[therapy] Time shifts experiences

May. 21st, 2025 02:08 pm
sorcyress: Drawing of me as a pirate, standing in front of the Boston Citgo sign (Default)
[personal profile] sorcyress
Content Warning: non-detailed allusions to my shitty abusive ex and the shitty relationship we had

I have been working on the Inbox0 project, which sorta has two modalities:

First, the banality of daily life. Unsubscribing from things I don't care about, and mass deleting the bulks they have sent in the past. Meeting notes and invitations and preperatory emails that can safely be labeled ("highland ball" got a workout today, from when I ran it in 2017) and archived. Going through the 50 most recent emails in the inbox and trying to at least first pass all of what's happened lately.

Second, the weight of history. I have had the same email address since 2005, so that sure is, uh, twenty years since January 15th. It's not everything I've ever gotten (see above about bulk-deleting bullshit) and I do have like, a more professionally wallet-named account, but even that sends its email into the main box.

And the weight of history can be _exhausting_. That's part of what makes this game difficult, trying to motivate myself to be exposed fully to some of my worst ADHD sins, or the parts of my personal history where the Big D went on the word depression. Have I mentioned lately I went through an abusive relationship for most of the year 2007? Yeah, uh. That still has bits and pieces lying around it sure does.

But mannnnn one of the benefits of hindsight and being an actual friggin' grown-up and stuff is the ability to look at some of those bits and pieces and see just how much I have grown and improved and gotten better. I can have a lot of grace for myself (I do genuinely like myself, regardless of how much I whine I am a really spectacularly awesome person) and part of the reason is that recognition of the work I have done to reach better and better heights as time goes on.

Or, like, to read an email in which this guy I was totally into was basically breaking up with me, in part because he was not interested in being in a polycule with my shitty boyfriend. Boo hiss, this should be real sad. But it's _not_ because it's been twenty freaking years, that guy I was totally into has developed a lovely sounding life for himself on the other side of the world and I've made a polycule that has an absolute dearth of shitty boyfriends anywhere in it. And so I can read stuff like this...

However, I talked to ksatyr....he is *way* over-reacting. You think you're not ready for a relationship? I'm sorry, but this is a demonstration of not being ready for a relationship.


...and scream lovely modern "YASS QUEEN SLAY1" because BOY HOWDY it is good to remember that there were people who were willing to say to my face "yeah, your boyfriend ain't shit because shit at least provides fertilizer and causes growth2". I mean, I didn't listen sufficiently at the time, but it turns out it never gets old to listen to folks drag my shitty partners, even if I didn't necessarily realize it at the time.

So yeah. The history is rough but it's also nice to see the growth that goes alongside it. And it's nice to get reminders that however fucked up current-right-now Kat is, they're not (correctly) getting dragged by a twenty year old for acting like a sixteen year old3.

~Sor

MOOP!

1: This is almost certainly ironic as it's not language that has actually gotten into my lexicon yet.

2: Okay sure, I suppose you could argue that kSatyr caused growth _in me_. As a different shitty ex once said "-99 points for everything, +1 for making a better Kat for the rest of us". But just because it causes growth doesn't mean I particularly want to be covered in shit. :P

3: September party! I will finally be the age my abusive ex was when he dated me! WOOO!

(no subject)

May. 20th, 2025 06:40 pm
sorcyress: Drawing of me as a pirate, standing in front of the Boston Citgo sign (Default)
[personal profile] sorcyress
Progress is being made.

I want to be very clear (and whiny) that I'm still burnt out. That hasn't gone away. Roundabouts July 15, is when I stop having Immediate Plans, and go back to comforting vagueness. I am probably going to book the entire week after Pinewoods on my calendar as "do not schedule, do not interact, this is entirely mine and I will maybe do things on an hours notice or less, but definitely not otherwise).

But progress is being made. Having Tuesday come over this past weekend and body double me while I worked on my room was a truly wonderful help. My room still has an infinite of little projects and organizations and puttings-aways, but it is SO MUCH BETTER and because it is not a series of fucking huge piles of undifferentiated stuff shutting my brain down the moment I look at it, I have actually been able to do maintenance level cleaning on a regular basis. Like, just take five minutes to put away several things where they belong instead of dropping them back into The Pile. It feels very good.

I've also returned to the Inbox0 project after basically 11 months of not touching it. I'm not yet at my lowest-ever1, but I have archived or deleted about 2000 emails in the last two days, and most of those were unread. GOOD PROGRESS.

I didn't really do any work progress, which was partly because I had a series of Good Individual Conversations instead. One of my favourite students came for 2.5 hours in the morning (it's a testing day, so weird schedule) and I helped drag him through most of the last six weeks, getting his grade this quarter to jump from about a 20% to an 84%. It's amazing how much quizzes are weighted if you _haven't done any of them_. I also had decent planning conversation with Clayton, and saw a couple other students for brief periods. Tomorrow, I teach one class, and have to proctor the test for ninety minutes, but it should be otherwise pretty mellow.

I should probably medialog sometime soon, especially because I have actually been reading --I've actually read a fair amount, although most of that was my recent murderbot reread. It's still good! It still hits hard! I was pretty vehement that I didn't want to see the tv show (I don't want to rewire my brain in how it visualizes or thinks about different characters, this happened with That Fucking TERF's books when I watched the movies and I didn't like it) but I've seen some pretty excited reviews, so hmmmmmmmmmaybe.

Also I earned a die yesterday, and I'm on track to earn one today. I'm happy to have this ADHD-brain-game maybe working for me again? Especially because it looks the like previous reset was _November_ meaning it took nearly six months to get 31 full-score days on my daily chart. Auuuguh. Yipes.

(gee Kat, what possible reason could your brain have for going all sideways and fukt-up since November of 2024?)

So yeah, it'd be cool if I can get through this batch, uh, a little faster. I liked the version of the game where I was going through about four rounds a year, it feels reasonable to say "I will get full points on a third of the days". Heck, it's still possible for this year if ~I only believe~.

(we build habits as best we can to support ourselves when the things fall apart)

Anyways, nice to have projects in my life that are seeing progress, even if it's just small and silly number-goes-down. I hope your life is also seeing progress.

~Sor

MOOP!

1: Technically my lowest ever was the long span of time through 2019 and 2020 where I actually maintained inbox zero pretty consistently. This is possible to do! It's just hard to get back to.

Two cranky, one nice

May. 19th, 2025 02:49 pm
sorcyress: Drawing of me as a pirate, standing in front of the Boston Citgo sign (Default)
[personal profile] sorcyress
I have a cold or allergies or something and it is making me cranky.

(I don't normally have allergies, but because I did so much cleaning on Saturday, I did stir up a fair chunk of dust. So like...maybe that's some of the problem? I did take a covid test Sunmorn, I should probably take another one in a day or two. Wastewater data is pretty low right now, so I'd be surprised if it was covid (I am still masking everywhere as per usual))

But yeah, my nose is either congested or runny, which is very annoying. Probably one of the solutions is to drink more water, sigh. My current main water bottle is full of flowers from the brunch last weekend. Which is very nice, but probably I should've gotten a vase in the first place.

Sidebar: I have seen the writing on the wall and begun writing on the new/current version of 750words, as the old version becomes increasingly deprecated and buggy. I hate it, so much, because interacting with things that are different is Wrong And Bad and also I am unthrilled with how excited Buster is about the concept of using AI as a cool assistant who will give you lovely reports about your writing. Honestly gross, if I want to go through my writing and see how things are different, I am perfectly happy to just literally do that. I do not need robots to tell me how to feel about the changes that have happened or to find the patterns that are occurring. Anyways, there's a nonzero chance I might abandon the site entirely and just start tracking my writing in .txt files on my laptop, which would be annoying in different ways.

Anyways, all this most recent complaint is because apparently the new site does not respond to ctrl-z. What, I say as heartily as I possibly can, the fuck. Like I know some of my crankiness is just your classic neurospice "things are different [and that's bad]" but I'm going to legitimately flag this as a Poor UX Choice.

At least he did make it so that you could type in plaintext instead of horrible automatic markdown bullshit that thinks it knows what you mean when you type *emphasis* _like this_ and quite probably thinks those two things are the _same fucking thing_ which I assure you they are *not*. Also, both of them are different from italicising or bolding, those are additional *different* forms of emphasis. The fastest way to make me stop using a website is to assume you know how I wanted to say the things I said.

(It's a fun game to take a chunk of text that has auto-formatted, like in Discord, and to attempt to put back in the proper emphatic markers. The best part is that I am frequently --I'd say between two-thirds and seventy-five percent-- correct if I later go through and edit in a way that shows me the original. No one else can probably tell the way my voice is supposed to be, but I usually can, and I like that fact about myself.)

Everything in the world is cranky because it is the end of the school year and I am burnt out, and I'm not actually a fan of this way of being. So how about this: There are these flowers that grow in big weird purple balls and they're extremely keen. Aliums, I think? Anyways, I've been seeing those pretty frequently out and about in the world and I like them quite a bit.

(it is a well established fact that I like things that are round, known also as "the strongest I've ever been fuckored". I also like flowers and bright colours! So these are very good. I will try and take a picture sometime soon.)

Okay, I am in the library for extra math help (and I have a kiddo! even if it's not my kiddos who I was expecting but some strange lovely kiddo from another class, that's still quite good!) and while I'm not actively helping kids, I am either going to play Balatro or try and work on the Endless Email Project. Wish me luck, it's been a while!

~Sor
MOOP!

Tuesvisit

May. 19th, 2025 02:57 am
sorcyress: Drawing of me as a pirate, standing in front of the Boston Citgo sign (Default)
[personal profile] sorcyress
Tuesday visited this weekend!

I've been deeply burnt out (have I mentioned that here? Have I mentioned that thirty times here? I'm really not sure!) and so I was upfront when we started talking about a potential hang this weekend, and straight-up said "the most useful thing for me would be if you came over and hung out in my room while I got things done (nagging optional)". And so late late Friday night (when I was dead-to-the-world asleep, because I forgot my ADHD meds on Friday and crashed _hard_, like, nine PM out cold on the couch) Tuesday showed up and kissed my head and we went upstairs where I made the bed vaguely livable.

Saturday was really quite productive, and I'm pleased with what I got done! Sunday was much lessso productive, but it was a nice chance to hang out with Tues and kinda do nothing. Here's some highlights, in no particular order:

*Saturmorn I made eggs. They turned out pretty well! We ate them with toast and it was a very satisfying breakfast.

*Satureve, Ezri decreed it their annual birthday-sushi night, and so Tues and I walked to Davis to pick up a pah-tee-plah-tah1 with approximately eight hundred sushi on it. It was too much for the four of us to eat in one go, so I had a bit of leftover sushi this evening which was pretty great. All of it was great!

*I did three entire loads of laundry, which is, uh. Yeah. It's apparently been a hot second since I last did laundry. I had been observing that I was starting to run out of underwear, which like, because it's me means I only had like six clean pairs left or something. But they weren't the _optimal_ pairs anymore, that's the problem!

(the related problem is that I don't know where I will get more underwear when I need, because last I checked, Target is still being bootlicking fuckasses, and I have no interest in giving them my business until they make it right. So I will have to like, find a new company that sells fairly basic cotton boxer briefs in good colours, and I hate this.)

*I had done a rough clean of my desk on Tuesday night when Austin visited, but today I gave it another shakedown, and made some better progress. I found so many gift cards! Things still feel dire, but less so, and I found a box to put all the ADHD games and scrap paper, which seems good.

*Tuesday helped me hang up all the hanging laundry, and that was really _really_ nice of her. It's one of the parts I hate by far the most, and am worst at. So I really did finish all the laundry.

*I wrote heaps, including figuring out my spreadsheets for dance (where I got all the data I was posting about) and writing a bit of "?!" for having a thousand days of words.

*We started to do some LEGO, and then stopped, so I have some partially finished models that I will hopefully work on over the next few days. They're bugs!

*Today involved a long walk and some errands. I picked up a copy of Overgrowth from PSB, and we got Panera Bread (because aforementioned gift cards). It was fun!

*I showed Tuesday a little bit of Rogue Legacy, because my brain has been _very_ video game lately. This is a problem with being burnt out, I think, that I want to wrap myself in high dopamine low-effort things.

*And lots of snuggling and holding hands and basking in each other and stuff like that. This is my favourite part of kem visiting!

~Sor

MOOP!

1: If you're not reading this like a clone high reference, you're not doing it right!

One zero zero zero.

May. 17th, 2025 02:15 pm
sorcyress: Drawing of me as a pirate, standing in front of the Boston Citgo sign (Default)
[personal profile] sorcyress
Numbers are all meaningless. I'm a mathematician so you can trust me when I say there's nothing more significant or special about one-thousand over nine-hundred-ninety-nine. Or one-thousand-one. In the grand scheme of things, they're all "approximately that much". (in the grand scheme of things, every number you can name is in the same bucket. That's just peanuts to numbers, etc.)

So yeah. 1000. It is just a number and there is nothing special about it.

I'm a mathematician, so you can trust me when I say that there is something special and significant and glorious about every number. One thousand is the first of the four digit numbers! It's 8 in binary! It's 10^3! It's very nicely round appearing, with all the zeros, and it's pretty fun to say. "thousand" is a great number to throw in if you're exaggerating something or engaging in pleasant hyperbole.

It is the number of days, inclusive, since August 22nd, 2022. Meaning, if we call that particular date, arbitrarily chosen, "day 1" then today, May 17th, 2025, is day 1000.

***

I have been thinking a lot lately about secrets and privacy and the ways in which I talk around things when they're too big or complicated or different or weird for me to state outright.

This has been extremely relevant lately because several months ago the choir director at my school sent around an email to all-staff saying "hey, the students are going to do Vivaldi's Gloria as a masterwork, and I'd love to have some adults join in" which means I performed in my very first concert _ever_ on Thursday. As of 48 hours before the concert, I had told exactly the following people I was doing this: my mother. At therapy, I mentioned it fast-casual-offhand and it did become the entire focus of that session. Called mom and talked to her about it for over an hour more. Did manage to tell Austin about it that evening, which was hard, told Maia the next day, have started to vaguely mention it in general through the actual day of the concert. Why didn't I tell anyone in February when I started rehearsals? Because things that my brain decides as secrets are big and complicated and different and weird and I struggle to say things aloud about them sometimes.

Anyways, the concert went well! It was nice! There's no reason anyone can figure out why I didn't talk about it earlier (there are actually several, if anyone cares ping me and I'll make it a separate post). It's not like the other thing I haven't been talking a ton about, there's a _reason_ I'm not talking about that one, and it's fear of This Country. Remind me in late August if you want to know.

But yeah. This is apparently a thing in my heart and brain, that sometimes I decide to keep things secret, and then I am just fucking weird about them for no good reason.

***

The last day I missed writing 750words was August 21st, 2022. 1000 days ago.

It's just a number and it doesn't mean anything at all. It's just a number and it means everything.

~Sor
MOOP!

GenderFree SCD is actually working

May. 17th, 2025 01:52 pm
sorcyress: Drawing of me as a pirate, standing in front of the Boston Citgo sign (Default)
[personal profile] sorcyress
Okay, went a bit sideways from room cleaning into data collation for my GenderFree SCD class. I now know that the class has made a profit of: $137 after 16 classes. That is *not counting* the fact that I've still committed to putting myself 1k into the hole for this project, so like, the fact that we have actually made money is _great_ and means we're still well above the threshold for "should I consider shutting this down".

tbf, we don't pay me when I MC, and like, that's fine, that's part of what this project is, but it does mean I can't consider ourselves fully self-sufficient until we can't afford to regularly pay MCs. But I think as things currently stand, I still feel a lot more strongly about "I want people to come dance regardless of paying (AND STUDENTS SHOULD NOT GIVE ME MONEY)" than reaching a form of self-sufficiency that doesn't rely on a lot of unpaid labour from *me specifically*, because like, I am _so happy_ to deliver this labour.

I am actually being paid for my role in this class, and the way I am being paid is in "holy shit, I like my hobby and feel positive about it again". This is especially evident in the fact that this month I'm back teaching at Cambridge Class for the first time in over two years, and man, the vibes are not the same. I like teaching at Cambridge, I can have real good feelings and moments there. But I've been saying for a while "I love my hobby but it doesn't love me back".

Some of it is covid bullshit. It was _exhausting_ trying to be the only person to remind an entire group of adults that actually this dangerous communicable disease exists and we should try to protect each other from it. With my class, I could actually set a rule! And then I could set an example and say "look, masks are always recommended" and honestly, mostly people wear masks most of the time even when the wastewater levels are low enough that they're not required. Fuuuuck yes!

And so much of it is gender bullshit. Both Monday's I've taught, one person has specifically come up to me to complain about the use of "bird terms". Like. I can't deal with this. I can't deal with the clear vitriol at me using the gender-neutral terminology that seemingly every other dance form has been comfortable in for years. I really am tired of dealing with all the casual transphobia that comes alongside callers who are trying to call neutrally but not actually thinking about it1. And I just fucking can't handle being a polite little "good trans" when someone loudly asks if I'm dancing on the wrong side of the dance and then gets mad at _me_ for being confused by what they were asking.

It's not just that my hobby doesn't love me back. It's that parts of my hobby, some people in my hobby, are _loudly_ making it clear that I don't belong inside it. And I didn't realize how much I missed just easy enjoyable Scottish dancing until I started my own class, where that...doesn't happen. Coming back to Cambridge Class occasionally this spring has made me realize just how close I was to leaving the dance form entirely1.5. I can sustain being only kinda welcome in the main spaces when I know I also have my safer space to retreat to.

And my safer space is WORKING. I have 132 people who have attended at least 4/16 classes so far. I have 37 more people who have attended any classes at all. I'm averaging about 9 people a week, which is a full set plus a caller. I've had two weeks with only six of us present (both of which genuinely kicked ass) but never fewer, which means I've never had to horribly cancel, embarrassed as hell towards the four people there or whatever. I'm horrible at advertising and reminding people to come, but it's still happening anyways and that's really cool.

I start every Thursday morning internally screaming, because oh god, in addition to everything else I have to set a damn program and prepare some extra dances for if we have a weird number of dancers and aaah. And then I come home every Thursday floating, because people came and danced and tried things and learned things and seemed to have fun. And sometimes they even come back for more. It's the best thing I've done this year, and that's not even close. I mean, okay, fine, MGH emails me when they use my blood to save someone's life and that is also extremely satisfying3, but seriously. Creating a community feels very very good and makes me very happy to have done.

So yay, glad to have run some data and seen that it looks like I'll be able to keep going. Maybe for a while even!

~Sor
MOOP!

(odd Thursdays, either 7pm-9 or 7:30pm-9:30, 504 Medford St in Somerville (the NESFA clubhouse). Come join anytime!)

1: I got a comment after the welcome dance by someone thanking me for being one of two callers they've ever heard call both with gender-neutral terms *and* pronouns. If you say "first robin cast to her left, while her partner casts to his right" you are not actually accomplishing what you set out to do, and may actually be making things worse.

1.5: Yes, I am arrogant enough to point out that any member of RSCDS reading that should've gotten a chill down their spine. Not to be egotistical on main, but I am a huge boon to this branch. I am a good teacher, I am a regular member serving various committees and co-chairing various events, and I am a joyous and enthusiastic participant who loves dancing with newer dancers and enthusiastically trying to drag other people in. The hobby dies if you lose the people who make things happen and who bring in others. Just. Fucking. Saying.

2: And 7 of those have attended at least half the classes so far. No one has attended all 16, myself included (I'm at 15, which should really be "14.5" but I don't differentiate how long people were at class, Alex is also 15, Keira's 14.)

3: THIS IS A REAL THING AND IT IS THE ABSOLUTE BEST EMAIL YOU CAN EVER GET. I'm just fucking around going about my day and glance at my phone and it's a subject line "you just saved lives!" and because it's literally from the blood donor center, I know they actually mean it. So fucking cool. Cannot overstate how great that feels to get.

Never stop

May. 15th, 2025 11:09 am
jducoeur: (Default)
[personal profile] jducoeur

(Posted this on LinkedIn, of all places, since it seems appropriate there. But let's also put it here, where my friends will actually see it.)

I was chatting yesterday with a sometime colleague -- a fellow programmer -- who just got laid off, who asked (paraphrasing) "How do you manage to stay hopeful in this terrible job market? What do you do in the meantime that helps?" Here are some thoughts on that.

Part of my response here is history, because I've kind of lived through it before. 2025 is starting to remind me of 2002 -- what we referred to at the time as the "nuclear winter" of the software industry, in the wake of the Dotcom Bust.

(Although this time around, the tariff mess seems to be popping the bubble earlier, and maybe a little less violently, than 25 years ago.)

Regardless, I expect the job market this year to be brutal for software engineers. We have a lot more programmers than jobs for the time being, after years of heavy hiring around the pandemic, so it's worth thinking about how to get through it.

The first question, hard but important, is: how serious are you about this? In 2002, part of how things resolved is that a lot of folks dropped out of programming and found something else to do. By that point, we had tons of folks for whom it was just a job, rather than a passion, and many of them found greener pastures elsewhere. That's 100% sensible, and I expect a fair amount of it this year.

For those of us who do consider ourselves to be software "lifers" -- the ones who can't imagine not programming on a constant basis -- I have two key pieces of advice:

  • Never Stop Learning
  • Never Stop Coding

On the first point, self-driven learning is the heart of software engineering: as a rule of thumb, I believe in spending several hours every week, even when fully employed, learning new stuff -- staying on top of things is a key part of my job in an industry that is constantly evolving.

That becomes more true when you're unemployed: you should take the opportunity to learn new languages, new techniques, new technologies. Take the time to expand your toolbelt and figure out new things you can do and find fun.

On the second, take the downtime as a chance to buff your portfolio. For most of us, our dayjob work is pretty hidden: the code is proprietary to our former employers, so we can't show it off.

So don't take too much time as enforced vacation. Instead, once you have your head straight, get back to "working" a full day every day on something open source. That both shows that you have some initiative, and lets you show off your chops to prospective employers.

Indeed, this is exactly what worked for me in 2002. I taught myself the then-newish C# language and built a dumb little shareware application in it. That proved directly relevant to my job hunt: I wound up getting hired to build the .NET middleware backend for a startup that I had my eye on.

(This time around, I'm taking the time to bring Querki, my own little product, up to modern snuff after years of neglect -- that's teaching me a lot about AWS, and should give me a chance to turn that crufty ancient Scala code into something I'm more willing to show off.)

Mind, it's still hard -- you have to put a lot of mental effort into not letting it get you down. But having a project to focus on will help with your mental game, and can help with the job hunt in unexpected ways. I recommend it.

(no subject)

May. 12th, 2025 07:48 pm
sorcyress: Drawing of me as a pirate, standing in front of the Boston Citgo sign (Default)
[personal profile] sorcyress
I am le tired.

But I think I am happier when I actually write my words, all artisinal like, and I also think I simply have not been doing that lately --I've been getting wordcount, but it's been a lot of collections of notes from meetings, or emails home to parents, or significant bits of chatlog, or comments to other people. I'm not really...writing, mostly.

I think I think "Blues Clues" is twee, but also jegus fuck, what else am I supposed to call the repeated mounting evidence that I'm only just surviving right now, and nothing close to thriving. I am so tired, and so burnt out, all the time. It sucks, and yes there's a light at the end of the tunnel when which I get to recover, but it's called summer vacation, and I have a huge amount of stuff to get done Before Then.

(And as summer approaches I need to be Making Summer Plans, like visiting my mom in June (and maybe going on an adventure to NY with Tues's family?) and visiting MD again in late July/early August, and that thing I'm doing in mid-August, and also HELLO I HAVE WRITTEN MY PINEWOODS PROGRAMS BUT I AM NOWHERE NEAR READY TO TEACH MY CLASSES YET.)

So here's some assorted updates on assorted aspects of my life:

*Dance is obviously busy as hell. (I say obvious, but like, I'm not posting here so who is supposed to know anything?). I am teaching at Cambridge Class this month, which is...fine. It's nice to have a big crowd, and I'm very good at what I do, but it's disheartening that last week basically the first thing that happened was someone crankily requesting that I not use "bird words". I told them "nope, I'm gonna try and call mostly positional, but if I need role terms, that's what we use" and then found something else to do with my energy, but it still set the month to be emotionally costly.

I called the Highland Ball welcome dance this past Friday, and that went surprisingly well --I say surprising because it was a hell of a program, written by not-me, and I was very anxious it would be Too Complicated. Certainly it was a lot of words. But the words disguised dances that all flowed very very well, and I think I felt good about things ultimately. I got some compliments, and that was good, I think.

And I'm still running my class. Oh, I need to write a program for our party in June, crap. And I need to email exec to ask for a music subsidy. And at some point I need to write a report for the AGM. Huzzah.

*Work is also busy as hell, as we approach the MCAS tests and the end of the year. I am very very burnt out, which is making me a less good teacher. This turns out not to matter very much, because all the children are also very burnt out, which is making them less good students. We are all trying to be patient with each other and it's mostly working.

I got my assignment for next year today. Similar to what I've been doing, all Geometry again, but now I will be co-teaching the inclusion 10th grade geo, for students who require higher-than-usual numbers of supports. I am actually looking forward to this, which might be a horrible mistake. We'll see. At least all Geometry again means I shouldn't have any (many) repeat students.

*Separate from work is union stuff, and jegus, that has been _busy_ as hell. I shouldn't say a lot more in a public post, because I continue to pretend that it's a secret which district I work in, but yeah, I'm on the bargaining team, and that's been 3-5 hours of work every week since December. We're part of a whole little coalition with a bunch of the other local districts, which is keen, but our particular city is ~not interested in funding education~ which is significantly less keen. Ping me if you wanna hear more specific cussing.

*I have lost absolutely all motivation for general life maintenance, which is bad and just going to continue to be bad. My room is a fucking catastrophe and I don't know how to make it not be, because any time I go to be in it, the general malaise and burn-out from the rest of my life slam against the freeze-in-place overwhelm of looking around at my disaster area, and nothing gets done.

I have finally started reading dreamwidth again? For like, three days in a row now, over breakfast, like I'm supposed to. So that's nice, it's nice to find out what y'all are up to, a thing I haven't actually known since mid-April or so.

*Partners are good and I love them, but I don't feel like I'm doing a good job at being present for any of them because busy and _fucking busy_ and burnt out. I am maybe seeing Tuesday this upcoming weekend, but we haven't made proper plans yet. Austin and I are trying to do weekly dates, but teaching dance is throwing it all off, and this week I have a TMC meeting and blahahhhhhhh. mek and I have like seven episodes of OFMD to watch.

And then like, I completely slept through my weekly taskmaster-watch with Tailsteak last week. Like, was asleep, woke up at 9:15 to be all "shit, sorry I'm running late, lemme log on", immediately fell back asleep. Woke up at 10 at least to be able to be like "yeah, I'm not dead, and I am so sorry". Sigh.

***

I dunno, there's maybe other things too, but they're mostly video games. Gonna post this and go put my dance shoes on so I can teach a class and stuff.

~Sor
MOOP!

Sorky's thoughts on AI

May. 9th, 2025 09:01 am
sorcyress: Drawing of me as a pirate, standing in front of the Boston Citgo sign (Default)
[personal profile] sorcyress
The school asked me to take a survey about AI usage! I could win a $25 gift card (probably to Amazon). In retrospect, I should've complained about that as well! Anyways, here are my answers. I didn't include the question prompts, but you can probably make some educated guesses as to what they asked.

***

I think it is unhelpful and will actively cheat our students of real learning and understanding by making them over-reliant on copying from a resource they don't fully understand, and can't identify if it is making errors or expressing poor judgement. I also think school use of generative AI is incompatible with our school goals of sustainability and fighting climate change, given how devestating it is towards the environment.

AI confidently introduces information that may or may not be correct. If I am an expert in the material, this means I waste my time proofreading instead of just doing it correctly myself the first time. If I am not an expert in the material, I am not qualified to identify when the AI is hallucinating and may repeat those confident-but-incorrect answers, causing harm to my students and my own understanding.

I mean, students since time immorial have tried to cheat themselves out of real understanding. As a teacher, my job is to actually assess them as individuals to find what they know. I worry that AI will weaken their skills, but it in no way scares me, because I am confident in my abilities as a teacher to come up with useful curriculum that will genuinely guide my students towards the information and metacognitive skills I want them to be able to express.

It can not be used thusly. We are not providing a massive data set that can be filtered using AI (such as the beneficial use of identifying anomolous cells to search for cancer), we are providing individual attention for individual people. AI collapses into an extreme form of "one size fits all" that does not have any nuance in the different needs of different students.

AIs are routinely confident-but-incorrect. No one should be using a learning tool that provides outputs they can't understand, because then they can't assess whether the answer makes sense or is correct.

Honestly, I'm somewhat horrified that this survey is providing questions acting like AI can be a helpful thing for a district that is otherwise trying to focus on authentic community-building and relationships. If SPS wants students, parents, and educators to abandon the actual communication and relationships we are forming with each other in favour of speaking to robots, I am appalled.

***

The subtext (of this, my first post in nine days) is that the district is exhausting me in so many ways right now, and I'm pretty burnt out. I'd like to make an actual post about what's happening in my life, but that involves an energy that I simply have not had. Maybe I can do that with my prep period today, instead of grading or whatever else it was I was supposed to do. I really miss reading dreamwidth and hearing what yinz are up to. :(

~Sor
MOOP!

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