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 : 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 …

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 …

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: …

Easily use AI to convert handwritten notes to text: 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, …

Creating a Critical Thinking Curriculum: 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 …

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. youtu.be/NFgFQO282…

AGI or not, we can't close our eyes: 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, …

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 …

Interacting with AI Podcasters in Real Time: 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 …

(Finally) Getting Better at Teaching Optimization: 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 …

Even if I was a therapist, I wouldn’t use social-emotional circles: 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 …

What happens in the classroom, stays in the classroom?: 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 …

I am not a therapist: 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 …

Explaining well is foundational to teaching well: 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 …

Fighting Confirmation Bias Is Like Fighting Gravity (so let’s stop fighting it): 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 …

It’s time to make school closures due to Covid an absolute last resort: Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash I’ve been working on this post for the better part of a week, trying to decide if it was worth posting. Then yesterday a New York Times headline came across my phone and it nudged me to hit “Publish.” “India’s Lost Generation: Lengthy pandemic shutdowns …

Jo Boaler, Tracking, Education Research, and Honesty: Image credit: https://dilbert.com/strip/2012-06-22 A few years ago I read Jo Boaler’s book, “Mathematical Mindsets” and I thought it contained some good ideas. There were a few things that I thought were not realistic or would be difficult to scale, but overall I found the book …

Antiracism in your school: 9 ways to keep the conversation rational and unifying: A few years ago, I noticed that the words diversity, equity, and inclusion were steadily gaining in popularity, especially in K-12 education. At first, I couldn’t see a problem with the concepts. But as I dug deeper I discovered that much of the movement behind these words, although advanced by …

We’re Teaching Slope Fields at the Wrong Time: In our textbook slope fields come during the differential equations unit, which for the last 8 years made sense to me. But every year there were groans from students and comments about how “pointless” they are. Well, here’s why students think they’re pointless. They already know antiderivatives. So …

I have a couple of questions about “Social Justice Math”: I have a couple concerns regarding “Social Justice Math” that I don’t think I’ve seen addressed. (If they have been, please let me know.) From what I’ve read SJM is billed as a way to bring real world problems into the classroom with a “justice” lens. Problems related to climate change, …