I Text, Therefore I am.

The idiot phones are winning.

There so many observations and thoughts I want to share with you of late, but unwanted distractions intervene. One of which came to head two weeks ago was confirmed yesterday. It may be another facet of what they have in store for us.

One of the frustrations with last school year at the med school was the Sub Director (SD) of the English department constantly changing the syllabus, rendering all preparation for the course and individual classes unusable. As I remarked both here and to the school, she was enforcing what would have led to a negative performance review in even very recent times, waiting until the last minute to prepare anything. Was this just this one person’s poor performance as a manager or something broader in scope. Until two weeks ago, the latter never entered my thinking. The SD (former) has a back ground in IT and is all in on AI everything, however.

I teach English a medical schools in Japan. Originally, the courses were just daily conversational in nature. Soon, I was given a medical discussion course which was more rewarding than challenging, and it was challenging. On the heels of this, I was trained in the basics of being a Simulated Patient (SP). Through these and other experiences, I would find myself teaching introductory level medical content in English to first year med students at different med schools. The actual content was up to myself but the topics were chosen by the school to match with the more in depth instruction they received during the week in Japanese. I am not a MD.

Here we have one of several uses of tech that I applaud. I often say that I hate tech, but that is not true. What I actually hate is how we chose, or far worse, are forced to use it. I remain a firm believer that humanity as a whole and on an individual basis must remain masters of our tools, not dependent upon them and certainly not controled by or enslaved to them. Please keep this in mind anytime my rants against tech and my occasional praise of it are inconsistent with each other.

What follows is a detailed and I am afraid, long excursion through the class planning process. I beg you to bear with me as I believe it is required to understand the sea change, perhaps even a paradigm shift that is fast approaching, perhaps even breaking upon the shore as you read this.

For example, let the topic be the respiratory system. I would find online a roughly three minute long audio on something related to this system and construct a listening class based upon it. There is a wealth of resources online, sadly most are either too short or too long to use for these classes. When a useful video was found on YouTube, I would save it and copy the transcript, which is, or at least was not as straight forward as one who hasn’t done this a lot would have reason to believe. It should be expected the transcripts are full of errors. Correcting them is much like listening to your favorite song on cassette tape and trying to write down the lyrics. Time consuming, requiring greater accuracy and thus more than a cursory double check to verify that what you corrected is in fact what will be heard by the students.

After making certain sure that the transcript now matches the audio, I then remove key words and replace them with a blank. Sometimes I do an actual cloze which is every 7th word replaced with a blank. Often, though, I remove key words as I am trying to build their top down listening ability where they can give an educated guess about what kind of information must go in the blank to make it easier for them to set the parameters of what they need to listen for. This is done as a prelistening activity.

From the transcript, I create a vocabulary list which will be provided to them at the end of the previous class, thus, if they do their homework, they will at least be familiar with the words they will be listening for. I then use online resources to make word search and crossword puzzles of the vocabulary list. These are provided for early arriving students to work on prior to the start of class and gets them thinking about the words they will be listening for. The first activity of the actual class is a pre-listening quiz. They take the same quiz after the listening to see how much new information they learned during the lesson.

Another resource of even greater value for myself is an online educational site that shall remain nameless for they are the cause of this post. They offer ready made lessons on all topics of study. No need to check the transcripts nor make my own fill in the blank activities, though I usually add more blanks to the ones provided. They even have their own quizzes. I still make the word lists, word searches and crossword puzzles as this site does not do these. This resource requires a monthly subscription, however. Even with all they provide, it still takes time to make the alterations to their materials to fit how I use them in my lessons and to make the activities I can’t on their site. So, I prepared many lessons in advance when I had the time to, requiring only that I review the materials the night prior to class.

All of this is time consuming. This is not a complaint, preparation is part of the job. If not for time constraints imposed by life, planning would be enjoyable and stress free. Still enjoyable, but often quite stressful as there are always distractions. The time and effort spent planning also leads to me being intimately familiar with the material, a plus. I cannot wait till the night before to plan a lesson as there is too much to do. However, once prepped, these materials are reusable

Were reusable. Disaster finds a new way to plague Kitsune. The audio for Wednesday’s lesson had been changed since I made my preparations. It still covered the same topic and most of the details, but the transcript I printed out and made copies of and likewise the fill in the blank version for listening no longer match the audio on the website. I had encountered this before but found at that time that if I saved the lesson plan on the website, the version I planned for was still accessible even if a name search directed me to a newer version. Not so any more. There is now no way to know if all of the materials I prepared will match the audio currently available online until class time.

Explaining the situation, one student asked why prepare in advance, why not just use what is available online at class time. And there it is; we are being forced to not “waste time” on preparing and learning on our own and instead rely upon our idiot phones and AI for everything. We are subordinating our own intellect, our own ability to learn and store knowledge in our own brains, to our idiot phones.

This was a med student who asked this. A few weeks ago, another med student at a different school fact checked me on whether there are T shirts saying that “Liver is evil, it must be punished” featuring a mug of beer as the punisher. While that was amusing, she found a variety of versions of this, it is also disturbing that she would feel the need to fact check anything, especially during class, and more so with something given out as a joke.

Weeks ago this topic came up on the Clay and Buck show. I do not recall what the subtopic was, but both hosts were unaware that today’s children do not trust anything adults tell them and believe everything their devices tell them. The Kid does this to me all the time. But this has been going for longer than I realized as I now have 1st and 2nd year med students doing so.