I will be baking today:

America's Test Kitchen Gluten-Free Chocolate Layer Cake, with the trued-and-true fantastic ATK Chocolate Frosting Recipe

Mom's cheesecake, which calls for 3, yes, 3 blocks of cream cheese

(some kind of dinner? but clearly, this is optional and does not really matter.)

Pictures forthcoming...