COLUMBUS, Ohio (WCMH) â Columbus City Schools students have reported bleeding through clothing, getting UTIs and missing class time due to bathroom policies, and now students say the issues are districtwide.
Students across Columbus City Schools have contacted NBC4 to report bathroom policy concerns across the district. Reports include frequent locking of bathrooms and policies that limit when students can use facilities.
The messages from students, parents and staff came after NBC4 published an article on the bathrooms at Whetstone High School. Since then, one student included in the article said they were called to the principalâs office because they spoke to the media. A Whetstone senior who was not interviewed initially said administrators made an âaggressive and demandingâ announcement telling students not to speak to news outlets.
As good as a confession, no?
The problem was not recognizing AI-generated or AI-revised text. At the start of every semester, I had students write in class. With that baseline sample as a point of comparison, it was easy for me to distinguish between my studentsâ writing and text generated by ChatGPT. I am also familiar with AI detectors, which purport to indicate whether something has been generated by AI. These detectors, however, are faulty. AI-assisted writing is easy to identify but hard to prove.
As a result, I found myself spending many hours grading writing that I knew was generated by AI. I noted where arguments were unsound. I pointed to weaknesses such as stylistic quirks that I knew to be common to ChatGPT (I noticed a sudden surge of phrases such as âdelves intoâ). That is, I found myself spending more time giving feedback to AI than to my students.
Not gonna lie, Iâd eat that.
Fold it over and eat like a Döner.
Sure, but would you cite it?
Rather, my experience is that young readers are eminently capable of critically engaging in long form content, but theyâre rightfully demanding a seat at the table where decisions about texts are being made. Luckily, we are living through a literary renaissance. Publishers are flourishing amid a profusion of stories, books that give voice to the experiences of people who look and live like the young readers in my classroom. There is no shortage of engaging texts that students can and will read cover-to-cover. But if we insist that quality literature must come from old dead white men, we are consigning ourselves to irrelevance before we even begin.
One often overlooked hurdle that I brought up with Horowitch was the impact of language evolution on reading comprehension and comfort. Linguistically, the dialect of English spoken by contemporary adolescents is rapidly moving further away from the vernacular of the canonical works we ask them to read. While this has always been true to some degree, social media and technology have sped up language evolution and widened the gap between English dialects. My students code switch into my spoken dialect to engage with me -something that I never had to do to communicate with my teachers in high school. So when I ask them to code switch further into the recesses of linguistic history to read Shakespeare, the struggle is real. The additional layer of linguistic distance between them and Shakespeare is comparable to my own struggles through Chaucer in the original Middle English -difficult and worthwhile, but truly a challenge. As a society, we have become more accepting of vernacular differences and demand less code switching -all good and important changes that validate studentsâ identities. But it does inevitably become harder to successfully navigate long form texts in dialects of English that are fading ever further into history. As a responsible educator, I require more justification than merely longstanding tradition as I set a course for my precious minutes in the classroom.
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/10/14/florida-university-classes-ron-desantis-00183453
Floridaâs public universities are purging the list of general education courses they will offer next year to fall in line with a state law pushed for by Gov. Ron DeSantis targeting âwoke ideologiesâ in higher education.
These decisions, in many cases being driven by the university systemâs Board of Governors, have the potential to affect faculty and thousands of students across the state. Hundreds of courses are slated to become electives after previously counting toward graduation requirements, which university professors and free speech advocates fear is just the first step toward those classes disappearing entirely.
The stateâs involvement in a curriculum process â which has historically been left to universities â is riling academics and students who oppose how officials are using new authority to weed out courses like Anthropology of Race & Ethnicity, Sociology of Gender, and Women in Literature.
I realize I know little about the Irish school system⊠this sounds interesting:
That sounds so incredibly wonderful and interesting and intriguing and supportive of both education and students.
Would never fly here in the States.
âIt is not necessary to produce mindless factory drones, therefore is a waste of time!â
âScrooge, maybe
Its a great option. Given the competitive final exams (leaving certificate) many choose to use the year to prepare for that.
We know all this already, but this particular article puts all of the education-specific nonsense in one place to make the depth and breadth of the attack clear:
A tangential, yet crucial, aspect of higher education:
Hoo, boy. hitting a sore spot.
My son was jammed into a double with three boys his freshman year, when he was supposed to have academic status to get a better setup.
Much, much worse was when my daughter had a roommate who was a sociopath - coming home late at night, playing loud music with the lights on from 1AM to 5 AM. Opening the window during sub-freezing temps at night. You name it. My daughter was suffering health problems as a result, and tanking her classes. The college refused to deal with it (despite having unoccupied rooms in the same dorm) until I called the dean and told him I was moving her to a nearby hotel room and that Iâd invoice the college for the costs.
Michael S. Roth is the president of Wesleyan University.
Well said! He should convert that to a paid ad in say, the NY Times, signed by hundreds of university presidents.
(I know thatâs a dream; good lucking finding even 2 or 3 more. 
)
