Well, zero tolerance on grammar, spelling, etc, being bad obviously. I'd also insist on the thing being coherent and well structured. Both of which were huge problems when I was reviewing student papers. These are all things an LLM can help students with improving.
And of course if all papers are up to standards on that (which IMHO would be a massive improvement already from an educational point of view), you'd be looking for other criteria to judge the papers that maybe showcase things that are actually of value. Like problem solving, critical thinking, originality, etc. I'd be looking for signs of the student having a good grip on the subject matter.
Perhaps I'd do a little verbal exam. I might grill them a bit on the subject they wrote about and make sure they understand what they submitted. Somebody that did the leg work of coming up with something good and that did the research, would be able to answer questions about it and be able to discuss the key points. Ask them some questions about other work they are referencing. Etc.
I just think trying to keep students from using tools that are out there is a lost cause.
Moving everything in class seems like a good idea in theory. But in practice, kids need more time than 50 minutes of class time (assuming no lecture) to work on problems. Sometimes you will get stuck on 1 homework question for hours. If a student is actively working on something, yanking them away from their curiosity seems like the wrong thing to do.
On the other hand, kids do blindly use the hell out of ChatGPT. It's a hard call: teach to the cheaters or teach to the good kids?
I've landed on making take-home assignments worth little and making exams worth most of their grade. I'm considering making homework worth nothing and having their grade be only 2 in-class exams. Hopefully that removes the incentive to cheat. If you don't do homework, then you don't get practice, and you fail the two exams.
(Even with homework worth little, I still get copy-pasted ChatGPT answers on homework by some students... the ones that did poorly on the exams...)
> If you don't do homework, then you don't get practice, and you fail the two exams.
I'd be cautious about that, because it means the kids with undiagnosed ADHD who are functionally incapable of studying without enforced assignments will just completely crash and burn without absorbing any of the material at all.
Or, at least, that's what happened to me in the one and only pre-college class I ever had where "all work is self-study and only the tests count" was the rule.
I completed college with unmanaged ADHD (diagnosed 10 years later; worst result my psych had ever seen on the TOVA lol).
My second and third semesters went exactly as you described for courses where I was exposed to new things and wasn't just repeating high school - mainly because I had no training or coping mechanisms for learning under that type of pedagogy.
After getting my ass kicked in exams and failing a class for the first time in my life, I finally grokked that optional homework assignments were the professor's way of communicating learning milestones to us, and that even though the professor said they weren't graded (unless you asked), you still had to do them or you wouldn't learn the material well enough to pass the exam.
Still had a few bad grades because of the shit foundation I built for myself, but I brought a 2.2 GPA up to a 3.3 by the end.
The point is that it takes is exposure to that style of teaching before it can really be effective.
> I've landed on making take-home assignments worth little and making exams worth most of their grade.
I feel like this is almost exactly moving all evaluation into the class. If "little" becomes nothing, it is exactly that.
I feel this was always the best strategy. In college, how much homework assignments were worth was an easy way to evaluate how bad the teacher was and how lightweight the class was going to be. My best professors dared you not to do your homework, and would congratulate you if you could pass their exams without having done it.
The very best ones didn't even want you to turn it in, they'd only assign problems that had answers in the back of the book. Why put you through a entire compile cycle of turning it in, having a TA go over it, and getting it back when you were supposed to be onto the next thing? Better and cheaper to find out you're wrong quickly.
I'm considering making homework worth nothing and having their grade be only 2 in-class exams.
When I did A levels and my first undergraduate degree (in the UK) that's how it worked. The only measurements used to calculate my A level grades and degree class were:
- Proctored exams at the end of 2 years of study (the last 2 years of high school)
- Proctored exams at the end of 2 years of study (the last 2 years of university)
Minor quibble here: If a student gets stuck on a single homework problem for hours, they're probably hopelessly lost and would benefit from being interrupted. That or the problem is way too broad to be mere homework.
It's easy to break your phone addiction—I've done it a 1,000 times...
But, seriously, I've tried launchers, leechblock, and other software solutions. For me, they don't work long term because I end up just reverting and unblocking. I always have some justification in my head as to why I need to reinstall Discord or browse YouTube and then it's over.
For me, I've had much better luck with a device where those types of slips are impossible. Mostly... although sometimes I really do need a smartphone to scan a QR code or to pay a foodtruck with Venmo.
The Jelly Star seems to be the best compromise for me so far. It's still a smartphone, but the screen is so small that it's a lot harder to be on it for hours.
Sometimes it’s hard for us to fight ourselves. My wife has the same issue and we found a solution that works well for her: screen time. She asked me for help and we set up limits for instagram and all the other shitty apps but here’s the important part: she doesn’t know the code to disable it. And she wanted it that way. Reduced her screen time from about 7h per day to 4h.
Yes. You could try endless ways to limit usage of your phone (change screen colours, launchers, deleting apps) but in the end of day you only will be hating using your phone. And I think bringing negative context in your daily life is not okay.
In this case, by limiting your phone usage, you need to try to fill the open void with something more interesting. If you do so, then returning to using phone will feel like just using another tool.
Often I'll think about spending money on a 'dumb' phone because I'm convinced it'll fix my problem, but then I realize that I'm just giving into another vice, which is buying technology. I am trying to instead focus on what the root cause of my over-use of technology is.
leechblock works for me because i have adhd and will open a time wasting website as a reflex and without thinking about it. i'm met with the block page and I'm like "that's fair".
it will not, however, stop the deliberate decisions to procrastinate, as you said
I'm a current owner of a Ratta Supernote A5X. I use the Supernote all the time. I previously had a Remarkable 2, but thankfully Remarkable added a subscription which made me look elsewhere and led me to the Supernote.
This seems right up my alley. Although, $800 seems steep.
The new Supernote A5X2 is due this year... at probably half the price? Granted it doesn't have the 60fps display, but it definitely has a bunch of other features. Is the 60fps worth $400 more?
you're right, for some folks it's not gonna be worth the price increase
we understand that, and we hope we can bring the price down with scale
for some of the folks who its worth it for, some of the reasons are:
- onenote or noteshelf or goodnotes on eink working without lag makes it worth it
- obsidian or google docs or your terminal working without latency
- you end up reading way more substacks, articles, blogs, things in the browser
- dragon ball z on eink is fun :)
Question for folks who live in non-English speaking countries: do you guys wear watches with calendars in English?
Last time I was in a mall in Mexico City, I asked a guy behind the counter of some store if they had any watches that had either the months or days of week in Spanish... surprisingly, the answer was no. English only.
Weird. My Seiko 5 automatic (about $150, probably one of the cheapest self-winding mechanical watches) has the days of the week in English, Spanish, and French. Weirdly, (but I suppose it makes sense if you think about how the gears work), if you look at the watch at an odd time (like say 3am) it is showing the day in one of the two non-selected languages.
My Seiko SNK807, Seiko SKX009, and Tissot Visodate all have an English/Spanish date wheel. I believe JDM Seiko watches have a Japanese/English date wheel.
My other three watches (Hamilton, Tudor, Rolex) are simple three-handers with no other complications.
I'm in Germany, my watch originally came in German + English, but when the clockwork had to be replaced recently, the replacement was only available in Italian + English.
Tangara is already linked in [5]. To bulky for me.
I also modded an iPod Classic 2009 with iFlash Quad, 512GB storage (it could handle more but the original software can't) and 2000mah battery, which results in >60h playback time.
All great, two minor problems: A bit too bulky and Earphone remote support lacks rewind and fast forward :-/ next / prev / volume do work, but I need the rewind for my audio book collection.
For users, one of the ways PWAs are superior to native apps is that the user gets to use an app at all. It's hard to maintain 2 or 3 different codebases of an app, which means it might not get built at all. As a user, I'd rather use a decent app that exists, than not get to use an app at all.
I'm working on a todo app called Tasket. The goal of Tasket is to provide an
unopinionated way to create and manage todos.
We work towards this goal by allowing users to:
1. create any task attributes they want, for example, status, priority level,
schedule date, deadline—or nothing if they want to keep it simple
2. custom app actions, for example, a user can tap on a todo and move it
to a different section—or they can tap on a todo and open a web browser, a
phone dialer, prepare an SMS—with more interactions on the way
I started working on this because I found some todo apps, like Todoist, too
limiting, but other apps, like Omnifocus, too complex. I believe Tasket can
strike a better balance between easy to use and powerful.
The reason I believe a better balance is needed is to fight against task
bankruptcy, where our todo list ends up overwhelming us.
