Robots, Guns, Teachers, and Keeping Eyes on Teachers

This past week let’s hope that you remembered to acknowledge your Loved Ones on Valentine's Day, a day of love. Or is it?

Back in the day, in the third century, Roman Emperor Claudius II executed two women on February 14 in which both women were named Valentine. The Romans also had a celebration called the Feast of Lupercalia which occurred between February 13 to 15. During this time, goats and dogs would be sacrificed, and the men would take the hide of the animals they just sacrificed and whip the women. The belief was that this would make them fertile.

Fast forward, Pope Gelasius, purposefully or not, combined these two events and in a way co-opted this celebration to make it less pagan-esque. Through assimilation, Valentine got confused with a Norman celebration called Galantine’s Day because obviously. Then comes Chaucer and Shakespeare to add a ton of sweetness to the celebration. To top it off, Hallmark began mass-producing Valentine’s Day cards in 1913, and we have not turned back since.

There is your history lesson for the day!

Robots scoring student essays

The worst fear for all teachers has come…the robots are coming! Or are they?

In Texas, a new model on how the written portion of the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness (STAAR) was implemented in December. Officials overseeing the rollout stated that the AI being implemented is particular to one question and is less robust than Chatgpt. The idea is that this will help cut grading time and personnel needed to grade, saving $15 million to $20 million in cost.

Well, that does not sound too bad, right?

For comparison, during the first iteration of the revamped STAAR test last Spring, the test was scored by humans. About 1 in 4 received a 0% on the writing test. In the Fall, the robots helped score the test, and there were 8 in 10 that received a 0% on the writing test. The claim was that Fall students tend to be re-testers who didn’t do well on the initial exam.

Efficiency is excellent to strive for, and there are many great things this new wave of technology, especially AI, can do, from helping teachers create lesson plans to coming up with great examples of figurative language that is grade-appropriate. Yet, when it comes to writing an essay, can that be left to AI? It may be similar to asking if AI can differentiate between a great painting and a masterpiece. When it comes to the aspects of specific subjective natures that humans have, that is not easy to emulate with 1s and 0s. That is not to say that it can or will never happen, but there is still a way to go until we arrive at a point where we have a genuinely sentient AI like a HAL 9000 or a J.A.R.V.I.S. from the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Teachers, your jobs are safe…for now.

This is not easy to talk about…

School shootings are a uniquely American thing. That is not to say that they do not happen in other countries, but no country comes close to the number of shootings that occur on school campuses than America does. They happen so often that most school shootings do not even register on your everyday radar.

Just this past week, on Wednesday - Valentine’s Day - a fight broke out on the school campus of an Atlanta high school. The fight escalated, and four teenagers ended up getting shot. One teenager almost lost his life, but thankfully, he is now on the road to recovery.

In Ontario, California, fortunately, a shooting was prevented at a high school. A classmate expressed that the teen was “fixated on school shootings and had access to weapons,” per a CNN report. 

On the first day back from break in January, there was a shooting at an Iowa school where a student shot six people: 5 students and one administrator. Unfortunately, one of the students died who was in sixth grade. What is Iowa’s solution to preventing future gun violence? 

More guns. Teachers and staff should be armed. As an educator, would you feel safer knowing everyone on campus was holstering a weapon?

Why bring this up here? Because it is hard not to think about this when recently a tragedy occurred during what should have been a joyous occasion, a Superbowl parade, ended with more than two dozen people shot, with one person losing their life. The person who died was Lisa Lopez-Galvan, who was a radio DJ and is survived by her two children.

Here is an interactive map of gun ownership by country, and you will notice no country comes to the number of guns the United States has. Even a country that has been in a constant state of war for the past decade, Yemen, has fewer guns per person in the country.

It should not be a controversial thing to say that the United States has too many guns in the country and that there are common-sense gun laws that can be implemented to minimize the number of deaths caused by firearms.

We will end with the question that was asked earlier about if you would feel safer knowing everyone on your school campus was holstering a weapon - would you have no hesitation pulling that trigger knowing that you will be taking the life of one of your students?

There are hundreds of things teachers need to worry about in their classrooms, and this should not be something teachers should ever have to think about.

Eyes on Education

Indiana State Attorney General Todd Rokita launched a portal called “Eyes on Education.” The portal allows parents and other concerned citizens to report and provide “evidence” of possible indoctrination in public schools. Indiana’s education department has no affiliation with the portal.

Below is an example uploaded to the portal that was labeled as CRT:

What do you think? Is this great example of possibly indoctrinating your youth toward a particular ideology? Here is Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita’s Portal if you would like to browse more examples uploaded to the portal.

An alliance of teachers’ unions is demanding that Rokita remove the portal because of Rokita’s history of being a staunch conservative, and that he set this up to advance his political agenda. The teachers state that this is a dangerous precedent that continues to attack public schools under false pretenses and that the goal of this portal is to further a conservative culture throughout the school system.

A big concern is the lack of controls in the portal, as anyone can go in and upload any document without being vetted for accuracy or authenticity. A spokesperson stated that everything uploaded has been verified and submitted by either a teacher or school staff. This has not been confirmed.

Similar measures have been tried in Virginia and in Arizona and have yet to yield any solid results when it comes to teachers possibly indoctrinating students with CRT or other beliefs that skew in the way of diversity and inclusion. Virginia’s attempt at this was quietly shut down. Arizona no longer has a direct line. You can no longer call the Empower Hotline. There is now a form that you must fill out to which there is a series of questions asked about the event that occurred, as well as what school, the name of the principal, the date it happened, and your name and number.

Should parents be worried about teachers indoctrinating kids from, as stated on the Empower Hotline section on the Arizona Department of Education page, “from [teachers] teaching academic standards such as those that focus on race or ethnicity, rather than individual merit, promoting gender ideology, social-emotional learning, or inappropriate sexual content,” in the classrooms?

Closing Bell

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On this day in 1930…

Pluto was discovered by astronomer Clyde Tombaugh. It was the smallest and the ninth planet discovered in our solar system. That lasted until 2006, when the International Astronomical Union (IAU) demoted Pluto to a dwarf planet. Pluto found its demotion to be unjust and is in an ongoing fight for its status as a “dwarf” planet as it deems this demotion in status as discrimination. The justification is that despite being a dwarf planet, it is still a planet. A planet should be a planet, regardless of its size.

Keeping fighting Pluto ✊