weird interaction with a student this week. they kept coming up with weird "facts" ("greek is actually a combination of four other languages") that left me baffled. i said let's look this stuff up together, and they said ok, i'll open a search bar, and they opened... ch*tgpt

and i was like "this is not a search bar" and they were like "yes it is, you can search for anything in here" the thing that made me feel crazy is like. every kid that's using this as a browser is getting new BESPOKE false "facts." this isn't "a widespread misconception about X that stems from how it's taught in schools." each individual kid is now hooked into a Nonsense Machine with the "widespread misconception about X" you can start at a baseline. like, ok, in tenth grade we all talk about X thing from history, and that leaves us with some misguided concepts about X, but we can correct that as students get broader understandings of the world but with this, each child is getting UNIQUE wrong facts they are SURE are correct... because they did what we told them to do! they "looked it up"! they got it from somewhere! it's not a kid making up a belief on hearsay and assumption... it's something they think they LEARNED

this kid was extremely combative with me, and i understood why. i was sitting in front of him and telling him that the internet, a computer, technology, all these supposedly authoritative things... were wrong. and that i, one person, was right. he basically *couldn't* believe me. 8 135 3.8K 97K ... stillorangecrushed @stilloranged. 7h he decided that i was simply a teacher who'd made a mistake. he could check it, after all! he could look it up! he could find the REAL facts. i obviously hadn't done that, i was just an adult who'd decided i was smarter than him. hence the defensiveness. like i said: i understood 5 760 3.2K 82K stillorangecrushed @stilloranged. 7h ... it was so fucking rough. i did my best, but i am one person trying to work against a campaign of misinformation so vast that it fucking terrifies me. this kid is being set up for a life lived entirely inside the hall of mirrors

Well this is grim

Title could be In Like Flint

Text: Impact: Texas lawmakers push for new exceptions to state's strict abortion ban after the deaths of two women. Background: Side by side images of two women. On left, an image of Josseli Barnica holding her baby. On right, an image of teenager Nevaeh Crain.

ProPublica recently reported on two women — Josseli Barnica and Nevaeh Crain — who died in Texas after they couldn’t access timely reproductive care.

Now, more than 100 Texas OB-GYNs have signed a letter blaming their deaths on the state’s laws.

Read more: https://propub.li/495B4PO

The Trump-Trumpist Divide The incoming president wants to do things his voters have not embraced.

Trump and his entourage want fo claim a mandate for the most extreme elements of their agenda. But a lot of people who voted for Trump were delusional about what that agenda actually is, and voted for him believing he wouldn’t do those things. www.theatlantic.com/politics/arc...

There’s the right spelling

Schadenfrau