Oh, let's not forget how the Irish were welcomed to America with open arms…
Philosopher, husband, dad, teacher, "leftist," potty-mouth, and pedagogical chaos agent. Aspiring to be the C.M. Punk of higher education. Distinguished, or so I'm told. he/him
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Oh, let's not forget how the Irish were welcomed to America with open arms…
Yeah, Week 1, they're very confident about CHEM and terrified of me. By midterms, they're terrified of CHEM *because of the points* and feeling the least stressed about the grade in my class b/c it's clear. I've had students tell me they've taken a second class with me because I contract grade.
We have A Chair on campus. Maybe two. If "accessible seating options" means something other than "I'm brining my own chair," I'm not sure how this is going to work.
As a fun aside, I'm teaching Moro's essay tomorrow, which means a bunch of wide-eyed first year students expecting A Very Grownup Experience are gonna hear me say COP SHIT about 50 times before noon on the first day of class. I love my job.
Lots of ways to be loud for America. Go find yours. Fly your flag. Tyranny shall not prevail.
Because it’s new, our syllabus talk has a lot of worry and confusion. But by midterms, students are so relaxed because they know what they need to do and know if they do it, they get the grade they want. They know they can do it because *they* helped set expectations. And they can focus on LEARNING.
Students are used to having points for everything. School for them is maximizing points on clearly defined assignments. I don’t do that. I have students tell me what they want to do and how they think they’re doing. We work together to set grades and expectations. This is ENTIRELY NEW for them.
Tomorrow, I start my 19th year of teaching, my 17th of teaching philosophy, and my 12th as a faculty member. By the end of class, I’ll have 80% of my students in a blind panic, but not because of anything I teach. This is my 6th year using alternative grading like ungrading and contract grading.
By contrast, try this: “I do my best to proactively design a class where everyone can learn and demonstrate their learning in a way that honors who you are as people. If there’s a change that would make things better, let me know accommodation or not and we’ll figure out a way to make it happen.”
This is what you get when you combine schoolishness with cop shit. “You need a special excuse to have a chance to learn and demonstrate that learning that aligns with who you are as a person. Otherwise, it’s just lectures and tests because no one trusts anyone and we’ve commodified everything.”
2/2 The default assumption is schoolish all the way down. This a waste of our time. I understand that Ss are panicked & rightfully so, in our uniform system. Panic over achievement, success, grades can’t be waved away. But also I’m so weary of this system
1/2 I’ve had 5 students request accommodations already this semester, w the default assumption being a need for time extension for tests. My classes have no tests. I just got a request to allow the S to record “the lectures.” There are no lectures.
I actually got a request this semester I’ve never gotten before for “accessible seating options.” Now I’m hopeful I’m about to get those bouncy chairs my 3rd grader has in their classroom. But seriously, we’re adults and we’ll figure it out together is both liberating and completely foreign to Ss.
NON-PHILOSOPHER: Agnes Callard is a brave truth-teller unconcerned with society’s opinions. PHILOSOPHERS: She’s a shitbird who at best confuses vice with virtue and at worst delights in viciousness. She stole her kids’ Halloween candy and publicly bragged about it, for chrissakes.
As an American married to a Chicagoan, I am BEGGING everyone in the Chicagoland area: PLEASE don’t make me depend on Philly for salvation.
Just wait until she divorces Travis, shacks up with a K-State tight end, and steals all the Halloween candy she can find, cackling, “IN MY AGNES CALLARD ERA!”
Do me proud, Chicago.
"Be loud for America."
AI has been a *miraculous* time saver for me. I get all of these invitations to webinars and trainings and panel discussions about maximizing the impact of AI in my classroom or teaching AI literacy or whatever, and I’m like, “Nah. I’m not doing that,” and I don’t go. Boom. Time saved.
ATTENTION TO EVERYONE WHO HAS EVER EATEN ICE CREAM OR KNOWS SOMEONE WITH A SWIMMING POOL Link Between Ice Cream Consumption and Drowning Rates Under Scrutiny as HHS Prepares Major September Announcements On Pool Safety
I am a professional philosopher and The Good Place is my favorite tv show ever. Now if you’ll excuse me, I gotta go put the Peeps in the chili pot (and add some M&Ms)
Gary's Treasure Island
Even worse. I've been able to spell Legos since I was four. I'm in my mid-40s with a Ph.D. and couldn't tell you how to spell MegaBloks or whatever they're called.
There's a reason the generonym isn't MegaBlocks.
Glengarry Glen Gary
The Great Gary Caper
A 👏 I 👏 is 👏 fundamentally 👏 and 👏 inescapably 👏 dehumanizing
No Country for Old Gary
I was gonna go “Nightswimming,” but that is a *quality* choice, sir.
The University of Missouri sent every member of my senior class a pre-filled application. I would never in a million years suggest that Mizzou offered admission to all 250 of us.
Don’t you mean… Breaking Nudes? (I’ll see myself out)
I thought you said he was in Paris.
[sneaks into your timeline] we celebrate labor day in september because capital was afraid that celebrating it on may first like the rest of the world would make workers socialists. workers of the world, unite! you have nothing to lose but your chains!
Year's end? They were pretty busted by September's end.
I say this from a place of love as a life-long Cardinals fan, but there's literally *no* must-eat food at Busch. Like the stadium itself, the food is Aggressively Fine. Hard to find anything genuinely terrible, but nothing truly outstanding. The State Fair Food booth at Target Field, though…
My time has come.
Hot Take: Trapper Keepers were actually bad.
There’s literally an achievement for shooting a Nazi in the balls at a distance of more than 100m.
I’ve played so much Sniper Elite 5 and SE Resistance that I couldn’t *begin* to tell you the grotesque ways I’ve seen Nazis be torn apart by a sniper’s bullet from 500m.
This is a thing? WTF. My youngest did pre-k in a Montessori classroom that included kindergarteners. We were kicking around whether to *skip* Kindergarten and go directly to 1st grade and didn’t only because we thought the Montessori to public school 1st grade transition would be too jarring.
This dipshit is what you get when you elevate That Guy From Your Intro to Philosophy Class to HHS Secretary.
I miss the old days of automated customer service where you could bypass the “Let me help you get to the right person. In a few words, could you…” by just loudly saying a string of expletives.
Sorry, but I’m gonna believe NBER, Princeton, Wharton, and a professional colleague who’s one of the most respected in her field over an internet dipshit cosplaying a stoic and going “hurrr durrr sexism”
Yes, the world is on fire, but also, I’m sitting here with the windows rolled down on a 65 degree day, drinking a Dr Pepper and listening to Dvorak’s New World Symphony. This is a world worth fighting for.
Telling that a dudebro “centrist” with a stoic’s screen name ignores evidence right in front of his face because a lady wrote it. Typical.
Very Golf. Much Healthy.
“Oreos are vegan” is the news I didn’t know I needed today.
Do we have Proof of Life?
I tried explaining all of this to my wife and I sounded completely unhinged. The best analogy I could come up with was “The entire internet is kombucha girl, except it’s joking about someone’s death but not really.”
Mick Fleetwood in Star Trek: The Next Generation only because it makes less than.m no sense.
8YO: Can you tell me everything about Challenger? [thinks about the Teacher in Space Program, the astronauts surviving until impact with the ocean, HOW WE KNOW THAT, the Morton-Thiokol cover-up, Feynman leading the investigation while dying of cancer, Feynman being *Feynman*] ME: n o .
The correct answer is, of course, Benjamin "Spoons" Butler. I kid. The real answer is Sherman.
A great suggestion I got from @cjdenial.bsky.social is to have snacks that have calories and protein because some students didn't/can't eat lunch. My go-tos are granola bars and individual packs of trail mix. My fave is Monster trail mix from Target. Also, actual coffee cups go a long way.
Also, something the AI shitbirds won't tell you because they think reading and writing is stupid: In English, we naturally order adjectives based on their qualities. So I had to figure out how to order "skeezy," "nonconsensual," "female," and "celebrity." dictionary.cambridge.org/us/grammar/b...
Here's the second part, BTW: bsky.app/profile/reut...
The big AI news today is that AI dipshits are working towards a FUTURE where AI interaction supplants reading and writing while also working towards a PRESENT where they make nonconsensual skeezy female celebrity sexbots. Truly the future I've always wanted.
This know nothing fuckstain has a company worth $2 billion. Give me 10 percent of that and I'll show you how learning actually happens.
They're using AI to "personalize" my 5YO's math curriculum. In KINDERGARTEN. I have FEELINGS.
Past years: Bonsai tree Ship in a bottle International Space Station This year's kit: Everyone's favorite war criminal
To encourage students to visit my office hours before work begins in earnest and view it as a welcoming environment, I do the following every year: Buy tea and snacks Buy coloring books and crayons Spend my office hours building a LEGO kit Display LEGO kit in my office with previous years' kits.
I don’t want to start from a position of distrust or assuming students are trying to cheat, and I want them to have agency in how our classroom is created. I’m not interested in assuming they’re adversaries and much more interested in viewing them as collaborators as much as possible/practicable.
Because elsewhere I’ve found working collaboratively with students to establish a shared social contract is not only ethically preferable in my mind, it *significantly* reduces academic dishonesty. My whole pedagogical approach boils down to “I trust you and we’re gonna figure this out together.”
Oh, I’ve got an easy cure for people who thought that. Just watch your SO go through law school. My (brilliant) wife went to law school with some equally brilliant people and some real head scratchers.
Ss are going to use it despite the ban and try to do Cop Shit to stop them. I don’t want to do that. I want to figure out how we can create a social contract that motivates Ss to not use AI.
I don’t think banning it is Cop Shit. Like, not even a little. So what I want to do (and work with Ss as an exercise in applied philosophy) is to think through “How do we marry an ethical commitment to ban AI with an ethical commitment to avoid Cop Shit?” Because the easy thing is to assume…
In fairness, this is *exactly* the kind of dancing John Lithgow warned us about in Footloose.
This is absolutely savage.
A 👏 I 👏 is 👏 fundamentally 👏 and 👏 inescapably 👏 dehumanizing 👏 technology
And when I say to my fellow academics "We shouldn't use AI because it's a fundamentally dehumanizing technology*," I'm often met with stares as thought I've grown a second head. *Notwithstanding the many other reasons not to use AI.
Real talk: if that’s the bar for tenure, what’s the bar for full?
Foods consumed at the Minnesota State Fair: 1919 Root Beer **** Kiwanis Chocolate Malt ****1/2 Gourmet Fried Pickles ** Sweet Martha’s Cookies ***** Milk ***** Brat on a Stick *** Spring Grove Lemon Sour Pop ****
Like, I think AI is immoral because it’s dehumanizing, built on theft, environmentally ruinous, doesn’t actually work, and prevents learning. The Cop Shit problem for me is banning AI but needing to find a way to do so consistently with my anti-Cop Shit position. *That’s* a potentially tricky issue.
Fundamentally misrepresents the problem with what? There are a lot of options there.
I saw someone on here describe themselves the other day as the most persecuted minority: A person who likes Taylor Swift a normal amount.
Look, those initiatives aren’t gonna initiate themselves.
This looks like a title card in a game for a 1984 Macintosh.
They would have KNOWN THIS if they had BOTHERED TO LEARN ABOUT THE KIDS. I'm happy to defend my smart, kind, amazing kid every day if I have to. It would just be nice if I *didn't* have to because the world bent itself a bit towards my kid instead of trying to force my kid to bend to the world.
Having the talk EVERY YEAR is bad enough. But usually it's after some version of "well, we had some trouble today…" Today was "Your kid needs to know that we have RULES and STANDARDS" and I had to jump in right quick with "You fucked up. Like, you made the wrong choice at literally every juncture."
Of all of it, the after school thing was most frustrating. She came at me like "your kid was defiant couldn't handle consequences & I'm talking with you even though he told me I couldn't" and I was like "let me patiently explain how you did LITERALLY everything wrong." I have this talk EVERY YEAR.
Things that have happened since 5:00: Had to explain neurodiversity to the new after school staffer 5YO had a meltdown because he didn't get to play "toilet tag"(?) Figured out and dealt with suddenly brown tap water Served as poop doula for constipated child Made dinner
You’re right, of course. But it pisses me off to no end that literally any time administrators talk about scalability, the idea of scaling actual teachers is the one option unequivocally off the table. They’d rather buy some unproven AI nonsense than hire a single extra human being.
What, are they gonna sail a destroyer down Pennsylvania Avenue? March littoral ships in formation? FFS.
I literally had that discussion with a colleague the other day after a workshop. ME: We should build relationships with and care for our students. COLLEAGUE: How do we do that at scale? ME: The number of instructors is scalable. COLLEAGUE: But that will never happen! ME: Doesn't mean I'm wrong.
ABC17 doing the Lord's work. (When we lived in CoMo, they were our preferred local news.)
I genuinely don’t think it is if you’re starting from a bachelor’s degree. Masters programs are typically two years and there’s no way you’re going to draft a proposal, do the relevant research, and write a dissertation in two years. And that’s ignoring ancillary but vital stuff like networking.
But don't be too good at it. That shit got Socrates killed!
For context, I did my Ph.D. at rocket speed. Zero to Ph.D. took me… FIVE YEARS.
Look, it was either burn down the country or elect a Black lady president.
If the Marines can understand the concept of "no one gets left behind," why can't Democrats? Hell, the Marines do it while being shot at!
Keynes 100 years ago: Technological advances mean my grandchildren will have a 15 hour work week. Today: Technological advances mean our work weeks aren't shorter but are increasingly filled with bullshit. AI Techbros: Technological advances mean AI will create cultural and artistic wonders…
I finished my Ph.D. at rocket speed. It took five years.
I am once again BEGGING Trump and his thugs to try Chicago. b e g g i n g .
A sort of "National Socialism," if you will.
Ruin a book by adding Tom Clancy’s to the title Tom Clancy’s A Theory of Justice
Ruin a book by adding Tom Clancy’s to the title Tom Clancy’s Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphycis
In the meantime, I’m going to pick my children up from the first day of school and hug them and hear their stories, knowing that stories an hour north are filled with terror and knowing some parents can’t do this because we’ve decided that the idea of guns is more important than children’s lives.
In my heart of hearts, I hope the people who made this possible feel all the shame and compunction of supporting guns over children’s lives, disingenuously justified in the name of fighting the fascistic tyranny they embrace, begging for genuine forgiveness. There are no words for the rage I feel.