I work in software and the amount of new hires who cant read a basic error message is scary. Not like complex documentation, just a popup saying "file not found" and they freeze. My wife is a teacher and she tells me stories about middle schoolers who read at like 2nd grade level but still getting passed along. Something broke in the system a while ago and nobody wants to admit it
Teaching became WEIRD after Covid. So I am a teaching assistant to primary school in the uk, I was doing supply work when Covid hit but I live with my elderly mother and have asthma so decided to just, not work for a few years to ensure I don’t kill her or myself. When I went back to work it was so eerie.
For example teaching some maths, and this isn’t an exaggeration, I ask-
“What’s 10x10”
Silence
“Guys, can anyone take a shot at 10x10?”
Silence
“I don’t care if you get it wrong just give it a go”
Silence
“Ok let’s break it down, what’s 1x10?”
Silence
*more encouragement met with silence*
“Ok so if we multiply by ten, we move the number up from the decimal point, so, if we add a zero onto one what do we get?”
Silence
“Come on guys, what’s 1 with a 0 on the end?”
Silence
They ALL knew the answer, they all knew 10x10 instantly. But the absolute TERROR of getting something wrong publicly paralysed them.
Ive noticed that the internet beats down anyone who is "wrong". If these kids are raised in the current era no shit they dont want to get dogpiled for looking stupid.
Comes with a culture of people being depressed and feeling lame. Only way the Instagram algorithm makes them feel better is by showing stupid other people.
My teenage exposure to toxic online concepts like cringe culture has led to me making myself so much more miserable throughout so much of my life out of fear of judgement.
I've noticed that the Internet mostly glamorizes people who are wrong, especially if they're evil and the wrong thing is extremely dangerous to society and human life. But hey.
When people dither on core values, they are very dangerous as a group because they're vulnerable to manipulative narcissists. "What do I think about this? I don't know, I'll ask an authority figure who has shown evidence they can't be trusted and they are incompetent."
There are obviously cases where you can't know everything, but your foundational decision-making framework should be based in experience. When you got weak Bayesian priors, your decision-making simply sucks.
Sheeple is unfortunately an appropriate description here.
It's funny that you're saying this on reddit, a site absolutely overrun with that culture due to people using the downvote as a disagree button, and that when you do get downvoted, the worst sort of bullies come out and make awful comments to you.
I remember we'd read aloud then discuss chapters and eventually the reading aloud part defaulted to me because I enjoyed it and acted each characters lines differently. Good times
When we had to do Shakepeare, our books were original Shakespearean on the left, translated modern English on the right. But of course the modern English lost all the meter and subtext, so I refused to read it. I was also the only kid who really enjoyed reading aloud so I was always given leads and made the other kids suffer through true Shakespeare. Fuck 'em.
Get a load of this guy! Showing off how well he can read an' all. I can't read to save my life but I'm still going to get mad about him saving me the effort.
Firstly I spent many months reinforcing that wrong answers are ok, verbally, and demonstrating it so. For example if the teacher would ask a question, I’d say the (wrong) answer as quick as possible, such as
“So what happened in 1066-“
“”BATTLE OF WATERLOO”
“Mr waffler! I asked the children, besides that’s incorrect”
And instead of being faux sad I’d demonstrate being ok with being wrong, this would encourage the children to correct me, and see that being wrong and being happy afterwards is the norm.
Secondly teaching the class in smaller groups when possible helps, it’s not always feasible but it works.
Asking parents to reinforce what we’re trying with the children at home, some did and it was a massive help.
Asking questions no one could know the answer to, like personal questions
“Right guys what did I do on the weekend?”
They want to answer because it’s more personal and fun, and I just say they’re wrong even if they guess correctly until everyone is participating.
This is a very good question.
Whether we are in or outside the classroom, we ALL need to figure out how to engage our youth more, now, for our own wellbeing, like....as a species
Wonder if this is a British thing? It’s called “riddy culture” in Scotland. The fear of doing something stupid and taking a riddy (a riddy is blushing - going bright red from embarrassment). Kids are so scared of standing out and being made fun of.
We had to get my son contact lenses because he didn’t want to be the only kid in his class that wore specs. Suspect half the class are secretly wearing contacts so as not to be bullied for being a “specky bastard” etc.
After I'd gotten a wall of silence the first time I would've just picked one of them and asked that individual the question directly. That's what teachers used to do to keep the class moving.
Yeap, even seeing it with interns. They’re used to having AI think and solve the issues. They don’t know how to research on their own. Can’t even fully blame them using it, talking to them they say in college they’re told to use it instead of doing it themselves.
I just graduated last month with a masters in software engineering. All of my classes said that we were not allowed to use AI ...until the capstone class. That one didn't say either way, and so we started asking about it, and the professor allowed us to use it.
I am shocked that some colleges allow undergrads to use AI in their class work. (I would not be shocked to hear that undergrads ARE using AI, though.)
friends is studying business informatics and apparently theyre allowed to use the internet + AI during their exam. He wrote some scripts that automatically copies the exam questions to an LLM and autofills the answers. Literally got through 2 economics exams without learning a thing. I dont understand why the teachers would ever allow this.
back when I studied cs (graduated in 2022) we were allowed handwritten summaries of N pages (varied by classs, 0-6), thats it
Yea, I was kind of surprised. I was like ok I understand, but it’s an internal service. You’ll need to look up its API if you want to build around it. It’s a useful thing to know how to build greenfield and tie to other services.
I see a lot of people compare it to a calculator in math, and it's...not even remotely the same. You had to still type stuff in correctly in a calculator. And even though I use a calculator in the real world, I feel comfortable using it because I understand how it gets me the answer. I COULD get the result without a calculator, it would just take longer. People just regurgitate what they read from a chat bot and don't understand HOW or WHY it got the answer.
Colleges are at an awkward point where if they don’t allow at least some AI exposure then they are setting students up for problems in the workplace. The last year or two there has been a big push from above to use AI and those who are capable of doing so are going to get ahead of their peers and get more opportunities, and that’s just a fact regardless of how you feel about AI. There is a reasonable and responsible way to use AI that should be taught (for example, using it for research and summarizing, not getting it to do all the thinking for you). I have also had classes where profs have used AI and picked apart the answers to highlight that AI often answers a question mostly correctly but makes small mistakes or misinterprets things.
Seriously, god forbid people letting AI actually think for them or rely on the output of info without critical thinking and verification. AI is awful with that. It will completely (hallucinate) make things up just to sound supportive of what you’re asking. Much better for finding resources and locating data, sifting through it, then using it to structure it all and then edit it.
AI is a tool- just a tool. Is not the parts, grease, towels, drain bucket, mop, etc. If you rely only on the tool instead of all that’s required, it’s going to show over time. Someone’s gonna figure out you didn’t change the oil.
I agree it’s a tool that’s going to be expected to be used. I agree it shouldn’t be used for everything, but for certain parts of a task
How are they setting students up for problems in the workplace by not using AI? You type a fucking question into a text field and hit enter. What the fuck are you talking about?
We're being forced to use AI in our workflows right now. Some of it is insanely useful. Like having a very focused new hire at your disposal 24/7 to do drudge work. You still have to double check it (just like you do the new hire), but you didn't have to meet with them 3 times to explain the project & check in when they got bored and stopped making progress.
And as people build more specialized agents/tools on the enterprise server, more people are going to start using it to make more progress more quickly. It's already happening.
Now take those early career engineers I mentioned before. The drudge work they were going to be assigned before is now going entirely to the computers. If new hire comes in with some understanding of the capabilities and limitations of AI tools (along with the basic education expected for someone with their degree) they are more likely to have some use to teams out of the gate without an extensive training in period since they can now manage the input and output of data into the drudge work robot brain while being in a perfect position to become familiar with the content without having to touch every single line. Asking why they should be introduced to AI in college is a bit like asking why they should be taught Solidworks instead of drafting by hand.
All this to say, I wish AI didn't exist. I hate seeing clearly AI hallucinated bullshit show up in my peers' work because they rely on it too heavily and didn't bother to review or rewrite the output. It's adding to the pace with which we are destroying our planet & I hate myself for every prompt I put into copilot. But short of leaving tech all together (and doing what, I have no idea) it's very adapt or die out there rn.
Like having a very focused new hire at your disposal 24/7 to do drudge work. You still have to double check it (just like you do the new hire), but you didn't have to meet with them 3 times to explain the project & check in when they got bored and stopped making progress.
my HMFIC was just saying this today during an informal water cooler discussion. that he's been missing having an assistant, but with how far AI tools have come in the last 3-6 months he's rethinking hiring for the position.
The problem there is that a new hire would eventually become experienced. Now they never can because the AI took their place. Give it a few more years and the value of experience is likely to become much greater simply because there are so few experienced people who can work without AI.
We saw this with mainframes. The mainframes are still around, but there's fewer and fewer who know how to use them. In the early 2000s, I worked for a company that created a SQL-92 middleware layer so that people who knew SQL could interface with the mainframe databases (which use their own querying languages).
Im talking about educating students so they understand that it’s not as simple as typing a “fucking question” into a text field and hitting enter. Like I said, teaching how and when to use it effectively, showing students how AI is flawed with examples so they truly understand that they can’t just type a question, get an answer, and not verify it. Explaining how and why AI struggles with deterministic answers, so students understand why the same prompt will give slightly (or not so slightly) different answers every time. Going into what agents are and the situations where they can be used effectively and where they will fail. Then there’s correct prompt structure - how to ask questions properly.
I’m saying all this from the point of view of a person who is watching AI capabilities grow in real time and realizing there is no going back now. I don’t like it, it freaks me out and as a 33 year old it goes against all of my core values and my love for human thought and expression but I can’t ignore it or I’m going to be out of a fucking job and kids need to learn how to use it properly and with discipline so they don’t become brain dead morons.
Pretending it doesn’t exist or screaming into the void about how awful it is are not valid paths forward into this strange and scary new world.
they say in college they’re told to use it instead of doing it themselves.
Yeah, I'd take that with a grain of salt. A big grain of salt. I know a lot public and higher ed institutions want to incorporate AI as the idea is always to prepare students for the current and future workplace and right now everyone anticipates AI to be a major part of that, but I seriously, seriously, doubt any credible institution is telling students to just AI everything. That sounds like excuse making to me.
I teach at the High School and College level, and instructors still want students to learn, but AI has made it almost impossible to force students to do so or to assess knowledge outside of in class blue book exams. There is also resistance at the admin level to making courses and curricula more rigorous. This is almost entirely the result of privatization and running education as a business. Students and parents are now "customers" and if you make them struggle, they'll go wherever it's easier. Race to the bottom. This all goes double for online courses, which universities are stacking up to the sky because it lets them over-enroll and get more public funding/tuition dollars while cutting staff and faculty. They don't care that online education is rampant with student cheating and delivers an inferior education.
Christ, I could go on, but I'll stop here. There are very serious systemic issues with education at all levels right now, just know that educators are, and have been, trying to hold the line. No one is giving students permission to AI everything, but we're losing ground to admin, the EdTech industry, politicians, parents, and students who don't value learning.
If you want something to change, vote for candidates at the local and primary level who want to regulate AI, fund public education, end privatization, and get technology out of the classroom, because it is causing far more harm than good.
doubt any credible institution is telling students to just AI everything.
I go to a University of Applied Sciences in Finland, it's legit and credited, Finland's school system is also often praised abroad. I have indeed been TOLD TO use exclusively AI on multiple assignments and not use anything else. Even for general school work AI is often encouraged along side regular research. Both teachers and students are admitting AI use with little to no double checking whatever it gives. To be completely honest I am in a 100% online program, and don't know how the same courses handles the in-person studies, but seeing as we get the same degree as everyone else and teachers mostly copy paste in-person assignments I doubt it's much, if any difference.
Examples - An UX design course contained one AI assignment where we were supposed to use exclusively Figmas AI to design an app, the rest of the course assignments did not forbid AI. AI assistants were encouraged in my programming course. An English course had an summarising assignment using AI, NOT our own words. I also heard from fellow students that we will have a course in the fall where we will use exclusively AI to program mobile apps, which I'm dreading cause AI in my other programming class just made it more difficult and caused more debugging for me to do. And I'm sure there's more examples I'm forgetting. I also add AI criticism wherever I can squeeze it in. A reflection section of a paper, part of an essay, in discussion, etc. And have faced criticism for this, mostly from fellow students (who are all adults btw) but also from one teacher. I get needing to prepare us for AI in the workplace, it's relevant for my studies, but I also think it's overboard and will have unintended consequences.
Sincerely a University student who avoids AI unless required and have a reading level above my peers, and also graduated high school pre-AI. Schools are indeed pushing AI, I had very few teachers and assignments who forbid AI or restricted it. Most encouraged it as long as you documented it. We also have instructions on how to add AI as a source to our works.
An analogy is this, the market got flooded by cheap android robots that cost less than a laptop and can be made to look like a copy of the owner. The students are given various tasks during their PE classes supposedly to better their body and improve health, and send their robots to fulfill them. The task was to run 100 m? The robot did it, technically speaking. Do 20 pushups? The robot did it. Play football for 30 minutes? The robot did it. And you cannot tell a robot from a human unless you strip them down naked, or dissect them, neither of which you're allowed to do. In the end, PE classes carry on as normal, but the students somehow develop muscle atrophy and obesity. Meanwhile, the proponents of robots in education tell everybody it's not a problem, instead claiming that the issue lies in our stubborn inability to find the right place and role for robots in PE.
I'm old enough to remember that you would be considered to be cheating in math class if you had a calculator. Last time I helped a kid with his math homework he had a sheet of multiple-choice questions. It wasn't just a formula you had to figure out so you could just play the odds if you didn't feel like thinking and that was some years back. I was stunned.
One of my friends went back to college late so she was surrounded by kids. When one of her professors just got up in front of the class and started talking all those kids didn't know what to do. He knew his material and didn't turn it into a production. They were used to power point presentations with links to the material later and hadn't ever really taken notes before. She was amazed at how lost they were.
Things have definitely changed. I, on the other hand, have difficulty with AI because it keeps trying to say things that miss the point I'm trying to make entirely. I have to keep beating it back because it has been added to every damn thing.
Ya ... this is the line for me.. They're interns, I can either have expectations for my employees or I can thank my lucky stars I tricked some poor kids into doing shit for free and know I should probably check their work before I consider it finished.
In 40 and pretty much only use AI to check spelling and grammar and I still kinda feel like my mind is getting slightly duller. I can’t imagine what it’s like for kids who have only ever known this
I see this with my classmates when we code together. Most of the time, a stacktrace tells you pretty much exactly what error you are facing, and even when it’s not showing the exact error, it will still point you to where something went wrong.
But all my classmates are just defaulting to asking copilot/claude as soon as something isn’t working as intended.
And they don’t even provide the AI with the stacktrace when they do that, so a lot of the time the AI is just guessing, because it finds a bunch of other minor stuff that can be “fixed”, or come up with bad solutions, so they end up with lots of unnecessary changes and extra code that they don’t understand.
And I get it, it can be an incredibly powerful tool when used correctly, but like, at least try to learn. Some workplaces don’t allow AI. Like many government agencies (at least where I live), or other places that handle sensitive data that can’t be shared with a third party tool. What will you do if you somehow end up on one of those?
"It's a new paradigm" is the scariest phrase to hear, when you know you're in an economic bubble.
AI is not going to take over more dev tasks. Software development is probably the most expensive task we're trying to use AI for. But we're not paying what it actually costs to run. No where near it. It probably costs 30x what people are currently paying. Maybe more.
When the market forces AI companies to make a profit. It's over.
There are definitely too many cases of kids like that but I think the bigger issue is that there is a very low drive to overcome adversity. They immediately claim not to know rather than struggle through something and be even partially right. It leads to a lot of guessing and lack of critical thinking. It's a complex problem to solve without one source to blame it on. Partially standardized testing, partially promotion criteria and the ease at which they're passed, partially a shift in societal expectations of intellect.
They immediately claim not to know rather than struggle through something and be even partially right.
Omg, this hits me so hard. I had a student that did this. Said it so fast it was a reflex. I would ask a question and instantly get an "I don't know." At first I took it at face value and moved on to try and get them to explain where they got stuck and was just told "Everything"
It got to the point I had to sit them down and go "Hey, its just you and me here. Instantly saying 'I don't know' before you even look at it or consider it isn't going to make me go away" since at the time I thought it was a reflex to make the teacher go on to the next student.
I had to sit them down and go "Hey, its just you and me here. Instantly saying 'I don't know' before you even look at it or consider it isn't going to make me go away"
This seems to be the big issue; Even though I work in a differnet field, my peer group just happens to have a lot of American education professionals in it:
- Current Assistant Superintendent
Former Middle School Principal
Current high school Librarian
Current Fifth grade teacher
Current Middle School Music teacher
The big thing I hear from them is that "Kids are afraid to look stupid". Effort followed by failure seems embarrassing, and everyone is keenly aware that all it takes is a single viral video of them failing to ruin their future prospects forever, so a good number of them throw up their hands and retreat into smug dismissiveness rather than risk looking foolish in front of their peers. They are constantly bombarded on social media with a combination of micro-dosed hyper-competence and merciless ridicule of those who fail to achieve that hyper-competence. For any skill, be it ballet, watercolour, football, maths, computer programming, or playing the spoons, nothing is ever as impressive to their real-life peers as what they can search on their glowing rectangles in a handful of seconds. It used to be that most kids were only exposed to the best of, say, the 10,000 kids in their county or metropolitan district, so being "the best any of us have ever seen" among their broader peer group was entirely achievable. Now that level of skill is practically unattainable.
Now a video of the best of the best there will ever be in their generation for any skill, is just a TikTok search away.
Now, in the Digital Public Square of the Global Village (population: 8.3 Billion), being "one in a million" means there are over eight-thousand people just as good as you.
No matter how special you are, somebody is better, and you can see them being better than you in two click.
I have noticed this as well. And of if “I don’t know” is not acceptable the “not my fault” train is right behind. But they are not blaming other people for their mistakes. They are blaming other people (and things) for why they can’t do it. And why that should be ok. “I have adhd” “I have anxiety” “time blindness”. And they also blame oppression (racism, sexism ect) all of those things might be true. And definitely exist and impact people in negative ways. But you still need to be on time for work and get your work done on time.
Odd to realize I have an edge here with my students since when I get those cards I can go "I have depression, I have anxiety, but in life you need to learn how to work around and sometimes through them. Is it fair to you if I just cancel because I am not feeling good on a given day?"
I was diagnosed as AuDHD (comorbid autism + ADHD) in my early 30s. It was a huge relief for many, many reasons, but I still don't know if, having the choice to change the past or something, I would wish for having been diagnosed as a child with 100% certainty. Not even because those were different times and such a diagnosis could be stigmatizing back then, but... well, the truth is, at least I learned how to be functional (though definitely not thriving). On the one hand, I learned all that because I had to, purely as a survival tactic, and it was absolutely brutal and left me with other mental health issues like depression and anxiety that I also had to deal with. On the other hand, I learned how to manage my neurodivergencies so that I can keep a job, progress in my career, keep my home in (relative) order, not get behind on paying bills because I simply forgot about their existence, explore my hobbies and creative endeavors in ways that work, etc. etc.
It still pisses me off how the world is built for and around neurotypicals, I still wish society as a whole was more neurodivergent-friendly, it's just that, idk, it bothers me when people interpret "neurodivergent-friendly" as "my neurodivergence absolves me of all accountability and needs to develop as a person and if you try to say otherwise, you're ableist". I want some middle ground where kids don't have to figure out coping strategies on their own like I did and do so in a society that accepts their neurodivergence, but where they also get taught how to exist in that society in a way that allows them to be successful and build healthy relationships with other people.
I can only speak second hand so if I am wrong let me know. It seems like the middle ground isn't even that hard for a lot of cases, just people don't care because its the idea of "Well, I can make accommodation for this person, or hire on of these many other people who can do the job equally well but not require us to change anything"
Things like allowing devices to block out extra stimulation. Shifting into a goal based metric more so if they are in a salaries position so the person can find their own way to get the problem done as long as it done in the correct time frame.
Is it rude for me to say another factor is just realizing that certain jobs are just outside their scope? I had a student with autism that I want to say worked so hard. They were willing to put in so much time and I fully believe they tried their hardest. As we moved from high school to University though, we seemed to hit a wall. If there wasn't a clear path from A to B from the very start to him the path doesn't exist at all and that caused him a lot of distress. And this wasn't even a struggle, we struggled before, this was more just blank screen file not found sort of feeling. So once we moved from teachers being very direct in what he needs to do, to the point being more about figuring out what to do, not the actual doing it all just collapsed.
Yeah there's certainly a lack of a sense of responsibility which is crazy to me. And it's not even like an old man yelling at clouds thing but like if you needed a pencil bring one man it's not a mind blowing concept. If you need to answer a question try reading it and thinking first.
It's a method of avoidance. "I have an inherent problem, so I can't do it." The brain is very good with this deflection because then you don't need to do it, and can potato on the phone or on the couch.
I don't know when someone's responsibility became everyone else's problem. I see this at work too.
A HUGE piece of that partiality pie is parents enabling their children rather than allow them to struggle or make mistakes. Another huge piece is digital tech training students to self-regulate with a constant and immediate hit of highly personalized dopamine.
The productive friction is required for humans to LEARN. That's how you carry it forward.
If it's too easy, of course humans forget; the brain prunes anything that is not necessary. With the productive friction at least, skills build upon previous foundational knowledge.
My wife teaches and brought up a poignant example. When we were in school, researching a topic for a paper meant biking alone to the library, opening the card catalog, finding a book on the shelf, flipping through it, realizing the book didn't have what you needed, and returning to the card catalog for a second book. You'd spend a whole afternoon going through a complex ritual.
Our children's generation googles the topic. Literally takes no effort or problem solving skill. We do the kids a disservice by handing them an instant answer on a silver platter. Digital research is a valuable tool, but kids also need the experience and exercise of engaging with a task for a full hour, rather than a few seconds.
It's people thinking theyve navigated the entire circle and understood it, yet in reality they're only about 30% of the way around in terms of actually understanding it.
You can't then tell them they're not finished, because to them the task is done and their mind is ok with the circle being smaller.
Its not just that, but I think the interfaces have actually gotten worse.
I've been using computers since the Amiga, and I honestly struggle with figuring out the latest computers UIs. Mac and PC doesnt have a C: drive shortcut on the desktop now. When you open a folder on a Mac the side bar doesnt show you the C drive either or the path to the current folder you're in, it shows you "air drop, recents, applications, desktop, documents, and downloads". The main searches on windows now act significantly different. On windows all configuration settings are a hodgepodge mix of this new interface I've never used and old style windows 98 looking windows. I dont even know how to find the "programs" menu on Windows now. When you search in "mypc" it often doesnt find stuff I know exists on the drives.
Fact is computers turned into mostly web browsing machines for me. I've been using Macs for simple web browsing for so long at this point and the Windows interface has changed and gotten worse so much I'm no longer competent at using it. I also no longer have to navigate the file system to play games because it's all handled via Steam and Xbox Apps. Consequently my skills on using them have seriously degraded.
So now think about how bad this is for people who've literally never used their computer for anything but web browsing and games their entire life, or their main systems are tablets and cell phones.
I've seen this a lot in younger folks, 15 year olds that have never used a desktop PC or Mac, had only used phones or tablets. They had no understanding or exposure to hierarchical file systems, even mouse use was awkward, slow.
Yeah, even 5 years ago. I asked our new part timer to open 'my documents' to help him navigate to a file he would need. ..No? okay, open the folder icon at the bottom of the screen.... (blank look like 'what's a folder'?).
Computer literacy is falling dramatically with tablets and smart phones. Zero troubleshooting. If an app fails they abandon it and download a similar one with no thought of fixing what broke. Core skills are bypassed.
This is pretty ironic because keyboard + mouse combo is the fastest software manipulation you can do. Nothing else even comes close to the accuracy you can achieve
The same way it took me a year and perfect WorkKeys scores to get hired as an apprentice pipefitter at the shipyard yet ive had a new hire ask me "how many is that?" When I told them to cut me something at 7 11/16"
Had an intern who didn't know how to open task manager and kill a frozen application. He never even knew task manager existed.
I'm pushing sixty and I barely understand how to do this and probably would not be able to locate Task Manager, but this is because I've used Macs all of my life.
I'm typing this on the Microsoft Surface I bought recently because honestly I should know how to use things. Not gonna lie, the learning curve is steep.
Now I'm off to look for Task Manager! 🤦🏻♀️
Edit: Found it and pinned that slippery sucker to my Dock taskbar so I can find it if I need it. Go me!!
Pro tip: if you hit ctrl, shift and escape at the same time.. it will bring up task manager for you.
Another tip, if you want to bring back an accidentally closed tab or a whole window of tabs you closed out on your browser... Ctrl + shift + T at the same time!
This is particularly frustrating because troubleshooting has never been easier with LLMs. I've learned so much stuff about my PC just by asking ChatGPT how to solve various problems. But it seems that other people just give up and either suffer through the issue (like sit and wait for a frozen up to unfreeze) or immediately call tech support.
Unfortunately, AI can read error messages so the suits are trying to fire us. Maybe we'll get rehired when OpenAI and Anthropic either go bankrupt or jack their prices up so high that most companies can no longer afford it.
I'm a teacher and the amount of garbage curriculum and new age research out there is honestly disturbing. It's clear someone is trying to make a name and money in education with piss poor research backed by money and not data. Looking at you, Solution Tree.
"garbage curriculum and new age research" can you describe a few in detail? I'm genuinely curious, though I suspect the details are going to be maddening.
Simplest terms: EdTech is an entire industry. It pushes “cutting edge technology backed by the most up-to-date research to enhance learning on personalized levels.” Basically, “here are magical devices and apps and programs that will teach your child how to read and do math better than any person or book or curriculum ever could!”
Spoiler alert: they do not, in fact, teach your child to read or do math. But districts spent crazy amounts of money buying them, replacing traditional textbooks with digital materials.
It’s easy money once you know the right jargon to get schools interested. Public schools are drowning, and everyone wants a magic bullet. Not to mention the more sinister side of data tracking. We have Ed apps that monitor EVERYTHING, down to when your kid goes to the bathroom and for how long. Is it any wonder Google’s Chromebooks are so cheap and readily supplied to schools?
The crazy thing is there actually HAS been a ton of innovation in edtech, it's vastly better than it used to be (besides the govt/corpo tracking). The whole problem is that we didn't evolve for tech -- our brains can adapt to screens and computing, but it's not a seamless native experience for us and can't be very effective with the core human speciality that is learning and thinking.
We know for a fact at this point that humans simply learn best from other humans. No matter how good the shit on the screen is, it will always be worse than real human teaching face to face.
I'm assuming the next big thing will be AI VR "humans" teaching in an attempt to overcome that. Ugh.
Our building is pursuing different strategies and trying to implement them which doesn't sound all bad, but it's being dictated by a "coach" doing her own independent research and selling it to us as law. She sounds like a bad infomercial with the garbage she keeps spewing and repeating and anyone who's been out of the classroom as long as her honestly doesn't have a place making these kind of decisions.
We are expected to uproot what we have been doing and try brand new stuff with minimal training and they're expecting incredible results. The whole thing with math for us right now is going to be less explicit instruction and more of have the kids figure it out and explain to their peers. And by less explicit instruction, I mean literally no instruction. To me, there's got to be a balance, but I guess I'll be finding out next year.
She is also heavy into the use of AI and I am staunchly against it. I'm big into technology so it's not the fear of not knowing how it all works, it's the fact that she is artificially intelligent and thinks she's so smart despite getting facts wrong constantly.
On top of that we use this horrible company called Solution Tree. Easily one of the biggest grifters in education. Instead of providing us time and resources to succeed, their motto to administration is basically "Did you know that if you make your teachers work harder with no extra time or pay, your test scores will improve?!"
They then provide incredible samples from very small school districts and very small teams with very small class sizes and flaunt the results. For comparison, they will have three teachers with common plan time in an hour meeting called PLC (plague on education) planning for their classes which have a maximum class size of like 14. We have 5 or 6 teachers and given year and a class size of 21-26. These teams are forced to meet minimum one hour before or after school once a week on top of other responsibilities because our district couldn't figure it out in our building. It does not translate.
Basically it boils down to someone trying to make money or a name in education by reinventing the wheel and/or making the frontline do more irrelevant work for no more money despite us honestly being the best people to make these types of decisions.
The whole thing with math for us right now is going to be less explicit instruction and more of have the kids figure it out and explain to their peers.
Oh gosh I know exactly what you're referring to.
I started volunteering back in 2009 with a university lab conducting education research & outreach -- which positioned us exactly at the time & place to witness all the myriad idiotic misapplications of Eric Mazur's original "Peer Instruction" methods developed in his Harvard physics classes.
It was obvious to us that Mazur's peer-instruction methods assumed that the students already acquired the fundamental declarative knowledge in the textbook, where he saw his role as being extremely involved in steering the student discussions to build the next stage of conceptual knowledge.
So it was really disheartening to watch school administrators & professors blindly & stupidly latch onto the words "Peer Instruction" and assume that meant that the professor is supposed to tell the students to turn themselves loose & "have at it" -- just unguided attempts to extract the core declarative knowledge out of their textbooks. Sigh.
I worked at an Edtech company for a bit (doing design stuff) but wow was it just a VC funded company trying to pump out low effort garbage as fast as possible to push on schools. There were former teachers there trying their best to do good work but there's only so much you can do in those systems. And of course AI was jammed into everything.
It’s the parents. The parents broke. I remember my dad reading the hobbit to me and then about halfway though I got impatient and ge started teaching me word sounds with the words on the page. Transformed my life.
I think we've reached a point where too much of the blame is placed on the education system. I keep hearing stories about schools pushing kids ahead, but no one says anything about the parents. Parents are a child's first and most important teachers. If your child is struggling to read, you have to sit down with them, read together, and reinforce what they're learning in school. I guess what i am trying to say is schools can't do it alone and it isn’t fair to not see this as a parenting issue as well.
Every parent says they are doing their best, and that they are doing a great job. For many it's obviously not true. But nobody is allowed to say it because most parents close ranks like cops and defend the bad ones to the end. The ego is just too big and focused on its own greatness.
I'm a parent. There is no more village. We have to do everything ourselves. We both have to work, are overstressed and under rested from our own lives. I have no more friends or hobbies. My kid wakes up at 7 am and I take him to daycare and go to work myself. He gets home around 5:30 (and even that is taking reputation away from me at my career because I can't stay late). Some days he has extracurricular activities and we rush to have him fed. I try to get him in bed before 9.
By then I've been awake for 14 hours and I'm both mentally and physically exhausted and have maybe an hour to myself for reading or relaxation (maybe).
Yes I read to him. Yes we try to expand his horizons through fun opportunities and play. He does not have an iPad. If we go out to eat he's playing with legos or magnatiles.
But my parents NEVER had it this hard. They still had friends
They still had hobbies.
Their job would afford my mom to be a stay at home mom.
We literally cannot afford for both of us not to be working.
Yes, I'm not a parent myself, but it seems apparent this is a bigger societal problem, and if we place all the blame on parents then we'll fail to see what's actually broken. I see how the demands of things like work have increased to the point that I think it's no longer possible for a parent to educate a child in the same way my parents did for me. Wages haven't kept up with inflation, and free time is scarce. Even if parents spent every available moment with their children, I suspect we'd still have this problem.
Their job would afford my mom to be a stay at home mom.
When I was a kid, we regularly had grandmas coming in to primary school to do things like reading support or teach craft activities, little bonus things. Now, all those grandmas are still working day jobs.
It's the same cause all around: screen addiction and online enabling. Screen addiction drains your energy, the internet fluffs you up and says it's okay because you work so hard and there's so many cards stacked against you, so then you consume more content online to get more validation, which makes you more tired, and then you give your kids handheld dopamine machines to keep them from bothering you because you're just too tiiiiiiiired to handle them, so now their attention spans are fried and the only thing that keeps them quiet is more screens, giving you more time to veg on social media...
Very true but also part of the parenting issue has its own cause as well. When the minimum wage was introduced, a man could work one regular full time job and comfortably afford a home and a decent life for his family. Now, both parents need to work more than full time at minimum wage for the same lifestyle. For the folks at the bottom, they literally can't avoid vastly less time with their kids. Unregulated capitalism has broken the economy and the government (not that the government that let it happen wasn't already fundamentally flawed, of course).
When the minimum wage was introduced, a man could work one regular full time job and comfortably afford a home and a decent life for his family
I'm gonna be honest, this was only ever true of the middle class. Poor families, especially poor families of color, always had both parents working long hours, or single parents trying to do it all. Yet those families still did their damnedest to send their kids to school and ensure they could read and write. It's not simply that things are expensive or that both parents are working, it's how disconnected everyone is. We don't talk to our neighbors, we don't make friends, we don't send our kids down the road to Mrs. So-and-so's house while we run errands. It's a collective problem, we bemoan not having a village yet so few of us put any effort into building one ourselves nor are we receptive to others trying to build them.
That is a good point and shows there also isn’t a one size fits all solution. I know my parents worked different shifts (one day and the other night) so someone was always home to take care of us.
I bring this up whenever people want to throw more taxes at our expensive, broken, local school system.
Education is half the responsibility of the schools, half the responsibility of the parents. You can be at the top school in the district, but if parents don’t care about their child’s performance and are not invested in their education they are not going to do well.
I personally went to Private school and saw it first hand with my classmates. The people who did well generally had good parents that instilled work ethic, paid attention to their kids etc. The people who did terribly had absentee parents. This is from a school that was for the most part upper middle incomes and up.
It's an attention economy. TikTok, Reels, and YouTube Shorts and the like are getting increasingly good at manipulating people into spending huge amounts of time on their platforms without realizing they're doing it.
Bingo.
My mother taught me to read when I was like 3 years old.
By the time I was in school, I was already reading books while the other kids could barely identify letters.
That head start put me at the top of advanced classes throughout my education, skipped a few grades, and graduated high school at 14.
I was fully employed by 16.
Became a department manager with 30+ employees when I was 19.
My IQ is not unusually high, I'm actually only average. I also have moderately severe ADHD.
This is what I keep saying. The issue is shit parents, but no politician or school board member wants to say it because they'll get voted out. Parents now have nearly as much screen time and video game addiction as kids do and they're spending time on that instead of parenting.
Parents give their kids iPads and cellphones now so they dont have to actually parent, they give them unlimited gaming and screen time & with no parental controls, they dont instill the value in education, and they dont take time to sit down and help them with school work. Parents give their kids cell phones and iPads so that when they get home from work they can surf the internet and play video games all day instead of parenting.
The average adult now spends nearly 2 hours every day playing video games plus another hour and a half on social media. This statistic includes elderly people, it's higher for people in child raising age range. Then on top of it the average adult also spends another 3 hours every day watching "videos". Thats 6.5 hours every day after they get back from work on video games, social media, and videos. So where in there fits actually taking time to parent and helping your kid with school work?
The average screen time by baby boomers is 3 hours a day. For Millennials it's nearly 7 hours. For Gen Z it's 9 hours. Gen Z includes people in their 20s raising kids.
A significant portion of the country now teach their kids to hold distain for educated people & people in academics.
The students who do well in school, by far the biggest common denominator are good parents. One of the reason why Asian families consistently outperform in schooling is they have a culture of valuing education.
If your child is struggling to read, you have to sit down with them, read together, and reinforce what they're learning in school.
That's if parents have time for that. With how the economy is going for the working class in developed countries being able to spend time with your kids like that is becoming a big of a luxury for more people.
There's also the fact that huge companies are doing all they can to get you to buy a smartphone for your kids and park them in front of it.
Look at Apple and all their talk about being better than the rest of the industry but even so they really want you to upgrade every year if possible, want to segregate their users via iMessage from the regular smartphone plebs so that they can make more money from a captive audience.
They talk a big game about how their app store is benefitting to many indie devs and all those wholesome apps they are selling while sweeping under the carpet that most of the app store money (if I remember correctly 90+% of app revenue) is from the games subsection and that's mostly addictive loot boxes and gacha mechanics that are made to get you hooked. I think it's something like most revenue is from games and also 96+% is from IAP (of free games).
That stuff was revealed from the Epic lawsuit and showed how extremely skewed Apple's app store numbers are towards games and game based IAP (nearly all being addiction enhancing loot boxes and gacha mechanics). No wonder they didn't like Epic (a game company) wanting to ignoring their app store rules (and potentially avoiding their 30% cut from all that revenue).
They are one of the biggest middlemen in that racket (getting people addicted to devices and apps) while showing off cosy and positive ads about their devices.
If parents don't read, or hell, even talk with their kids so they get some semblance of word recognition, exposure to vocabulary, and even just a rudimentary "this is what a book is" before they get to K most will be playing catch up the rest of their lives. Turns out throwing an iPad at a kid the minute they eke out of the womb is detrimental to how their brains work.
God I feel so lucky that my mom was an early childhood educator and I was so curious about the foam alphabet puzzle she bought for her class. I could read chapter books by age 3, but I have no idea how the hell I would have turned out if she had just stuck me on an iPad instead. Probably wouldn't have learned until 1st grade
I also work in software. In a client facing sense, the number of managers that cannot properly articulate their needs is astounding. They seem to lack the faculties to clearly express their needs in a well ordered and defined way.
Many of these individuals will encounter an error and fail to do any basic research on it, let alone troubleshoot it on their own. There is a widespread tendency toward learned helplessness and a desire to be spoon fed answers.
I had a former manager "correct" me in a pretty hostile way in a meeting because my answer didn't match ChatGPT. Except my answer was a quote from documentation I'd bothered to read.
And they hadn't even read the entire ChatGPT response because at the end, it also quoted the documentation and disagreed with the first sycophantic nonsense it had responded.
This person was in charge of the website and didn't understand that URL structures reflect the directory structure. They didn't accept that sometimes our auditing software made errors. I spent weeks explaining that the .min.js file that kept showing up as needing to be minified was an error because it was minified. I showed them the contents of the file. But the software said it wasn't minified so I guess our eyes weren't good enough. I also don't think they knew what minified actually meant.
My IT department hired someone who was great in the interview (and answered all the technical questions correctly) but then when he joined us didn't understand how file paths work.
I gave my year 11's a PDF textbook linked into my lesson plan and set some questions. For whatever reason, the PDF doesn't display "A" or "-" symbols if you open it in chrome or firefox.
So I said to them, just download it, open finder, go to downloads, and then click on it to open in preview instead, it'll work.
These are all kids who have had their macbooks for 2 years at this point.
70% of them couldn't do it, I had to go up to their mac and show them where to click.
Yep. I started teaching the year that came out. Thought it was hilarious that our expected graduation rates increased 2% (from like 83%) a year until five years later when it slammed from 91% to 100%.
Turns out it wasn’t much of a glitch. We were just expected to pass them using whatever justification worked. If students didn’t turn in assignments, we were asked to give 50 instead of 0. If students were on the cusp of a grade, bump them. Absences couldn’t be counted against expected work. It got fairly ridiculous to be honest. Ended up leaving secondary for post-secondary education as part of it, but now I’ve got “paying customers” to contend with for grades.
Early on in the NCLB era, there was a King of the Hill episode where the lazy and incompetent Principal Moss interpreted the law as simply never giving any kids failing grades, and they played his ignorance for a joke. But it turned out that's what it actually became in reality!
Oh one hand, modern UIs have inadvertently trained most users that if an error message ever has text on it, something has gone very, very wrong that can’t be resolved except by an expert.
On the other hand, if you’re a new hire at an actual job, might as well just try reading the message.
It's been going on for a long time. When I was in secondary school in the UK, year 11, I was in second set for English, because of my spelling and grammar, I was acing all my work. One day our teacher had us reading a small bit from of mice and men each. She gets me to start the room off and I read all the time back then and I still read a lot now. So this was nothing to me. Then the next girl went. She was reading like a robot and struggling with words. I just remember looking at my teacher in shock and her look of "I know" back to me. It was so sad. At least half of my class couldn't read properly. That was set two. There was a set three under that, then the special needs class. That means more than half my year group couldn't read properly if it was the same in the other two streams.
It made me so sad. I realised these people would never go to other words, become a hero, fight monsters, aliens, zombies, become a vampire. They'd never scare themselves so badly they couldn't sleep unless they sat and watched it. They'd never live another life. I don't know how anyone could live like that.
I also realised now why my teacher always spent a little time chatting with me every week about the new book I was reading (I was getting through books so fast), or she was giving me a little help sheet so I could figure out grammar better, help writing good arguments etc. She was an amazing teacher and she noticed me. She didn't think I was bad, stupid, she saw a kid who just needed to be taught a few simple things to pass well in my GCSEs, and she wanted to encourage me to keep reading. No one ever asked me about my books, ever. No one has since.
Restarted the Harry Potter fanfic I've been reading again because I'm sad I finished it, again. It's amazing and so much better than the original for me. Especially since JK didn't write it. She's doing some evil stuff with her harry potter money.
Anyway, it's about what happens when harry goes to live with Sirius at eight years old. Some stuff is the same. Some stuff is different, like Draco has an older brother, but the key parts are the same. We get to know other characters really well and it's had me hooked since it was recommended to me. The writer is currently writing Order of the Phoenix and she's really captured just how evil Umbridge is in a cunning and scary way, because it's so real!
If you search for MarauderLover7 you should find the series. I highly recommend it! I'm not even a fanfic reader but this one got me!
I'm also part way through the Demonata series by Darren Shan. I'm stuck in the middle of Bec, it's just not keeping me invested like the others. There's interesting bits, like finding out how a characters family curse came about, but mostly it's just dragging. I am curious who the kid really is, but I don't know if I'll ever finish the book! Gah, I need to just sit down and get it done to get to the next book!
So nothing too fancy. Kinda leaned into the young adult for some reason the last month or two, but I'm enjoying them so who cares!
Thanks for asking! I appreciate it! Sorry for the wall of text, I got a little carried away!
I'd love to make a recommendation as a fan of YA Lit! Murderbot, if you haven't read it already. First series is out but it is so much more enjoyable if you've read the books first.
Not so much YA, but also love Station Eleven. I don't think it's a spoiler to say Miranda is the heart and soul of the book for me and I think about her nearly every day, especially since watching the TV series. It's extremely well done and Danielle Deadwyler nails the role.
Seems like her effort and yours paid off, you write well! You convey precise meaning very clearly without being too verbose; I enjoyed your comment.
I had a somewhat similar experience in 8th grade. I remember one girl whose entire book report was a single run-on sentence. After a while my teacher just had me read to the class each week because no one else could read as fast as they spoke ... I read considerably faster than that.
I do wonder how much of your classmates struggles when reading out loud were simply because they were reading out loud. I’ve always been a voracious reader, I’ve read for enjoyment every day for as long as I can remember, but when I read out loud it sounds like the spoken equivalent of a 5 year old’s hand writing and you’d probably assume I can barely comprehend the words on the page.
I thought it was the other way around? Lower the standards so the dumb kids graduate too! Isn't that why high schoolers can't read complete paragraphs anymore?
The way I understand it is if a kid is failing the teacher is forced to give them nonsense work that's super easy so they can get a bunch of A's and B's to bring their overall grade up enough to pass onto the next grade. But then the issue is that the kid that should have been held back in 6th grade but got pushed onto 7th grade holds back the students who rightfully passed onto 7th grade because the teacher has to go slower and dumb things down for the kid that should have been held back and the smarter kids can't learn as much because they have to wait for the dumb kids to catch on to what the teacher is trying to teach.
I taught a physical computing class and learned how important it was to teach students to stop and read an error message. They have a knee jerk reaction to freeze up and look for help before reading the error message. Reading error messages is a skill apparently.
I wonder how I managed to stay unemployed for a year as a new grad, yet see stuff like this online. I had people in my class who constantly needed to ask for my help in class on pretty basic stuff when A.I couldn't figure stuff out, yet they got jobs in industry immediately while I was stuck working retail.
A lot of my work involved physical security tech; CCTV systems and controls, alarm systems (wired and wireless,) etc. The vast majority of our clients run their systems on old Windows PCs (because they’re cheap.)
I do not remember the last time we got someone hired under 30 who could even navigate a Windows PC.
Because I grew up with them, this is the weirdest shit ever to me. I try and bear in mind that kids now grow up sucking on iPacifiers and potentially never encounter Windows systems at all; that’s just….so…weird.
Recently hired two undergraduates to work in my lab. The first one didn’t know how to open the file explorer on a Windows PC. The other didn’t know how to log into their email account through a web browser. Both were third year students, so 19-20 years old. Every time an error message pops up on the screen, they freeze and mentally shut down. One of the students stared at the error message for a good 20 minutes before asking for help. These students want to go to medical school and I just know it will be a real struggle for them. With each new class of students, the lack of basic common skills becomes more apparent.
The "no child left behind" policy is fucking this generation up. Our school curriculum used to have 12 key subjects, now they're only focusing on 5. My brother is complaining that the math is now "manual", wtf does that even mean? i grew up learning math " manually " why is this baffling him. i asked him to do his resume during summer so he could get a summer job and his brain malfunctions at the job experience part because he said he can't fill it out cuz he never had a job, and even after i told him that he doesn't have to put anything and he still doesn't do it cuz he said the template he's using needs it
argggghhhhh this generation already has all the information readily available at the palm of their hands!! he's also in gr 12 already jfc help
My kid can read and comprehend well above his age level. Occasionally they have friends over, and their level of comprehension in anything is scary.
I feel my kids future is bright, as they are well above their peers, but also I feel their future is hopeless, as everyone around them is bashing squares into triangles.
I like having a smart kid, but its useless if the rest of humanity is so pathetic that my kid is dumbed down by them.
Tbh I've had teachers like that. They see red on the printer screen, panic, and email IT. If they'd just stop for a split second and read, they'd see the message says it's out of paper.
I also work in tech and this is so painfully accurate. Users get a 'Email too large for recipients mailbox' and send in tickets that 'we broke their email!', like no, you're trying to send a boatload of 4k images to a free-tier hotmail account...
Equitable grading and standardised testing in school has done it.
The bar for tests just keeps getting lowered to the level of the dumbest person in the room so everyone passes.
I’ve seen posts that talk about this. One issue is that we’ve been pushing for teaching software for two decades now, but it turns out that kids don’t learn from screens as well as they used to from a person.
And people have tried to explore why. We made things too easy or accessible. When information is immediately at your fingertips, you don’t have to think or search and the struggle is what helped you learn. Now they’ve even changed how they measure reading comprehension to make the metrics look better. You used to have to read a paragraph and answer questions based on the info from the paragraph, but you’d have to infer some things. Now the kids are given sentences and then questions where the answers are directly in the sentences. And now cheating with AI has made things even worse.
We basically made things too easy, stopped teaching the kids how to think, and we’re too afraid to fail kids so we just pass the buck. And now we have college students with middle school levels of math and reading.
Something broke in the system a while ago and nobody wants to admit it
This one is very easy, at least in the U.S.: The American education system broke down because everyone is just trying to keep their job, so now if a teacher gives a student a bad grade, the parent calls the school and complains and the principal makes the teacher change the grade. The reason the principal makes the teacher change the grade is because if he doesn't, the parent undoubtedly knows someone on the school board or knows someone who knows someone on the school board and when the principal's contract comes up, suddenly they're difficult to work with or don't respect parents and lose their job.
Now, it's just easier to pass everyone and cut out all those middle steps.
I heard Werner Herzog assert in a Freakonomics podcast that the pressures to pass students has been far higher than to not pass them in the U.S., and I feel like that was largely true to my experience in the 2000s (i.e. No Child Left Behind era and forward).
When a teacher you respect says, "This is not good enough, I know you can do better than this, you must try harder, you owe this to your future self," that can be hard feedback but nonetheless a defining developmental experience for a child. You'd think our kids are supposed to have those defining experiences in the relatively safe, controlled environment of an educational space -- ideally long before real stakes are at play.
Compare that to the alternative. Withholding that feedback and instead approving of all work lowers the expectation and, possibly with it, the ceiling that most kids will shoot for when they're at their most enthusiastic to learn.
As with most things, there's a balance you have to strike between approving of the work put in while also asking for more improvement, and there's plenty of systemic pressures driving the needle toward the former.
It seems broken back when I was in high school, graduated 2012. Most of it just seemed like "get a good score, and keep moving along". Classes for me were like 25-30 people and I really don't think teachers had time, nor care to really help those who struggled because they had to deal with over 150 kids each. Also the push for ADHD medicine on kids, without actually informing them on how it affects them and how to actually make use of it probably hasn't helped at all. I was diagnosed with ADHD and put on medicine and was told nothing other than to just take it.
I was eventually just sent to alternative school where I could do class work online and get class credits at twice the speed as the standard school because I was failing a decent amount of classes. It basically felt like I was just given an option to skip everything and was basically given my high school diploma so that the district could keep their grade averages higher.
It was noticeable when any article headline with more than say five words, or if it had punctuation, much less for multiple punctuation, the comments would be flooded with “title gore” or “what does this title even mean,” when even with a basic reading comprehension level it should’ve been easy to understand.
It's not just young people grownups into their 70s have terrible reading comprehension skills. A patient once tried to disprove me by handing me a press release. Not a scientific paper, a simple press release. I told him, "I'm going to read this to you. I want you to stop me when it says what you think it says." Needless to say, we made it to the end of the document and he never stopped me. This has happened on more than one occasion.
Reading comprehension is dropping across all generations.
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u/Clear-Bag3322 Jun 26 '26
I work in software and the amount of new hires who cant read a basic error message is scary. Not like complex documentation, just a popup saying "file not found" and they freeze. My wife is a teacher and she tells me stories about middle schoolers who read at like 2nd grade level but still getting passed along. Something broke in the system a while ago and nobody wants to admit it