This post is mostly working through the challenges that Chat-GPT pose for a general-education TEFL writing instructor. As Stephen Marche noted, “nobody is prepared for how AI will transform academia.” Well, almost nobody. I kind of am, since I’ve been dealing with analogous issues for decades now. So anyway, these are my thoughts, for anyone interested in them.
So, something I would have thought impossible happened, and I thought it would be worth noting for posterity: grade grubbing has dropped to almost zero in my classes. There are a few reasons why this has happened. 1. The Kim Young Ran Law got passed. Hands down, this is the main thing that has helped. A few years ago, the Anti-Graft and -Corruption Law was passed. (It’s also referred to as the Kim Young Ran Law sometimes.) The effect among university administrators was immediate: they stopped being willing to accept even the smallest thank-you present from anyone: one guy helped …
Ah, cheaters… they shall ever be with us. True story, this, and recent, too—from the course I taught in winter semester, which finished in late January. Names have been omitted for obvious reasons, and there’s a little follow-up on my philosophy regarding cheaters and how to deal with attempted cheating in a class. Enjoy:
This post is just an idea for a mass-game type exercise for a large EFL camp, riffing on Canadian history and specifically the fur trade.
Of all the places to find a euphemism for baffling passivity! This is from Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White: A mild, a compliant, an unutterably tranquil and harmless old lady, who never by any chance suggested the idea that she had been actually alive since the hour of her birth. Nature has so much to do in this world, and is engaged in generating such a vast variety of co-existent productions, that she must surely be now and then too flurried and confused to distinguish between the different processes that she is carrying on at the same time. Starting …