kkylin
I'm on the math faculty at a R1 (public) university, and we've not had a budget for graders for most courses for a very long time, with the exception of e.g., very large courses. For most classes the instructor does all the grading. Grading has been a significant fraction of my time teaching, certainly much more than what I can spend on preparing lectures and other teaching-related work. Moreover, much of the time grading is giving feedback, figuring out partial credit, etc; just checking "correct" or "incorrect" is often relatively quick.
In the last couple years, my personal experience has been that (i) a very small (and possibly vanishing) fraction of students are declining to use AI, or at least use it sparingly, because they want to learn; (ii) a growing percentage are using it as a personal tutor; and (iii) some are outright outsourcing all the work. The last category is small, but if that category grows (anecdotally this seems to be the case -- I've mostly taught grad courses in the last year and don't have first-hand knowledge) then what would be the point of spending all that time grading and giving detailed written feedback?
Incidentally, many students in the second category are the type who in years past would form study groups, come to office hours, etc.; now they seem to prefer AI over humans. Some of them do seem to benefit from it, but not all. How one uses AI matters a lot, and how to help students use the tech to learn is something we have to figure out (regardless of how we feel about AI's impact on research).
Edit: added semi-source
https://mathoverflow.net/questions/100316/raoul-botts-quote-...
Anyway if you enjoyed this you might also enjoy
Having said all that, I'd taken mathematical logic in college to learn about incompletenss, but the most interesting things I got out of it were completeness and compactness. Non-standard models really can be quite interesting.
The structure of the periodic table itself can also be understood, to leading order anyway, in symmetry terms. See for example https://mathstodon.xyz/@johncarlosbaez/112540366778806757 and references there.
If someone has a work-around I'd love to hear it. Until then, or until Apple changes this design, I think I'm done with iPads. I don't want to pay that much to "own" something that Apple can simply make obsolete by reconfiguring or turning off a server somewhere.
Edit: fix typo
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eunice_aphroditois
Thankfully they don't live on land.
The pain points are what other commenters have said:
- I don't find the default config a good fit for me, and run it heavily customized. As someone said everything in Emacs turns into a project...
- Performance can be an issue, especially indexing new mail (and especially if you like to lug around a copy of most of your emails locally as I do). On a laptop while traveling this used to be more of a problem, but newer versions are notieably quicker and newer laptops have better battery life.
- HTML rendering isn't great. Thankfully I don't get too many important messages that isn't just plain text. This might be a reasonable use case for xwidget-webkit though I'd imagine there are security/privacy issues to work out. (Another Emacs project -- yay!)
When I started I thought it would be an efficient way to get through lots of emails, and it has been for the most part. I'm just not sure I've saved time overall unless one counts the hours configuring it as "entertainment / hobby" rather than "work".
I don't question this decision is sometimes (often) driven by the need to increase publication count. (Which, in turn, happens because people find it esaier to count papers than read them.) But there is a counterpoint here, which is that if you write say a 50-pager (not super common but also not unusual in my area, applied math) and spread several interesting results throughout, odds are good many things in the middle will never see the light of day. Of course one can organize the paper in a way to try to mitigate the effects of this, but sometimes it is better and cleaner to break a long paper into shorter pieces that people can actually digest.
- Differenting a function composed of simpler pieces always "converges" (the process terminates). One just applies the chain rule. Among other things, this is why automatic differentiation is a thing.
- If you have an analytic function (a function expressible locally as a power series), a surprisingly useful trick is to turn differentiation into integration via the Cauchy integral formula. Provided a good contour can be found, this gives a nice way to evaluate derivatives numerically.
For anyone else interested: I wanted to be able to typeset mathematics (actual formulas) for the students that's as automated as possible. There are 1 or 2 commercial products that can typeset math in Braille (I can't remember the names but can look them up) but not priced for individual use. My university had a license to one of them but only for their own use (duh) and they did not have the staff to dedicate to my students (double duh).
My eventual solution was to compile latex to html, which the students could use with a screen reader. But screen readers were not fully reliable, and very, very slow to use (compared to Braille), making homework and exams take much longer than they need to. I also couldn't include figures this way. I looked around but did not find an easy open source solution for converting documents to Braille. It would be fantastic to be able to do this, formulas and figures included, but I would've been very happy with just the formulas. (This was single variable calculus; I shudder to think what teaching vector calc would have been like.)
FYI Our external vendor was able to convert figures to printed Braille, but I imagine that's a labor intensive process.
Partway through the term we found funding for dedicated "learning assistants" (an undergraduate student who came to class and helped explain what's going on, and also met with the students outside of class). This, as much or more than any tech, was probably the single most imapctful thing.