Thinking about what kinds of rigor are needed

A couple of articles have been bouncing around in my mind, both of which touch on issues I’m sure most educators are thinking about, but where I feel like the most interesting part of the conversation starts at the point the articles end.

The first article from Inside Higher Ed, New Data Shows Attendance Fosters Student Success, initially caught my attention because of the sheer obviousness of the statement and curiosity about what more there might be to say about this. If my class sessions don’t foster student success, what am I even doing! The article, of course, is more focused on the tension between how faculty encourage students to attend (knowing that it will help them be successful) and students’ desire for flexibility in their schedules and dislike of attendance factoring into their grades (as compared to just their ultimate ability to demonstrate what they have learned).

From the article: “A professor at Colorado State University surveyed 175 of his students in 2023 and found that 37 percent said they regularly did not attend class because of physical illness, mental health concerns, a lack of interest or engagement, or simply because it wasn’t a requirement.” I find that list interesting, because the first two items are very different from the second two items. Other quotes mention transportation issues and class conflicting with work schedules. This range of reasons that students do not attend creates challenges for faculty, particularly the evidence that (possibly particularly when compared to the many classes that do require attendance), a lack of a grade-linked attendance policy contributes to students deciding not to attend, when compared to their other interests and priorities.

I appreciate that the article wraps up by basically advocating for teaching in a manner that makes evident to students the value of being present. That’s certainly been my strategy and for a good number of students, it can be effective. But it can also take time for students to make that connection, and first-year students in particular (in my experience) can find themselves only realizing what they have missed by not being in class when they are in a very hard spot for catching up. Having an attendance grade makes it easy to intervene when a student is heading down that road. I’m working on finding ways to have those interventions (e.g. email messages to students who aren’t keeping up with the activities that are supposed to be happening in class) but there always seem to be students who do the math and decide that formative work that’s only worth 5-10% of the overall grade is optional as compared to other priorities. It’s a conversation I keep coming back to with colleagues – I don’t judge students for having to balance priorities, but how do we help students have a more accurate sense of the cost-benefit tradeoff of attending class?

The other article, Meet Students Where They Are? Maybe Not, from the Chronicle of Higher Education, follows the title with “Lax standards will void the value of a college education.” A telling sentence: “If the college degree continues to lose its traditional function of signaling competency and grit, the outlook will be grim for a higher-ed system largely financed by student debt.”

The inclusion of “grit” in addition to competency is interesting there. In some ways, I agree – can you manage your time and priorities to be able to learn, are you willing to make use of the help available to you in order to succeed, etc. But if my competency assessments are the same, what is the merit in (per the previous article) assigning a specific point deduction to an absence if the student can demonstrate they’ve made up for the missed learning activities on their own time? Doesn’t the student juggling a 30-40 hour a week off-campus job as well as a full time course load show at least as much grit as the classmate with a 10-hour a week work student position or no job at all – even if I show some leniency around attendance?

The article states that “a third of professors in our survey admit to watering down their courses in recent years; we suspect that many more will have to dilute their syllabi in the future”. Perhaps that is accurate, in the way that the  sentence asks to be read, and that would be unfortunate. But I’ve also had a lot of productive conversations with faculty at many institutions (not just my own) about the balance between number of topics covered versus perhaps cutting back on some content in order to engage more deeply in the topics we do cover. Some of my best class sessions have been when I realized that my students were trying to understand a hard concept and, rather than pressing on with the next topic, I gave them space to really apply their critical thinking skills and work together to make sure everyone in the class reached a solid level of understanding – even if it meant looking at the class plans for the rest of the week and figuring out what to prune. Are we watering things down, or are we identifying that facts-conveyed may not be the best way to measure the learning value of a course? I’m also not sure that a syllabus level assessment is the best way to look at this, compared to a curriculum level assessment. If students are coming in with different preparation, why wouldn’t we change how our introductory courses operate? If, in turn, the structure of the curriculum can shift as students move through it, and we can still graduate students who depart with the needed competencies – rather than dropping or failing out – it seems like a bit of early “watering down” was all for the good.

I understand that this looks different at different institutions, and I do think the article has a good point that many institutions’ weak methods for assessing the quality of instruction incentivize making students happy (particularly for untenured faculty), so we should find better methods for instructional assessment. But, reading these two articles together in close succession, I think it is an overreaction to suggest that we should stop considering who are students are as they enter the college and the classroom and think about how we can continue to adjust our instruction to meet that reality.

Miscellanea, June 2025

This video made me laugh enough I watched it twice, and then a bunch of others from the series, which were also good but not as funny as How to Fix Grocery Stores from Hank Green.

This made the rounds thoroughly, but this is exactly how I consumed the weather forecast for years and I would absolutely install a widget that ran this on my phone.

Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Aviation is a variation on the falsehood programmers believe about names. While the names piece is great, the aviation variation is interesting because, on its surface, air travel is an entirely manufactured process that seems like it should be controllable and standardizable.

Dragonsweeper: You probably didn’t know that you needed a mashup of minesweeper and a dungeon crawler, but you do. Key to know that you can lose all of your hearts, so long as you don’t lose more than are available, leveling up restores all your health, and you can carry extra diamonds forward from one level to the next. I am not good at this and still have not swept the dragon.

Real life updates: Managed my first 10K run, and no I won’t tell you how very slow it was. Having a good start to the veggie garden including my first foray into growing lettuce, with positive signs for the cucumber crop as well. Good reading from the month included The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu (second book in the Three Body Problem trilogy), The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead, and Eligible by Curtis Sittenfeld.

I have an old collection of Byte magazines that I picked up early in my time as a faculty member imagining I would do …. something? …. with them. It occurred to me the other day that a thing would be to include highlights in my miscellanea posts. So, trying that out – here’s the cover of the oldest issue I have from August 1983. Look at how minimal the text is there. Besides the publication info at the top, there’s no chaos of article titles, just “The C Language”. Love the cup of coffee far from the computer on a separate desk. Just a couple of pages in to the magazine, there was this sweet ad for C86, the preferred compiler of bulgy-brained aliens who want tight code that includes all the functions in K&R.

  

Project report: Raglan Pullover

Striped sweater in yellow, teal, and purpleI took a step away from my lace knitting projects and knit up a quick sweater for myself this spring. I managed to finish it while there was enough cool weather to wear it a couple of times and it’s a comfy, slightly oversized fit.

The pattern is Lightweight Raglan Pullover from the Purl Soho yarn site. The yarn is Big Twist Boho in color Lakeside Lodge – it’s a Joann Fabrics brand I had never used before but picked up in one of their store clearance sales. It’s an 80% acrylic, 15% wool, 5% mohair blend listed as “super fine” weight (4 mm needles/3.25 hook as the recommended tools to get a 4’x4′ square) and it took me about two and a half skeins (590 yd/3.5 oz per skein).

I picked the pattern because I wanted something that would have a lot of mindless knitting (as compared to my lace patterns) and that would show off the colors in the yarn. It’s an incredibly easy pattern, knitting the two sleeves and then the body rom the bottom and joining them all together to finish the yolk. If I had been more confident that I would have enough yarn leftover, I could have made that transition a bit cleaner but I think it looks fine when I’m wearing it.

The cuffs, hem, and collar use a neat stitch I’ve never used before for the edging – Cording Stitch. I definitely recommend using the “lifeline” they suggest for identifying the round to pick up. It makes a nice slightly rolled edge but counteracts the overall tendency for stockinette to curl (along with some mild blocking).

If I made the pattern again, I would consider if I could adjust the decrease rounds to make the neck hole a bit smaller. As is, some t-shirts look awkward under this neckline. I’m happy with the length of the sweater, but it would be very easy to make it slightly shorter or longer to your taste.

A big agree that “the homework is the cheat code”

Just the title of this long blog entry caught my eye, because YES!!! The Homework is the Cheat Code indeed!

The content didn’t disappoint. Written by someone teaching CS at the graduate level at U Chicago, I’m not sure if I’m shocked or relieved that they’re seeing similar patterns in their students as we’re seeing at the undergrad level. Maybe the most honest reaction is that if we want to graduate students who are job- and grad school-ready, addressing these tendencies has to be central to undergraduate education (bold mine):

I get a lot more requests now for extensions on the project they’ve known about all quarter (students reading this: lovingly, no ). I get a lot lower compliance on instructions I wrote down twice and then also said twice in class. I get a lot more homework reflection assignments that package considerable insight—they’re still very smart people, after all—into the syntax I’d expect in a group text among friends rather than prose submitted to a graduate school instructor.

I like the observation that overcommitment, or burnout from years of overcommitment is part of the problem. I definitely see students think that the best value will come from packing as much as possible into their college experience and we’ve started having conversations at my institution about how we encourage students to make choices so they can more deeply benefit from the smaller set of things they are doing.

This, inevitably, gets linked to the issue of students using generative AI for assignments in a way that is not productive for their learning. This particular instructor doesn’t forbid the use of AI. Beyond other good reasons, they point out that we just don’t have data on the impact of these tools on learning yet and allowing some usage lets them collect data on how students are choosing to use AI. They’re coming at it from the perspective of someone who studies how LLM tools affect the development process, so that is interesting.

I love how they break down the academic honesty issue of using generative AI by first defining the issue: “I define “cheating” as something a student does, usually in the interest of time, whose tradeoff is the circumventing of the assignment’s learning objective.” and then walking through reasons students might not invest the needed time or might circumvent learning objectives. The time element certainly circles back to being overcommitted – I think it also connects to a lack of understanding of what time it really takes to be a full time student.

For both the time and learning objectives elements, I think trust in the instructor (and possibly in the institution?) play a large role. Is the student willing to trust that the structure of the course and the assigned work have been thoughtfully designed and will support their learning? How do you build that trust? And, the following paragraph got me to thinking, how do you push past students’ focus on efficiency of learning over effectiveness of learning:

We’re steeped in a tech industry laser-focused on efficiency as a positive quality, but this term often becomes overloaded when we’re talking about capacity-building. I’ve lifted weights for about a decade now. The exercises that build my capacity the most are not the efficient ones. Walking is efficient—humans can walk a very long way without spending a lot of energy. Kettlebell swings are inefficient; they require an enormous amount of energy and muscle activation relative to walking. That’s why weightlifters do them: they produce capacity-building adaptations faster because of that. Learning works the same. The activities that promote learning are, by design, inefficient: they require an enormous amount of attention and active engagement, usually on a thing that the learner feels bad at. They deliberately present the learner with challenge, and sometimes frustration, because those uncomfortable states build cognitive capacity. Avoid this, and you avoid building cognitive capacity. That’s a weird choice to make in a class with the specific value proposition of teaching something.

This leads to the heart of how they connect this back to the use of generative AI in learning, which they break down into whether it is being used as an “outcome accelerant” (thus shortchanging the learning process by just getting to the product faster) or a “learning aid” (where the tool streamlines the time taken to really focus on the activity related to the learning objective).

The article includes tons of examples of syllabus language, assignment information, etc. about how all of this works in practice, including how they set up assignments where the “cheat code” is that doing the work as assigned is more efficient than trying to get gen AI to do the work for you (they like the tool of “instructive visualizations”). This may or may not relate to your particular classroom. But I think there’s good potential for this outcome accelerant versus learning aid contrast to apply across a lot of classroom settings.

Miscellanea, May 2025

April got away from me with the end of the semester (earlier than usual with a new academic calendar for us), so early May has been spent catching up all over the place.

Looming summer means more time to read. In preparation, I browsed the new-to-me Literary Hub on grading breaks.

Ask a Ninja is back!

Long read The Department of Everything: Dispatches from the telephone reference desk – excellent reflections on the importance of knowing how to find information and how to frame answerable questions.

An even longer read on the hidden house in the IBM ascii character set and where it came from/what it means: Why is there a “small house” in IBM’s
Code page 437?

A really interesting discussion of the considerations of alternative grading in a six-week asynchronous course, specifically a Discrete Structures course. The compressed timeframe seems to call for daily work and mechanisms to ensure students aren’t falling more than a day or two behind, at the risk of never catching back up. Perhaps my favorite part of the write-up was footnote 3 on the challenge that asynchronous online courses are marketed as being ideal for “busy working adults” but still require a significant amount of time, which may not always be as clearly marketed or understood.

If you are a substack person, there is a Guide to Pittsburgh Substack Newsletters.

Been playing the demo of Word Play after watching the developer’s video about creating it (which made me wonder if I should try Balatro, which I guess everyone else has played). I like the gimmick of the game of being able to add rewards or change game features after each round. Entirely agree that this would be great on mobile.

Computing education for everyone, and maybe some CS also?

Mark Guzdial has written some blog posts recently about having computing education for everyone that doesn’t have to – and shouldn’t – look like computer science education. He has posts looking at this for both the undergraduate level and the K-12 level.

I’m entirely on board with offering introductory computing and programming education from students with a range of disciplinary interests that doesn’t look like a typical CS1 class or have to cover the typical range of CS1 topics. However, I think a piece missing out of this discussion is whether there is value is teaching those courses in a way that supports students if they realize they want to become computer science students.

Mark gives the example of the insistence of teaching loops in introductory programming, despite the fact that many students will not need loops for their problem solving and can rely on vector-based operations. For students getting started with programming in a data science context, this is certainly the case.

However, particularly when thinking about the K-12 level, how do we know which students “only” need computational exposure or conversational programming skills and which will develop an interest in deeper CS study? Is there merit to introducing some of these foundational CS concepts in these courses, even if just to familiarize students with the fact they exist and give them a taste?

Based on conversations in my department, I think the answer is yes. To build on the example of loops, perhaps an introductory data science course doesn’t have to use loops extensively or test students on them. But, loops are useful! And, if a student does decide to move into CS, they’ll find themselves well served with some minimal prior exposure to the concept.

Again, I am glad that Mark is calling for computing classes that meet the real needs of students who do not plan to study computer science but have the need to be literate in computation. But I hope that some portion of those students may, through those computing classes, realize that they want to change their plans to include computer science. I fear curricula that would tell students “you can’t study CS because you didn’t start out in the right courses/on the right track.” What, then, might we minimally include into those courses to give students the potential to shift tracks?

Miscellanea, March 2025

The hardest working font in Manhattan: Excellent long read about a near-invisible font that appears everywhere, and the investigation into where it came from and why it is ubiquitous. Ultimately its a story of the analog versus the digital. Beautiful collection of illustrative photos throughout.

Ran into this interesting research from last year about reconstructing protolanguages and developing models that can move from a protolanguage to the modern variants and backwards from a modern language to its ancestor.

As for gaming this month….

Hooked on Bracket City as part of my morning word-game routine. The site started up on January 30th if you want to go back and play all the puzzles from the beginning. I definitely recommend the tutorial (the question mark button) to get started.

Very pleased to have played a round of botsbotsbots and successfully evaded detection as a human.

Also pleased to have puzzled my way through this cute little online puzzle box made with HTML and CSS.

Try to match 368 chickens. You will probably fail.

Miscellanea, January 2025

Going up a couple of days late, here’s some things I came across in the past month….

A new favorite comic from SMBC

There is a variety of content at the ELIZA Archaeology Project site including the complete code of the text generation system with a description of the MAD language it was written in, a blog on the software archaeology process of recovering it, and a running version you can try out.

The Calm Tech Certification (IEEE Spectrum article, project site, book) is a really appealing idea, both for consumers and as a tool for encouraging developers to think about making our technology less intrusive and stressful.

Stimulation Clicker is in the idle clicker genre but with a definitive end after not too much gameplay that walks you through the exact opposite of “calm tech”. Interesting to notice your personal point of “too much”.

The point of this article recounting a conversation with the Replit CEO on their shift to AI-driven software development seems to be to argue that developing software should not require an understanding of code, but rather the skill of recognizing problems that software can solve. I’ve seen good writing elsewhere about how to include more instruction on identifying software-appropriate problems earlier into CS curricula, though these conversations can get stuck when you start to get into the weeds of what each of us mean by “developing software” (are we producing a product for sale with assurances to a customer base about reliability, or are we building a tool for ourselves to solve a local problem?). I’d have liked to see some comment on the decision to embed AI-generation of code into Replit mid-semester with no advance warning or ability to disable it in student accounts after years of presenting themselves as educator-friendly.

The data analysis you didn’t know you needed of the Most Mario Colors.

Miscellanea, October 2024

The Merchants of Venice – In Code: A nice little review of early cryptology in 1400s/1500s Venice within both trade and politics

Typing Bowl is only barely a game but it’s good for a five minute break to see if you can type faster than strangers on the internet.

I’m not a big discussion forum person, but this massive list of topic-specific forums probably has some great content in here. I wish there was an index of the topic areas at the top of the page to help skim for what’s available.

The recent post Of trashcans and thimbles by Math with Bad Drawings is not only a nice review of an unintuitive statistical phenomenon but makes a connection to a larger life lesson about taking bold chances while also attending to the day to day essentials that will let you be successful if your bold chance comes through. Thematic for a month of talking to students about their education and their goals.

A little bit of navel gazing about the history of the blogosphere as Scripting News turns 30 which pairs well with The Verge’s retrospective on 2004 (a somewhat frightening flashback to internet culture the year I started working at my college)

Thinking about having my AI students read GSM-Symbolic: Understanding the Limitations of Mathematical Reasoning in Large Language Models which got a burst of attention. I find myself talking to students about fragility in systems in all my courses these days.

Miscellanea, September 2024

Cool photos and breakdown of a Navajo weaving of an Intel Pentium chip from a display in the National Gallery of Art (sadly the exhibit now seems to be closed). The breakdown is able to map out the chip to determine specifically which chip it is based on. The blog post also closes with an interesting story of the Fairchild work on the Shiprock chip and the relationship to the Navajo.

Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power Since 1500: Scrollable visualization of computing, communication, and control from the 1500s to the present categorized by things like communication devices, interfaces, algorithms, education, human bodies, biometrics, medical, policing, energy and resources, etc. Lots of ways to browse this; one interesting option is to zoom in on the era you were born (if it was long enough ago to be referred to as an era) and scroll your way across horizontally.

The headline “Secret calculator hack brings ChatGPT to the TI-84, enabling easy cheating” hides the amount of hardware modification required to get this to work. The pitch on the video that this is the “Ultimate Cheating Device” may oversell how helpful it is to query ChatGPT during an exam through your calculator keyboard and screen (better prompt engineer some shorter responses than usual!). But it is a pretty impressive hardware hack.

A couple of cool looking paper-and-pencil, single-player sims of a dungeon crawler and a space shooter: Paper Apps Dungeon and Paper Apps Galaxy. Both procedurally generated so each game notebook is unique.