this post was submitted on 25 Mar 2026
973 points (99.5% liked)
Microblog Memes
11169 readers
2639 users here now
A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.
Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.
RULES:
- Your post must be a screen capture of a microblog-type post that includes the UI of the site it came from, preferably also including the avatar and username of the original poster. Including relevant comments made to the original post is encouraged.
- Your post, included comments, or your title/comment should include some kind of commentary or remark on the subject of the screen capture. Your title must include at least one word relevant to your post.
- You are encouraged to provide a link back to the source of your screen capture in the body of your post.
- Current politics and news are allowed, but discouraged. There MUST be some kind of human commentary/reaction included (either by the original poster or you). Just news articles or headlines will be deleted.
- Doctored posts/images and AI are allowed, but discouraged. You MUST indicate this in your post (even if you didn't originally know). If an image is found to be fabricated or edited in any way and it is not properly labeled, it will be deleted.
- Absolutely no NSFL content.
- Be nice. Don't take anything personally. Take political debates to the appropriate communities. Take personal disagreements & arguments to private messages.
- No advertising, brand promotion, or guerrilla marketing.
RELATED COMMUNITIES:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Yes, it used to be that the putting of words on paper/screen was the "work" of an essay.
What I am saying is that the actual work of writing is the thought behind it. The effort of research, of developing an opinion, of forming the foundation of a complex argument. The High School English teacher's obsessions with word count and strict adherence to grammatical rules are not "work". They are mindless drivel. We churned out generations of morons with excellent grammar but no ability to actually think.
That will no longer suffice. Any half-assed AI can spit out a thousand words on any topic you care to name, all with perfect spelling and grammar that would have made a 1990's AP English teacher cream themselves. And without any idea of what it was actually writing.
Don't teach kids to do the work of machines. Teach them to be poets. Teach them how to research. Teach them how to think, not how to imitate the mindless behavior of an essay-writing AI.
This is more of a personal, subjective note. Being handed some arbitrary writing assignment that I'm not actually invested in and don't actually understand what the teacher is really asking for, and then staring at a blinking cursor on an empty Word document with this buildup of frustration. I remember going through that my senior year of high school, and then I watched my girlfriend go through the same thing the next year.
I've written a lot over my lifetime, in various degrees in formality. I've written aircraft manuals and checklists, company procedures, lesson plans, primary research and scholarly essays, when it's a subject that is at all relevant to my life, that feeling of WHY THE FUCK ARE THEY MAKING ME WASTE MY TIME ON THIS isn't there. I took an intro to engineering course in college. We were given an assignment to pick out some engineering disaster, some calamity caused by a mistake made by an engineer, and write a ten page report on it. Being an aviation nut, I picked out the saga of the DC-10's cargo door latches. I cited NTSB reports, the Applegate memo, the DC-10's operating manual, and the eventual Airworthiness Directive that resulted. I pretty easily filled those ten pages. It somehow wasn't the same tedious bullshit that discussing themes in Wuthering Heights was in high school.
The biggest knack to teaching is getting the student to care.