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Comp Sci students and the ChatGPT disaster
It’s well known that given the chance, people will nearly always look for a shortcut in making a decision, in order to avoid the more laborious effort required to think things through from scratch. The psychology discipline has various terms for this: “cognitive miserliness,” “cognitive economy,” “satisficing,” “mental inertia,” reliance on “heuristics,” and others. It’s…
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Children of the pandemic
(I was going to title this post “Children of the Coronavirus,”but that seemed a little too…well, corny.) Most people I know have “moved on” from the Covid-19 pandemic, and who can blame them? Quarantine was one of the yuckiest times in recent memory, to say nothing of the many who lost their lives to the…
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The trouble with what you already know
One of the continual challenges of teaching — and in fact, I’d argue the single most important thing for teachers to master — is the ability to remember what it was like to not yet understand the material you’re presenting. Believe it or not, there was a time when you yourself did not yet understand…
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The taboo of thinking too hard
If there’s one thing that drives me nuts about this culture, it’s that choosing to actually use one’s mind is often ridiculed. Don’t believe me? Try casually mentioning in conversation that you’ve been learning, just for fun, ancient Greek or economics. Or try taking a book on differential equations to the beach. Every face will…
