Education, Birding, and Pens...

  ChatGPT  Recently, I received a department-wide email from my department chair. Email may be a generous word, Jeremiad might be more accurate. The topic was ChatGPT, and I am not sure what sent him into a tailspin on this topic, but it must have angered him quite a bit, because he came down really hard on the students he accused of using it. In the email he declared that students who were using ChatGPT were "Lazy, stupid, and apathetic”. Additionally, there was an implication that students who chose to use this program were incapable of doing the work.  When I chat with students as to why they choose to use this technology, they make similar arguments to what I have come up with in my own head; to escape doing things I don’t find valuable, like creating rubrics. Students would much rather be hanging out with friends, playing video games, or getting jobs. Much like the time I would need to invest in making rubric being time-not-well-spent for me, some of my assignments s...

  Asking the Right Questions During my high school years, I had a tendency to drive my science teachers crazy. I would complete my lab reports before conducting the experiments, crafting conclusions based on data I hadn't yet acquired and seeking meaning from those premature conclusions. Predicting the experiment's focus wasn't challenging—I'd analyze the setup, correlate it with our class lessons, and deduce the expected results, often aligned with what our teacher or the textbook intended us to derive from the task. While the purpose of the activity might have been to reveal these results, I didn't consider it a genuine experiment because the outcomes were known, and the conclusions were drawn repeatedly over years and decades. Needless to say, I struggled to engage with this task. What I believe I struggled with was the absence of a real question. By a real question, I mean a query that hasn't been answered before—something new and novel, perhaps an issue soc...