Academia - Dealing with Writing in the Age of ChatGPT

In which I give some advice as to what composition teachers should do, given that students can just go to chatGPT and ask it to generate an essay on whatever. The tool is being used, and I think there are intelligent ways to use it for composition.Episode LinksPrior episode in referring to ChatGPT use in academic papersGuillaume CabanacTwitter feed: Guillaume Cabanac ⟨here and elsewhere⟩He retweeted: https://twitter.com/clementFFF/status/1745193183988871357https://twitter.com/gcabanac/status/1689334454798491648Cabanac also has a suite of tools to discover academic papers in STEM with tortured language as an indicator that something may be suspect with the method or results.Meep’s rant on calculator use in math class25 Aug 2000: Here is my tirade on calculators. In 1988, when I took trigonometry in high school, graphing calculators were an expensive new tool and calculators hadn't really been integrated into the mathematics curriculum. We mainly used calculators to add, subtract, multiply, divide, and sometimes even take a square root. However, even these most rudimentary calculators were forbidden my first quarter in trig. .... Fast forward to 1996, in which very sophisticated calculators and computer programs have been incorporated into the math curriculum, from pre-algebra to trigonometry to calculus and beyond. I spent four years as a computer consultant for the math department at North Carolina State University, which had fully incorporated the symbolic math program Maple into its Calculus curriculum. I saw many of the students doing the same thing as my fellow students from so many years before: taking the functions they had and applying all sorts of things from example Maple worksheets to it, hoping they would recognize the answer when they saw it. If they were lucky, the homework problem exactly paralleled the examples. Usually, they were not lucky, and they, like Cinderella's step-sisters trying on the dainty slipper, would hack at the problem given trying to make it fit one of the examples that had previously been done. This, obviously, is a stupid way to apply technology to math problems. Much has been made of the use of calculators and computers in math, and they are indeed very useful, powerful, and even necessary tools in modern math research. However, I feel that the focus of the use of these tools has been misplaced. Too often they are seen as something that can remove the tedium from math, as opposed to tools that remove tedious calculations that one understands very well and can do by hand one's self. People claim that many students are turned off by math early on due to excessive rote memorization of addition tables, multiplication tables, and the like. Math is about recognizing patterns, not simply arithmetic, they enthusiastically proclaim, and let us use calculators to cut through the tedium of practicing long division and graphing lines. I would agree with them -- mathematics has very little to do with arithmetic and has everything to do with finding patterns and relations and using these things to solve problems. Indeed, I rarely do long division by hand, or even integrate by hand anymore. However, I do not agree with the reasons as to why students are getting turned off from math. They get turned off because they do not understand it. STUMP - Meep on public finance, pensions, mortality and more is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to STUMP - Meep on public finance, pensions, mortality and more at marypatcampbell.substack.com/subscribe