39
votes
What’s a recent “shower argument” you’ve had?
You know when you’re in the shower and you play out a conversation in your head and say all the right things?
Often it’s a throwback to a previous conversation you actually had IRL where you didn’t quite get out what you wanted to, and it’s only with time and separation that you’re able to give your words the precision and clarity you want.
Let us know about a recent one you’ve had. What was the argument? Who was it with? What clarity did you achieve?
Also, for the purposes of the question, I used “shower argument” because it is a more familiar term than “shower conversation.” Your response doesn’t have to be a true argument. It doesn’t even have to be a conversation either. Any shower thinking that has led to a resolution counts.
The YMCA charged me $35 for a bounced credit card payment when (a) that's a crazy fee for a declined payment and (b) I had credit on my account for the amount being charged. I went in the next day to fix it and that didn't even need payment; they just applied the credit against the balance (including the penalty) and it was good.
That's a shower argument, for sure.
I teach.
Last week, my students had to do a presentation and they were just awful. I asked for everyone to speak 2 minutes and 30 seconds per person. Some groups had a 3 minutes presentation for 3 people. Lots of people just didn't put in the work, despite 5 full classes devoted to working on it and about 3 weeks they had (they could have worked on it at home) before the presentations.
Still, I failed a lot of people. I failed everyone who spoke for less than 2 minutes and everyone who fully read their presentation, something that was very clear in the assignment. I wrote an email to all my parents explaining what I just wrote and that there are a lot of failures.
One father wrote me a lengthy email saying if time should be the sole factor for failing a student, that his son spoke about 2 minutes, yet he failed (he spoke 1 min 40, he probably lied to his father). He told me why haven't I intervened more when the kids didn't work in the class (I wrote that in my email, explaining I wanted them to see that no work = failing).
I read the email before my shower this morning and I couldn't comprehend how this father wanted to me pass his kid and wanted me to have changed how I do things. I'm like really? Don't you want your kids to learn that them not working towards something and literally botch their work, that they would not be rewarded for that?
Kids who put in the work got the grades that came with it. I've got multiple 100s and many 90s, it's not like the work was hard.
So I spent the whole shower arguing with the father that, yes, while failing a kid due to time can seem harsh, it's simply a lesson that he didn't do the work and he won't fail his year because of that anyways, so what's the point? All I wanted was to teach the kid a lesson and I'm sure a lot of the kids will remember their botched presentation and will put more work toward that in the future. That's what we need to teach children, right?
That father is a school principal...
I feel this. It's getting hard to keep doing this job when so many parents are actively adversarial with teachers' decisions.
One of my colleagues this year had a parent who pushed to let their student turn in a project that they didn't do. The project was over a month late. The teacher gave it, I believe, a 60 on account of it being, you know, over a month late. The parent then submitted a copy of the rubric for the assignment that he had filled out himself, "showing" the teacher that they were wrong and the student deserved a 90-something.
We couldn't roll our eyes hard enough.
Also, with regard to the presentations, I really feel that. I facilitated two different end-of-the-year presentations. Both were designed to be independence-building exercises. I told the students that I wasn't going to help them much, but I'd given them everything they needed to succeed in the forms of rubics, checklists, and exemplars. Also, the projects were focused on skills that we'd worked on all year.
Both sets of presentations were atrocious, and I don't say that lightly. And the worst part is that the whole point of having two of them was so that they could learn from the first one and apply that knowledge to improve their second one!
Lots of AI-generated content. Lots of students that never bothered to finish (they presented incomplete or literally blank slides to the class). Zero proofreading -- not even using spellcheck, prices without dollar signs, or, even more egregious, prices that went to one or three or four decimal places (e.g. $143.1). Several students got up and gave flat out wrong information, clearly indicating they did zero research and just came up with stuff based on, I don't know, vibes?
Lots of "you don't need to go to the nurse right now -- you're feeling nervous, which is normal -- everyone feels nervous, especially when they know they have to present -- but you can do this -- it won't be as bad as you think, and after you're done you'll feel a lot better."
It's getting harder because I feel like, even though I'm teaching the same age of students as I have been for a while, they're presenting as younger and younger. Many of my students were outright childish in how they approached these on all fronts. The presentations were embarassing by elementary school standards but these are significantly older secondary school students. The number of times I had to say "no, you do not put memes into a professional academic presentation." The number of times I had to say "look at your checklist to make sure you have all the necessary information."
Chat, did they check the checklist?
Nope. Nothing but Ls.
Anyway, I say this not to try to one-up your comment or flood you with my own complaint. This is just me commiserating (and venting) but mostly trying to convey to you that, as a fellow teacher, I 100% get it.
I completely agree with your rule, but as a kinda funny counterpoint:
I've found that telling my young staff to include memes and go crazy with a 'for me' draft presentation has crazily improved the quality.
Depending on the audience, we usually leave some of them in.
I think if I had to guess, I'd say it's because they have to think really laterally and properly understand the subject matter to find a funny meme that actually 'works with' complex geopolitical and global security related content. And the rule is do your best to be funny, so maybe it helps make the dry content a bit easier to read and organise.
Again, not saying this is the right approach for kids, I'm not a teacher! But I'm finding more and more that my section is creating briefings that people who don't even need to know want to come to, and creating material and presentations that people are sharing far more widely.
I think the 'this made me exhale air from my nose' differentiates their work from the normal, stock-standard death by PowerPoint.
I think it also just makes the project more fun to work on when you can sprinkle some humor on it (within reason, of course). Most of my PowerPoint projects in school were for computer class and I went out of my way to learn new things about PowerPoint so I could make certain jokes work.
And then in history class I did a group video project that was ultimately just my friend and I doing (terrible) python-esque sketches around a central storyline about the topic. But we went all-out and I learned a lot about the Salem Witch Trials along the way.
Granted I have ADHD so my life is nothing but a series of efforts to fool myself into doing things I need/want to do, but I feel like if you make the process fun, then people will put more effort into it and learn against their own will. Or at least that's always been true for me.
And also, this carries over into the professional world, too. I see webcomics and memes sprinkled into work presentations all the time. The humor serves as a hook to make the presentation more memorable and less awful to sit through.
I want to say this not as a rebuttal but to give some view to my considerations here. I absolutely hear what y’all are saying and am sympathetic to it (and definitely think that it’s a method that has its place — more on that in a bit!).
Also some of this is me shower arguing with well over a decade of people thinking the solution to education is just to “make things more interesting.”
In teaching there’s a big tension between leaning in to kids’ interests and habits versus stretching them and helping them grow.
The major one we see is attention.
If kids are bored in our classes, that is seen as an instructional issue that teachers need to solve. We can do this by making the lessons more vibrant, changing the pacing or cadence so that there aren’t long stretches of task time, adding humor, etc.
All of these sound good, right? Nobody likes a boring lesson after all.
Well, the tension is that, if I make my class match frenetic social media pace, I’m not helping my students expand their attention span — I’m simply another input driving hyper-kinetic information at them delivered in a shallow and often irreverent manner. Education should be a place where they can think slowly, deeply, and at length. It should be a place where they learn to deal with the gravity and interconnectedness of topics, rather than meeting them with flippancy and the ability to discard them the moment they become less interesting.
I know this sounds really lofty and high-minded, but it basically boils down to: If I TikTokify my class, my students will undoubtedly be more engaged, but I’m effectively feeding the issue that cause the need for that TikTokification in the first place.
Interrupting that circular (and vicious) cycle, however, means confronting the idea that I will, to some extent, deliberately be boring kids. I’ll be doing things in a way that’s less “optimized” for them.
I see it as my job to do this in a way that’s deliberate and with purpose. “Strategic boredom” if you will, which is aimed at developing their skills and ultimately their appetites for longer, more significant tasks. In teaching we talk about the “zone of proximal development” which is the key space we try to target. It’s the space between what a child can do on their own and what they can do with help. Left to their own (literal) devices, they’re engaging with attention-sapping content. With my help, however, I can create an environment and activities that nudge them along the path to more sustained focus.
It is, of course, a very hard balance to walk, made none the easier by the fact that it’s different for each kid. My shy introverted student has a far different attentional threshold and curricular needs than my extroverted ADHD student. Both deserve an education that pushes them individually in their own ZPDs, meaning the introvert is going to have to, say, talk to their peers sometimes, while the extrovert is going to have to cope with silence sometimes.
Complicating things further: there’s a vast, multi-axis spectrum that exists between a boring Ferris Bueller-style lecture and a lesson that could play well on YouTube Shorts. Finding the sweet spot in there is tough.
So, I would undoubtedly get more interesting presentations if I let them use memes, but part of my job is to help them understand that there are other ways to engage with the world besides irreverence and disposability. It’s both possible and necessary to be serious, or solemn, or thoughtful, or introspective, etc.
It’s been my experience that memes tend to shortchange all of that, and if they’re using pre-made memes instead of creating their own, they’re effectively outsourcing their thinking. The people you and @IIIIIIIIII are working with are older and have developed the critical thinking skills that are allowing them to use memes as a method of expression or language, rather than just shorthand (which is how my students tend to use them).
Furthermore, some presentations do benefit from humor or irreverence. I use those all the time as a teacher! Us humans like peaks and valleys and emotional resonance, and those are often absent from dry, formal meetings.1
So I don’t want to appear to be that stodgy old out of touch guy wanting to “get these memes off of my lawn!” Instead, I’m trying to get my students to see that there is a time and place for memes, just as there’s a time and place to be meme-free, and knowing the difference between the two is a key discernment skill that I would like for them to master.
1. Teacher trainings are infamous for being incredibly prescriptive about “correct” instructional methods while failing to live up to those exact standards. For example, we’ll be told about how we need to have dynamic, engaging, interactive lessons in the form of the world’s most dry and monotonous hour-long lecture.
These make me want to crawl out of my skin, so I am incredibly sympathetic to those suffering through excruciatingly boring lessons. I am not defending those. I just think that, developmentally, some amount of strategic and intentional boredom is healthy.
It makes me sad, really. It's like being a clown and not doing your work is now the norm...
That is so frustrating! Do you have a rubric? For example "Speak for 150 seconds" and "Speak don't read" both weighted 50%. The stuent spoke for 100 seconds earning 67% on that point, and if they just read, they'd get 0 on the second point. For a weighted score of 33%.
I only ask because this is how I conducted my college classes. I had peers who would score things out of 1,000,000 so if someone complained they'd hand out an extra 100 to make them feel better but not actually impact the grade.
Scoring on a million is such a funny concept to me lol I don't think my brain can comprehend that.
Never heard of a "rubric" (am not from the US), yeah I kinda have that. It's more of a scoring sheet, where on it is written "less than 2 minutes 30 seconds = fail, complete reading = fail", plus I mentioned it when I presented the assignment as I said. The students had full knowledge of that.
A rubric is just a slightly more formalized scoring sheet that specifies what factors go into the final grade and how each factor is graded. Often made into a cute little grid ime. For instance, this document contains the grading rubric for the German exam I just took (in German ofc, but you should be able to see the structure).
As someone who used to be a student, I immediately decided that the best course of action for that rubric would be to just read a couple pages of a dictionary, take the 50% for absolutely zero effort, and make up the difference on projects that I hated less. That would give me five full class periods to goof off or do projects for other classes.
And as your prof I'd think it's completely fair because you thought more about it than most students.
I recently did a trainer course, and our teachers really emphasized how poor the communication skills of our future trainees are - very little face to face talking skills, to the point where basic small talk is something we covered as something to teach... I don't even want to think about presentations.
Hopefully your students will learn the lesson and do better!
Honestly it's mostly just American politics. I don't want to get too deep into politics here as this probably isn't the place, but in my head I mainly just arguing with people on the left that I mostly agree with who I feel are either playing directly into the hands of those who are stoking chaos, or the left's misaligned priorities and lack of bigger picture thinking about what's going on.
Anyways, the argument I keep having lately is detailed below.
Politics Warning
Like as just my personal opinion, in my head I'm constantly arguing with fellow leftists because it's maddening that people can on one hand personally acknowledge and communicate how fearful they are and how serious the political situation in the US is and how dangerous it's becoming, but then turn around and continue to push for gun control as if that's not disarming ourselves in the face of what many see as an authoritarian/fascist takeover.Because here's the thing, maybe just maybe with more gun control at a time like this we'll have less mass shooting, less school shootings, less children dying. I agree with you there.
But how much will that matter if liberalism is labeled terrorism and people are being shipped to re-education camps, kids are being kidnapped and re-educated? How much will that matter when lynching becomes a thing again and the police turn a blind eye. How much will that matter if conservatives who already have guns grow bolder and start targeting what they consider problems in society?
The only defense we have right now is legal resistance to this administration, but if legal resistance fails, who's going to be protecting us, our families, etc? Both the military and police are currently being armed against protestors under the guise of it being a rebellion. The president and administration have already been pardoning and being lax with criminals that support them. So what happens when violence starts being targeted at the left and the police don't have our backs or turn a blind eye depending on what political affiliation you have.
I'm not saying we should be looking for armed conflict or use guns offensively, I'm saying it's good to be an armed statistic and have that option in the face of what's happening.
It's frustrating because I feel powerless to change things and feel cursed to just watch things happen exactly as I expect them to.
Feel free to delete this or ask me to delete this if it's too serious or controversial, haha Just trying to answer the question honestly, not trying to preach anything.
I do this, but my target “audience” is my Dad.
Growing up, he was a rural pediatrician that was generally loved by the community, and he was a really supportive father. I couldn’t have wanted more.
Since he retired and moved to Florida, he’s been falling into right-wing conspiracy holes. He’s very overweight, and he feels a lot of shame on that front, but it means that he browses the internet a lot, and it hasn’t been good for him.
I argue with my mental image of him in the shower almost every day - I find myself oscillating between trying to show evidence that Trump is horrible, trying to find common ground on topics that are important to him, trying to tell him that he shouldn’t drink too much, and asking him to see a therapist.
I’ve tried all of them in person, to a light degree, but he shuts down the conversation every time.
I mostly wish that I could interact with the person my Dad was, and the shower is a decent place to cry a little.
I blackhole fox, truth social, and a variety of other shitty authoritarian propaganda outlets on relative's internet and TV when I can. The amount of difference it makes within just a matter of days(!) is shocking. It kind of freaks me out how susceptible otherwise intelligent people can be, but there's a certain mindset of 'the tv needs to be on for noise' that seems to be particularly prone to it all. Changing the source of their noise is remarkably effective, and they don't even realize it, even when I ask directly about it.
I don't know if it's a generational thing to just trust media, age-related cognitive decline, or what. But my sample size is about a dozen people at this point, and, yeah, turning off the hate spigot works wonders.
I think it comes down to a certain level that intelligence does not equal self awareness/emotional intelligence.
I have found the same thing to be true with my own relatives. And a lot of people keep saying that these past 10 years have showed them how stupid people are, and I don't think that's true.
It's shown me how many people lack self awareness and emotional intelligence and the ability to self reflect.
I grew up in a troubled household and had a therapist in my teens who spent a lot of time and effort teaching me to be resilient and self aware and have good emotional intelligence to avoid long term emotional damage upbringing. And I'm incredibly grateful for that because those skills have allowed me to avoid almost every form of propaganda, scams, etc.
But the down side is having to live in a world where most people just don't have the ability to really question themselves, their biases, their pre-conceived notions. Most people operate on the concept of just FEEL -> REACT, and give no thought as to anything else.
Even talking to my parents, their general outlook on life is "Just do it, and if it doesn't work out then deal with it then" to EVERYTHING, haha including me. They have zero concept of actually thinking through decisions thoroughly and it's always been a point of contention between them and me because I'm always trying to solve problems before they happen.
My audience is also my dad. I argue with him in my head a lot and I don't know that it's healthy for me to do that, so I try to curb it when I think to. I find myself just assuming his take on something and then being bitter about it despite never having had an actual conversation about it.
This, I just now jumped on tildes to try to break out of the cycle of arguing in my head, with my parents, about american politics. It's so pointless, on so many levels.
I think it's just how I process these things sometimes. There's stressful political stuff happening in my city right now and when I start spiraling about it I always end up arguing with my parents about it, as if that would actually do anything to help anyone.
When I'm in a better mood, I like playing with a rubiks cube and explaining my solutions to my kids, in my head.
I don’t have a specific argument in particular. But I love the French term for this kind of belated engagement. L’esprit de l’escalier or the spirit of the staircase are the words you wish you would’ve said when you are already out of the conversation and back at the bottom of the stairs.
This is nothing to do with the topic but I'd not heard this expression before. My wife (who is French) comes out with the most random French expressions, and I swear there's a new one I've never heard every other week. I've not heard this one yet, so I'm going to casually drop it in discussion somehow. It's going to make me sound very smart, and I will be a little smug about it. So thanks for that ;)
Edit: I was able to use the expression and my wife didn't know this one! I was, in fact, pretty smug about it :D
That arguments about pornography being a "public health crisis" carry very little weight when they come from the same political party pushing vaccine conspiracies in the midst of a measles outbreak that is actually killing children.
I've been thinking a lot about AI. How to use it ethically (if that's even possible), how it's been transformed into a commercial buzzword, but mainly its impact on education. I think AI has proven itself to be a powerful tool, but with great power comes great responsibility, and I do not think that the average student has the capacity to use it responsibly.
If you're an inquisitive type of person, LLMs are amazing. You can research obscure concepts and process tons of information with significantly less effort than was possible without them. They allow you to skip the uninteresting, hard part of information gathering, sourcing quality documentation, and get into the parts you actually want to be using brainpower on. (I do have some concern about losing the ability to research things the old-school way. Without practicing mental skills, I've found it's easy for them to degrade, but I’m hopeful it’s more of a car/horse situation.)
I was fortunate enough to go to a wealthy enough school district and have parents that instilled the value of education in me, but I can’t really say my experience is the norm. The thing that worries me is that when I reflect on my experience in US public school, I believe that most of my peers, including myself at the time, viewed education as a tool; a mere pathway to a career to make money. Valuing knowledge came to me after years of effort put into meeting a goal of a “good life.” With LLMs offering people a shortcut, I don’t really know how we can expect people to take a more difficult approach without any immediate payout.
Most of my internal debate has been that my position on this is very cynical and elitist, I'm super biased because of my childhood, but most of the people around me have similar upbringings so it's been hard to find good counterpoints.
YMMV, but I’ve found them hit or miss on a lot of topics. I was recently doing some research into biodegradable shoe soles (I’m … a really thrilling person), and although the LLM successfully identified a couple startups, it couldn’t figure out how one of their products worked.
I stepped in: using my incredible Googling skills of slamming on a few different variations for my query, I eventually hit a PowerPoint that explained a very likely synthesis path, and a Nature paper explaining in intricate detail how the company confirmed the biodegradability of their product.
Maybe this is a “next year’s model” sort of thing? And eventually the LLM will actually be capable of this sort of reasoning and research. But so far I haven’t been able to outsource the job of finding decent quality sources; they tend to find weird sources and fail to separate fact from commonly repeated fiction.
… also, as an amusing side note: I was curious about how a particular solvent is used in Rayon production, and asked about synthesis paths. Easy, the LLM spat out a bunch of garbage, and I started researching to figure out what it skimmed over. An hour later, I returned with a slightly altered prompt (now that I knew what to look for) and it blocked my query, since apparently that solvent is used for explosives and pharmaceutical production XD even trying the original prompt again didn’t turn up any results. Fascinating tools, really; I’m truly terrified for the future.
I'm definitely overselling it. There are probably more situations where the standard approach is still way faster than using an LLM to do research. I tend to just look at the references it provides instead of having to probe it for being more specific. That is a pain in itself. I also use local models as a glorified cntl+F for personal documents, but I doubt local models are the future tech bros envision for their product.
In university, I had a professor introduce me to the "five orders of ignorance" and I find that LLMs are great for addressing the second order of ignorance: not knowing that you don't know something. Your first example is probably how I mostly use online LLMs the most. They’re great as a starting point for research.
I'm hopeful the "next year's model" does eventually address these kinds of problems. The biggest reason I started using LLMs was because of all the issues I've had to deal with Google's declining search quality in recent years. Their ability for censorship and "thought control" are definitely the most terrifying parts of these tools becoming integrated into people's lives.