I made a post on Mastodon that seemingly did numbers.

I don't know who needs to read this, but: there's value in doing things slowly, in your own way. Trying to maximise efficiency in your life is a fool's errand, and will just hurt you. Take the longer route with the nicer scenery. Write that email by hand instead of asking a bot to do it. Spend some time to read and not just skim. Take your time and cook a nice meal for yourself. Pursue little hobbies, even if you're not good at them. Don't compare yourself to others, don't focus on improving. Just enjoy every activity for itself. Don't let the world convince you that you always have to be optimising yourself. Just be sub-optimal and happy!

The reason I wrote this is because I read a thread on X (the everything app) which made my blood boil somewhat. Academics were saying that the reason they train students rather than just do research themselves with dreaded bots doing all the legwork is that there's value in the apprenticeship, in training a person. To me, that's a bad argument because it presupposes both that we should be prioritising efficiency above all else (definitely disagree) and that working with AI is more efficient in the long run than working with a student (also disagree but falsifiable).

I was devastated earlier this week when I marked the midsemester test for the first year course I'm teaching at the ANU. Less than one in five students passed the test, with more than half of submissions showing compile errors when running automatic tests on their code (this is for the second programming course in our programme, mind). My tutors completed the exam (100% correctly) in 25 minutes, and I gave my students 90 minutes.

I am fairly confident that this result is not a result of some deep failing on my part — I've taught first year students before with much better results — so I did a little digging to see how much students are engaging with my course. The results were not encouraging. More than half of students had not even started Homework 1, which came out at the beginning of semester (ten weeks ago), and fewer than one in five students had started Homework 2, which was directly intended to prepare them for the very test they failed. I hear reports from my tutors that students have begun education-defeating practices like copying a lab exercise into ChatGPT without even reading it.

This is all a symptom of the broader engagement crisis in teaching and an overall worrying decline in conscientiousness that is deeply troubling and bodes poorly for the future. Lecture attendance is extremely low. Usually I get no more than twenty students (out of about one hundred and twenty) in my lecture theatre. Frustratingly, it's precisely those students — the students I can actually reach — that I'm not worried about. When bad results come out like this, a lot of the relatively conscientious but struggling students begin to feel like they should give up and withdraw (and this pressure disproportionally affects under-represented groups such as female students). The rest of the semester has become a delicate morale balancing act where I need to shock students enough to get them to switch their brains on, but avoid demoralising students such that those who have ability but lack confidence are not discouraged.

I've retooled the remainder of the semester. We're going to do only the essentials in terms of more content. The rest will just be drilling exercises to help them gain the basic study skills they should already have by now. I'm so much more depressed and anxious running my course this way. I hope I can teach a 3rd year elective one day and be somewhat relieved of this.

I successfully performed in my first concert with Coro. I think it went very well, and I saw some familiar faces in the audience (including Fabian Mühlböck!). The programme was a very nice (although eclectic) collection of music spanning centuries. Some of my favourites included Lobo's Versa est in luctum, Stravinsky's Ave Maria, the Agnus Dei movements from all of Byrd's Masses, including the Byrd 5, and Morten Lauridsen's O Magnum Mysterium. It was a delight to sing with these talented singers and I'm looking forward to our next concert later in the year!

Vocem iucunditátis annuntiáte, et audiátur, allelúia: nuntiáte usque ad extrémum terræ: liberávit Dóminus pópulum suum, allelúia, allelúia.

Today at All Saints Ainslie I conducted a small group for the Crux Fidelis commonly (but almost certainly wrongly) attributed to John IV of Portugal (I took Neale's translation rather than a more direct one):

Crux fidélis, inter omnes	Faithful Cross, above all other,
Arbor una nóbilis:	One and only noble tree:
Nulla talem silva profert,	None in foliage, none in blossom,
Fronde, flóre, gérmine.	None in fruit thy peer may be.
Dulce lignum, dulci clavo,	Sweetest wood and sweetest iron,
Dulce pondus sústinens.	Sweetest weight is hung on thee.