Tween shoppers, Chaos, Teaching w AI, Waiting Rooms, and Tomatoes!
RWL #411
Greetings from The University of New Hampshire! Late summer vegetables are starting to come in, and we have a lovely crop of tomatoes ripening by the day. It’s so much fun to go out to the garden and pick some treats. Tonight I made a really simple creamy sauce by baking tomatoes and feta in olive oil. End result:
Yum! It’s not much of a recipe. Tomatoes, feta, oil. Bake at 350 for a while. Then use an immersion blender to mix it up. Simple and delicious. It’s the best kind of cooking.
We’re already in week 3 of the semester - hard to believe. There’s a long way to go, but it seems like things are moving unusually fast this year.
I have a new FITW podcast coming out this Sunday - an interview with my colleague Sue Siggelakis from the PoliSci department about St. Thomas Aquinas. I know, I was not expecting that either, when I asked Sue, who I have known for years, to be on the show. I thought she’d want to talk about the Federalist Papers, but no, she wanted to talk about an 800-year old saint. I had fun - I hope you like it! Watch your inbox.
On to the links! As usual, willing good for all of you! (you know St. Thomas is willing good for you!)
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Read
What: Antonio Bowen and C. Edward Watson, Teaching with AI: A Practical Guide to a New Era of Human Learning
Why: I’ve been thinking about how to integrate AI into my teaching. I use AI all the time to write things like recommendation letters and other formulaic written products. A couple weeks ago, my dean gave all the department chairs a copy of this book. I found it enlightening. As the book points out, there is no putting the genie back in the bottle. LLMs have done to formulaic writing what calculators did 50 years ago - if you need to do a basic calculation or write a 5-paragraph essay, the machine can do that for you. So what does it mean to be educated in a world where neither basic arithmetic nor even basic, formulaic writing is the realm of the educated? What does it mean to educate when a few prompts can produce a high quality essay? This book offers some suggestions, if not an answer. Well worth reading if you are an educator. Interesting to review if you think of yourself as an educated person, but you don’t yet regularly use LLMs.
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What: AEIdeas, The Brotherhood of Man in a Waiting Room
https://www.aei.org/society-and-culture/the-brotherhood-of-man-in-a-waiting-room/Â Â
Why: TLW talks about the use of phones in waiting rooms to create isolation barriers all the time. I have to admit, I am totally going to be glued to my phone if you sit next to me in a JiffyLube waiting room. But this article makes a good argument for putting down the screen and saying hello.Â
You never know who you are going to meet.Â
And this is something I preach all the time. So, I should probably take some of my own advice.
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Watch
What: BBC World Service, A simple guide to chaos theory ((5 min)
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Why: Short and lovely - chaos theory means uncertainty, not randomness. It argues for epistemic humility. Â
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Listen
What: WSJ, The Rise of the Tween Shopper (17 min)
 Why: In my research for my podcast on the history of childhood with Julia Rodriguez I read a bunch of stuff about how teen spending changed the economy in the mid-20th century. We didn’t talk about that topic as much as I would have liked, but it’s remarkable how as we became richer as a country, our (older) children’s spending became a force in the economy and the culture. Now it seems like that trend is continuing to nudge downward, and it is particularly influenced by … influencers.