It’s back-to-school time in Kingston. U-Hauls and SUVs will clog the streets. Lines at restaurants and grocery stores will lengthen. Gangs of frosh will sing and shout. The buzz will be good. And a lifetime spent in the school year’s seasonal rhythms tells me football is just around the corner. Too bad I’m anxious because my profession is leaving me behind.
Last year, AI’s predilection for vacuous circularity, generalizations without facts, and fake sources – like the book I never wrote that appeared in one footnote – betrayed several students’ papers, leaving me to wonder why anyone would pay tuition to submit fake work. I can’t wrap my head around recent talk about how we might use AI as a positive tool in the classroom given how much it is used for fraud.
A recent directive further urged us to craft litigation-proof syllabi for fear of being hauled before the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal for violating a student’s accommodation. Maybe they have been excused from speaking in class or allowed to arrive at and leave class whenever they see fit or been given extensions on every assignment. All of it seems to be aimed at reducing anxiety even though that’s about the sum of the adult lives they are entering.
So as Labour Day rolls by, I’ll ride the buzz in the streets and on campus and do my best to keep up without giving up. It took several millennia for the dinosaurs to die out, after all, and the Patriots can always turn things around.