Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips A long time ago, a substitute teacher in one of my classes was so interesting that teenagers cut their regular classes to sneak into his class and learn. I think it was 1972 or 1973 in Southern California. We were hippies or thought we were or wanted to be. And teenage hippies […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Big tech advise$ educator$ to drop the coding and teach the AI. Every few years, rich people advise educators on what to educate. This advice often comes as, “Here is money for an after-school program,” and “here is money for in-school programs,” and “here is money, do what we say or else.” […]

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by Dwayne Phillips We tend to ban the latest tools in school so that students won’t “cheat.” Today’s kids laugh at what prior generations banned. My granddaughter is in high school (I have to take a moment to comprehend how that happened so fast). We had a short discussion last night on tools for learning. […]

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by Dwayne Phillips At Brown University, a professor shows that students used AI systems to get good scores on a take-home test. The in-class test scores were much lower. Does any of this matter? For a few days, this story was sort of famous (here is one version of the story). For one reason or […]

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by Dwayne Phillips A malady is a setback. A malady teaches a person something unique. That allows the person to do things others cannot. Permit me to dote on my granddaughter a bit. I am subjective here, but that is my privilege. She has congenital cataracts, i.e., she was born with cataracts. She sees well-enough […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Common usage is incorrect, but, hey, what’s the problem? Yet another headache. My grandson is a “rising junior.” That means, and everyone in America understands this but me, that he is between his sophomore and junior years of high school. (And he’s 6’3″ tall which puts him far above me, but I […]

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by Dwayne Phillips AI has upended large parts of the education system. What to do? Back to basics. Decide what is important to learn and teach that. Teachers give an assignment. Students use one of these chattering bots to write the answer. Task done. No learning, but the task is done so move on. This […]

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by Dwayne Phillips I have been able to write drafts faster and with much higher quality than other writers I know. I have, unknowingly, been writing at “pulp speed.” I stumbled across this concept of writing at pulp speed recently. It came from a blog post by Dean Wesley Smith. Back in the old days […]

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by Dwayne Phillips There are times when a good thing to do is put one or both hands in my pockets before doing something else. In the late 1970s (yes, I am that old), a college professor was working with us know-nothing students in an electrical engineering lab. The experiment of the week involved a […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Sometimes you just lower your head against a wall and push as hard as you can. Let’s begin this little blog post by noting that I attended LSU—not MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Stanford or any of those places known for producing really smart people. At LSU, we may not be able to spell […]

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