status update: one class is a wrap.

goal: one per day / done by Thursday

on thursday I re-up the class I co-teach w my boss -  so that will require almost no thought / no change, unless he's making any changes.

In my own 3 classes, I am systematically going through every assignment, and adding an AI step to it, and then constraining them to use no other AI, then, make 'em run it through AI for analysis/revision before I see it besides etcetc. 

So far, I have done the easiest class. Tomorrow, a writing class. 

Upside: by doing this now, I am constraining the amount of attention anyone could get from me for the rest of the semester; and I am making it possible for every student to get an A simply by following the directions very strictly. It's got a dominatrix vibe to it for sure. I'm taking all those grit(ty) assignments and adding them structurally into specific course material.Which means wherever I've been reading chatgpt anyway already, I'm just letting them do what they were already doing, and not calling it cheating, calling it prep work. Then one SHORT actual thing that I read. If they cheat on THAT THING, they fail. Period. 

It takes a surprising amount of time to design an assignment that actually works, that a student cannot get around and just hand in bullshit. If you think that by asking them what they feel, or whatever, is gonna get you around that it doesn't - they ask chat g p t to have their feelings for them, and it's getting better and better at faking those. It used to be that you could catch it because somewhere in it, it would say 'of course, I don't really have any feelings' and the student would be too stupid to even proofread the fucking thing before they turned it in. But that was in the days when I could actually read these things and I can't anymore, first of all, and second of all, it confabulates better now, so it wouldn't make that mistake in the first place. I have to plug in the original assignments and make it cheat digest it, right in front of front of me, so I can reverse engineer what to tell the students to do, which is what they were already doing. And they still can do that. Strangely, that makes them feel as if they're doing homework lol - that's how's how much they use it! I'm just not going to fucking read any of that shit any more. They get to ask chatgpt what they think and then they get to ask chat g p t to write drafts for em and then they have to ask chat g p t what it is they would ask a real human being at that point and then they have to answer whatever fucking question that is in two hundred motherfucking words typa deal.

And let's see what happens.  

I certainly don't want to read any more chatgpt fucking essays. THAT IS PASSING BUTTER. No. So. One class per day. Nothing changes except every assignment. Every one of them is A/F so do it exactly the way I tell you. Including be funny when I tell you (amuse me). This is very tedious work, assignment design, but it's long overdue, really, it's been a couple of years now that I've had my eye on the ball of aliving desperately. One should update one's assignments continually, ideally. But now several very hard years have gone by since I last did that. 

So. There's something satisfying now about going through each one of these classes, and the update is that every single week I crack a leather whip over the heads of two hundred people. I can almost hear it. They are gonna do it my way, or they are gonna fail. And when it comes to the writing classes, I'm going to make sure they fail by week 4, if they're gonna, so that they won't even be there as part of my statistics, they'll have dropped. Self-analyzing to see if they should persist (harder) or swerve is one of the assignments at week 4, when I am mandated to report them for being likely to fail. Or not. They're going to decide. But they're gonna use AI to come to a feeling-less conclusion on the subject based on the evidence. There will be zero late assignments accepted until MIDTERM - after midterm, if you've been on it, then you've earned some leeway. I am dogfooding all of that here because I can't bear to sit in front of that laptop for one more fucking second at ten p. m. But I did get one done. 

Tomorrow the writing intensive version (WIP means writing intensive program, and yes, I did come up with it, intentionally sound like whip 🤭, a good fifteen years ago. It used to be writing across the curriculum (WAC) which was a whack lolol but that got dated, so I thought it would be funny to change it - omg the shit that nuns used to let me get away with was awesome - that's an actual program, WIP, and every single student at the college is subject to taking two whip classes lolol very very often misspelled just like that -  we had a middle states commendation for it! - and stillll cracking myself up about it 🤭) of the same course, the worst offender re students turning in total bullshit. 

Wed - Narrative Medicine 201, with an eye towards a Week 4 guillotine of some kind, right before that conference presentation. Oct 2.  Handy timing. What will we want to be able to say by then in that particular one 🤔 - but all of my classes count as narrative medicine, they're all taught to healthcare provider students, and they're all about stories.

Maybe I could get both those classes done tomorrow - yes, let's GRIT THAT OUT. setting that intention 🙏. then yoga Wed. 

Thurs - Graphic Medicine class, the reading list for which ChatGPT hallucinated a book by Ken Dahl and started this whole thing about hallucination and verisimilitude confabulation - but that class won't be changing because that will be up to my boss, the BIO part of the course runs that show. I will tell my boss all about the presentation on Oct 2 and see if he wants to get in on that which he might, we have done many presentations like that together before. Totally up to him. I booked 1-2 hours that morning for us to catch up and get the class out the door. Nobody but he and I have a class that big. It breaks the enrollment rules for a freshman class by one hundred percent - and that's why he and I both still have a job. And I understand that. We are both very pragmatic people (he's a capricorn). 

Then all there is to do, if nothing else bad happens and classes actually begin on the 31st, all I have to do is go to the union funeral picnic on the 28th to confirm that yup we are still alive, then I press the "ON" button on the classes. That's it. Half of my job happens when I'm not doing my job. It happens in summers and in spaces betweens. It happens when I look back, and I look forward and I make these decisions. Otherwise, I'm free to be anywhere, doing anything, while everyone else is going to physical classrooms and I am not. And everyone else is wondering what they're doing next week, and I am not. My students know every single thing that's going to be occurring and that they'll be responsible for - they can see the entire class laid out in front of them on day one, and then they get to decide what to do from there on out. I'll be going to Wisconsin for sure. I wanna get to the high peaks for sure. If I get accepted to that conference, which is almost for sure, I'll be going to kalamazoo michigan. All that is in Oct. in the meantime, I'm going to head out to my cottage. I think the cottage is mostly where I'll be for lotsa Sept, 'cept labor day ( fucking fireworks ) until I gotta close it up for the year.

The only other thing I did today was get that bees nest, which is hornets actually, offa Mary. The guy comes to the door, he's got a yellow shirt with a big bee on it and something stuck in his teeth (like a little bit of a hamburger bun from lunch). He introduces himself as so and so junior, I'm pretty sure this dude is some kind of drunk or high. He's really really happy to see me. And all I've said is hello. So I bring him around the side of the house to where Mary is. The hornet's nest is in the foundation of the house right behind the base of Mary. So it does look like they're flying in and out her ass, to be fair. But this dude actually says that out loud and adds "virgin birth, ya right!? didn't think she'd be KINKY though!!" and cracks himself up completely so then I'm also laughing because it just feels so absurd. All of it. All the time. And he's not alone, he's got a driver too - my guess would be this is the company owner's kid, middle aged guy who probably does not have a driver's license anymore. So Beeguy Jr calls to the other guy, "come see MARY dude, she's got fucking hornets in her ass!" Like, I have little old people for neighbors across the street 🤭🤦🏻‍♀️. Not to mention that I didn't get dressed today because why would I (?) so I'm standing out there in bare feet and this little stupid black dress I sleep in 🤭🤦🏻‍♀️🤣 Janis sitting there, swagging her tail at the whole scene... he wanted the check made out to him personally, no tax, or cash? (no), a check I wrote out fast, thanking christ for the driver dude standing there or Junior woulda hit on me it was feelin like 😵‍💫🤦🏻‍♀️. He told me to write my email on the check so that he could send me a receipt that never came 👀 (sigh range)