JSA Lowe

what are you doing in my basement (...the sundays, probably)

A person at level 1 or below proficiency, is unable to do this. They cannot parse out extraneous, distracting, irrelevant information.

They cannot look at a website and identify which parts of the page they are looking at, are advertisements.

Level 2 proficiency is such as being able to look at a website and identify which parts are advertisements, if you want a concrete idea of what it means.

Think about all the libertarians you've encountered who will read a book and *entirely* miss the point of the book. Literally not perceiving that the book is describing a dystopia, or identify satire of real world events, or identify who is the villain.

54% of US adults read below 6th grade level.

Think about chuds constantly going "man I used to love this band but they turned woke by putting politics in their songs" and the band is literally Rage Against the Machine or Bruce Springsteen.

54% of US adults read below 6th grade level. 20%, below 5th grade level.

2024-2025 Literacy Statistics | National Literacy Institute Literacy Statisitics

Fun fact: 54% of US adults read below a 6th grade level.

You have to actively remember literally over half the US adult population is *unable to perceive subtext*

www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/2024-2025-li...

no one's ready for this but: schindler's list

"this film is boring" oh yeah well you're boring and i'm trying to make you more interesting, you're welcome. also i love you desperately and need you to be alive and to think, not devolve into some horrific amalgam of posthuman corporate-controlled bot-fed advertising receptacle, lana turner get up

anti-AI “credo” I have a religious exemption from using all generative “A.I.” I am not a member of the Silicon Valley sect. Their beliefs and practices are an affront to my sensibilities. The tech is trained on stolen intellectual property. The output is riddled with mistakes, and it is incapable of comprehending the weight of its errors. It is not even an “it.” But sometimes, it is filtered and massaged by unaccountable human sweatshop workers and bad actors. I am not required to use “A.I.” any more than I am required to join Amway, buy black market rhino horn, or attend the Fyre Festival. As a human, I have a duty and right to limit my carbon and water footprint and protect my fellow human. As a union worker, I have a duty and right to oppose tech that is used to threaten workers or cheapen our product. As a tech consumer, I have a duty and right to oppose scams that lower the quality of our tools. As a scholar, I have a duty and right to oppose anti-intellectualism. As a taxpayer, I have a duty and right to oppose the misallocation of public funds and data. As a grown up, I have a duty and right to protect young people from predators. As a person with a conscience, I am appalled at the decadent disregard for user safety, the callous dismissal of responsibility for lives ruined and slaughtered. My religion is related to my identity, geography, and family, making it an irrelevant accident of birth. What matters is that I was born. I have an exemption from their digital rapture, their cultural austerity, their intellectual poverty. I practice wholesome hedonism and First Do No Harm. CS 12/9/2025

i included this in my syllabi this year

The website for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) is completely scrubbed and gone! They didn't even leave a legacy statement.

i say this because of course i taught la jetée today (dir. chris marker, 1962) and of course several of them bitched about it

ofc i posted this and then spent the intervening hours thinking of all the other preexisting conditions causing the perfect storm including:
• shift in students' willingness/ability to tolerate exposure to cultural artifacts perceived as distressing
• higher ed now based on student-as-consumer model

Censorship Is Bigger in Texas Texas officials apparently think Texas students are stupid snowflakes who must be protected from hearing controversial ideas.

"In recent months, Texas universities have inflicted some of the worst repression of academic freedom we’ve ever witnessed at American colleges, with gag orders, speaker bans and arbitrary firings of dissenting faculty."

[laughs through strangled sobs, continues packing bags]

the perfect storm of how we broke higher ed in the exact kinds of ways that would leave undergrads vulnerable to billionaires who don't care about their minds and souls but just want to sell AI and LLMs no matter who gets trampled on the way. it's like climate catastrophe in that we probably couldn't have engineered all this more precisely if we'd tried.

not sure why i spent a half-hour making this except i can no longer assign writing as either pedagogy or assessment, and i don't know how to teach reading and thinking and watching films without it, so i'm watching the slow-motion trainwreck of a job i've had since 1998 and i'm kind of mad about it.

JFC MY HEART STOPPED MAZELLA 😅

i will be mentally replacing "lakes of wine and forests of meat" with this now in every single danmei translation i read, thank you

this is ghastly and unsurprising and everyone should read it

Call for Papers: Trans-Asian Transcultural Fandom Symposium

Description of the CfP

A list of potential topics for the symposium

Details of the organising committee, 500 word abstract + 100 word short bio to be emailed by 1 Feb 2026 to transasianfan@gmail.com

CfP: Trans-Asian Transcultural Fandom Symposium happening next May @ NUS, Singapore. More announcements to come, but we're hoping this will kickstart conversations and collaborations for scholars in the region working on transcultural fandom

#AcademicSky #FanStudies #TransculturalFandom #CfPs

The number of people acting shocked by this amazes me, frankly, since we've been predicting exactly this— and seeing AI slop taking over google searches — for years now.

Also we MUST stop using "hallucination," which frames this is an unfortunate quirky fluke. It is the program's intended behavior.

Feeling the cliff unmorsel from our heels
And knowing balance gone, we smile, and stay
A little, whirling our arms like desperate wheels.

[James Agee]

From People magazine: "Kate Middleton wears most dramatic tiara yet, skeletal remains found in drained swamp"

This...should have been two separate emails.

me: i will not apply for anything else! i have too much to do and it's just not—
this: [appears]
me: …after i apply for this, i will not apply for anything else

i only have 40 in my film section in the spring and i am 100% doing this. thank you for the idea, op!

yeah i read that piece and was similarly sickened (but the over-assessing is a very real thing in texas, it's incessant)

Norman Rockwell's Freedom of Speech but it's Ellen Ripley

"I say we take off and nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."

^^^ NYer style has been the umlaut over a repeated vowel foreëver

let it run through our fingers like salt

Addressing Assessment: Assessment often drives instruction. If assessments ask for certain kinds of skills, teachers feel compelled to teach these skills explicitly. As a result, increasing amounts of time are given over to "nuts and bolts" or to "bits and pieces" and soon, teachers lament, the larger picture is lost. What began as an attempt to certify that students have achieved a certain level of mastery in language development has turned into its op-posite: reducing literacy development to a series of hurdles that often have little to do with actual competence in reading and writing. Skills-based teaching, as just described, does help some students pass their assessment tests. Often it does not. LBW has tried to address this discrepancy by asking why. No responsible teacher would argue that levels of competence should not be determined or that both teachers and students should not be held accountable for what they have or have not accomplished in any given school year or academic subject. So where is the problem? LBW teachers concluded that current measures of assessment, however well-intentioned and well-informed, do not measure real literacy development. LBW teachers, similar to teachers everywhere, do not resent standards per se. But they do resent standards imposed from without that do not reflect either the realities of their classrooms or the lives and languages of their students. They resent such standards and the necessity of teaching to them when this endeavor gets in the way of what they truly want to teach: literacy instruction based on reading, writing, conversation, dialogue, debate, reflection and social action. LBW teachers (again, like many teachers elsewhere) find themselves in an uncomfortable position. Wanting to do their best for their students, not wanting to short-change them in any way whatsoever, they devise the best methods they can to help their students pass their assessment tests.

It’s Saturday night and I am editing PDFs (for reasons) and this section on assessment from a 1999 writing text jumped out at me, not least because of all the ~discourse~ on here about student writing