Interesting take on AI hype from Freddie deBoer.
Some say AI is the greatest invention of all time. I don’t get it.
Anyone who cites AI as the pinnacle of human ingenuity, above plumbing, should try spending a month without the latter.
I exercised for 300 days in a row - and then I crushed my ankle
Monday, January 27, 2025
Around spring break of last year (2024) I decided to exercise every day. I worked out fairly consistently, 3-4 days a week, for close to two years at that point, but I decided to commit to every day for a few reasons. First, I learned that natural muscle loss from aging can start in your mid thirties. Despite my insistence that the final season of The Office ended just a few years ago (it was 2013), by most chronological accounting methods I’m 35 years old.
Quote from Seneca that resonated with me.
“I say, let no one rob me of a single day who isn’t going to make a full return on the loss.” —SENECA
It’s not just red dye no. 3. It’s all our stuff.
RFK Jr. has the potential to do what Sinclair did in the early twentieth century: to shift the vibe, and spark the public into demanding companies remake their products for the twenty-first century. America cannot claim to be exceptional while making inferior, toxic products. The process will take decades to fully mature, but Americans have never been afraid to insist on better. It’s time that we do that now, and demand a Great Reformation.
Hopefully TikTok will be banned as scheduled.
And even if parental controls worked and parents chose to shield their kids from bad stuff, they can’t because TikTok’s content moderation is poor. An internal study found that the “leakage rate” (of bad stuff getting past moderators) is as follows: 35.71% of “Normalization of Pedophilia” content; 33.33% of “Minor Sexual Solicitation” content; 39.13% of “Minor Physical Abuse” content; 30.36% of “leading minors off platform”; 50% of “Glorification of Minor Sexual Assault”; and 100% of “Fetishizing Minors.” For those who think that social media is relatively harmless, we urge you to read the quotations and internal studies described below, in which employees of TikTok discuss the vast and varied harms that they are causing to literally millions of American children each year.
Easily use AI to convert handwritten notes to text
Wednesday, January 1, 2025
It dawned on me today as I was taking notes on a video about weekly reviews that I could probably upload a picture of my notes to Claude and ask it to transcribe them into text. And, even with my poor handwriting, it did a great job. I also asked it to format it as a bulleted list with sub bullets, which it did. If my handwriting was slightly better it would’ve done an even better job.
Creating a Critical Thinking Curriculum
Tuesday, December 31, 2024
A couple of years ago I was on Drew Perkins’s podcast to discuss a curriculum that Will Reusch and I designed called Critical Thinking Across the Disciplines. I realized that I never actually posted about it on my blog, so here it is. Here’s the podcast description: Drew Perkins talks with Will Reusch and Zach Cresswell about the Critical Thinking Across the Disciplines curriculum they’ve created and are piloting with funding through Heterodox Academy.
Testing youtube shortcode. Here is the video from my previous post.
I thought that large language models might asymptote in their capabilities. If that’s true then it doesn’t seem like we’ve reached that limit yet.
AGI or not, we can't close our eyes
Monday, December 30, 2024
There’s been a conversation about when AGI will arrive for a long time. That time horizon has shrunk since chatGPT came on the scene, obviously. However, for a while I thought maybe these models would asymptote. I’m not convinced of that anymore. I think AGI, or something close enough, is hurdling towards us. We need to start grappling with these questions (and by “we” I mean the general public, as I’m sure many in the industry have these conversations frequently):
An incredibly snowy and peaceful Christmas Eve.
Excellent little coffee shop. Worked on migrating my old blog posts to micro.blog and tweaking some settings. Hoping to make a new space on the internet for my thoughts as Twitter is a hellscape and Nostr isn’t quite ready for prime time yet. ☕️
Check it out: z-cress.micro.blog
The pace of change in AI tools is spectacular and it’s incredibly difficult for educators to understand the tools, determine how to integrate them, consider policies around them, consider long term impacts on learning, figure out if or when the service will cost money, etc. And about the time that’s figured out there’s a new set of tools or updates or something new to think about.
It’s simultaneously an exciting time to be an educator and a difficult time to be an educator.
Interacting with AI Podcasters in Real Time
Monday, December 23, 2024
AI continues to amaze me. I recorded this video this morning and had to share because it is so mind blowing. Educator friends, this is where we’re at. I don’t even know if this is the leading edge of what’s available, but I have to think that in terms of free tools, this is pretty close. NotebookLM can generate podcasts based on various materials. I uploaded a PDF of an excerpt from John Stuart Mill’s “On Liberty” and generated a podcast.
(Finally) Getting Better at Teaching Optimization
Sunday, December 22, 2024
In calculus I teach a concept called “optimization,” which, as I tell students, is an application of pretty much everything they’ve ever learned in math class. Not only that, all the problems are “story problems.” It can be a very tough section for students. The irony is that the calculus is not the difficult part. It’s interpreting the situation, sketching it correctly, developing the correct model, integrating constraints into the model, and finally interpreting what the model is telling you.
Even if I was a therapist, I wouldn’t use social-emotional circles
Monday, August 19, 2024
Part three of a three-part series called “Breaking my silence on social-emotional learning.” You can read part one here and part two here. Photo by Tima Miroshnichenko Until this point I’ve argued that since I’ve trained most of my adult life to teach math, and not give therapy, I shouldn’t try to become a therapy hobbyist with the teenagers in my classroom. I’ve also argued that the thorny issue of confidentiality probably can’t be overcome with any clear benefit to students.
What happens in the classroom, stays in the classroom?
Saturday, August 17, 2024
Part two of a three-part series called “Breaking my silence on social-emotional learning.” You can find part one, “I am not a therapist,” here. Photo by Eren Li In my previous post I explained how, as a teacher, I am not qualified to run a social-emotional or restorative circle and hinted at the idea that even if I was, I still shouldn’t run them in my classroom. I promise to flesh out that point in the next post, however, as I was writing I realized another problematic aspect of this needs to be addressed – confidentiality.
I am not a therapist
Thursday, August 15, 2024
Part one of a three-part series called “Breaking my silence on social-emotional learning” Photo by Tima Miroshnichenko I’ve been suspicious of “social-emotional circles” since I learned about them several years ago. My first concern was how to fit this practice into a curriculum in which two snow days can mean I have to cut content. However, my second and more substantive concern, was that, put simply, I am not a therapist and am not equipped to lead an exercise like this.
Explaining well is foundational to teaching well
Friday, December 23, 2022
The ability to explain things clearly is a necessary condition for being a good math teacher. Many conversations in some circles are around creating activities that help students construct knowledge and understand concepts more deeply. This is great! But young teachers need to know that explaining concepts clearly is foundational to those activities. Not that I’m in a position to do it much, but when I talk to young teachers I tell them to teach primarily with direct instruction/guided practice/independent practice/formative assessment their first couple of years.
Fighting Confirmation Bias Is Like Fighting Gravity (so let’s stop fighting it)
Friday, August 5, 2022
Photo by meriç tuna on Unsplash When you learn about confirmation bias two things are usually explicitly stated. Confirmation bias is inescapable and that we should do everything we can to escape it. This is like saying it’s impossible to escape gravity but you should do everything you can to try to escape it. Is it possible to hack our bias to confirm our beliefs in such a way that we don’t need to feel like we’re constantly fighting gravity?