Links and Commentary 6/5/25

Shitty Phone Policy Reviewed, Are Teachers OK?, The Nigerian AI Miracle, AI is Warping People's Reality, Call Me Daddy?,

Author

James Shanahan
June 06, 2025

Welcome to Scholastic Alchemy! I’m James and I write mostly about education. I find it fascinating and at the same time maddening. Scholastic Alchemy is my attempt to make sense of and explain the perpetual oddities around education, as well as to share my thoughts on related topics. On Wednesdays I post a long-ish dive into a topic of my choosing. On Fridays I post some links I’ve encountered that week and some commentary about what I’m sharing. Scholastic Alchemy will remain free for the foreseeable future but if you like my work and want to support me, please consider a paid subscription. If you have objections to Substack as a platform, I maintain a parallel version using BeeHiiv and you can subscribe there.

Shitty Phone Policy Reviewed

High School chemistry teacher, Matt Brady, spent a lot of time last year lobbying his North Carolina school district for a cell phone ban. Last fall, he got his wish. Sort of. While his district did institute a ban on phones during instructional time, enforcement fell completely on teachers with no support from administrators. This is one of the gems:

I didn’t think the olds who came up with the policy needed to be learned of this, but here’s a thing: as predicted, a phone up front or otherwise out of sight, but still Bluetoothed to earbuds (concealed under hair, or blatantly, visibly worn) or to a smart watch means the student is still connected to the phone. I’ve seen kids text on their Apple Watch by touch, under a table. So, yes, even though these things are mentioned in the policy, it’s nearly impossible to detect or enforce unless I devote a not insignificant portion of my class time to search and seizure of phonestuffs.

I expect this to be the more common case of phone bans. Not all districts can afford frequency blocking locked pouches for every kid. Even those that can, well, we know how that goes.

Are Teachers OK?

Questions around AI and education continue to swirl in the discourse. The most recent article making the rounds comes from 404 Media’s Jason Koebler: The Teachers are not OK. It covers a lot of the same grounds as what I’ve written about recently, so I don’t know that I have much new commentary of my own to add here but I do recommend reading it. The bit that seems to be getting the most attention is when one teacher laments, "LLMs have absolutely blown up what I try to accomplish with my teaching." His fuller take is a bit more nuanced but you get the idea.

The Nigerian AI Miracle

Hey, we’re still following up on that study that was done where AI supposedly tutored kids in Nigeria and produced huge effect sizes. The World Bank finally published the paper (not a peer reviewed journal, mind you!) and is ready to sound the victory horn for AI tutoring.

But, as we discussed previously, there are some serious methodological problems that prevent the study from actually providing evidence of that claim. Now that we have the full paper, it is indeed what I thought it was. I wrote:

The summary of unpublished research which purports to show a large effect size for a lesson on antonyms. Apparently by getting a license for MS Copilot, an after-school tutor, training for teachers, and booklets for students these students improved by two years. On antonyms. Dan already points out that the study may not disentangle all these treatments, but I have a broader question which is, how does this work, exactly, with antonyms. Like, how is one kid two years better at knowing opposites to words than another? Isn’t this just a vocabulary exercise? Also, maybe they didn’t have proper controls?

And it turns out that the study did not have proper controls and that the students received not one but four treatments any one of which (or any combination of which) could have contributed to the students’ improvement. Like, you keep kids after school for a special program, give the kids computers, staff teachers, training to use said computers, paid access to Copilot, and train them to use Copilot for the work they’re doing and then compare them to kids who just go home at the end of the day. What did you expect would happen? Did the AI help? Maybe it did! Just design your fucking study so it can tell us if that’s the case.

But for some reason, people really really want it to be the AI that made all the good things happen.

AI is Warping Peoples Reality

Speaking of AI, early last month Miles Klee wrote about people whose use of AI is giving them spiritual delusions. The same day I read that post, I attended a birthday dinner for one of my friends. A few of our mutual acquaintances also attended so I had some fun catching up with people I hadn’t seen in over a year. One friend, launched into a story about how she quit her job that day because ChatGPT told her to. Well, kinda. What she started doing is using AI to generate feedback on all the communications coming from her boss. She would have it transcribe calls or paste in the text of email and then ask the AI to analyze the communications. ChatGPT apparently informed her that her boss was overbearing, controlling, and sexist and that is why she quit. Who knows, maybe she was? But it seems weird to me to be feeding all of your correspondences into an LLM anyway.

Later that week we visited my sister-in-law and her husband as part of another memorialization of their lost son. As part of that visit, I was chatting with said husband and learned he’s basically doing the same thing but for everything. He told me he clears every single decision with “one of his AIs” before doing anything, including things he’s asked to do at work. I didn’t press too much and the family is obviously in a vulnerable state but I didn’t like that sound of that. It’s not like he was saying, ‘yeah, well, the AI is cool and has good ideas but says dumb stuff too.’ No, this was AI as personal guru.

So, I think about that article often. Klee makes the point that LLMs are basically set up to please the user and give them what they want. So if you go in asking “does this email sound sexist?” there’s a good chance that the LLM will say yes. In the article people discuss losing relatives and friends to wild conspiracies that they’re being told by some LLM they use. I worry we’re not ready for what’s coming down the pipe.

On a related note, the subreddit r/accelerate, a sub for people who are super excited about the singularity and want to accelerate its arrival just had to ban a bunch of people who are having psychological breaks with reality because of their use of ChatGPT and other LLMs.

TLDR: LLMs today are ego-reinforcing glazing-machines that reinforce unstable and narcissistic personalities to convince them that they've made some sort of incredible discovery or created a god or become a god. And there is a lot more crazy people than people realise. And AI is rizzing them up in a very unhealthy way at the moment.

Seems bad! Let’s make sure every child in America is talking to AI daily for school.

Call Me Daddy?

Matt Yglesias asks where all the daddy blogs are. One challenge he identifies is the tendency to cast men in parenting roles in a nearly universally positive light. While not bad on the surface, this contrasts with the much more critical nature of commentary about women’s parenting. There’s potential for a kind of boomerang where men are seen as mansplaining parenting or accepting a reduced quality of parenting that a woman could never accept without repercussions. That said, Matt writes,

I really do wish we had more dad content in the world, though. And perhaps the answer is that more dads just need to be willing to risk writing honestly about their experiences. It’s not as if the women writing about parenting are immune to negative feedback — the comments section of an article on parenting is as contentious as anything else in politics. And moms obviously navigate their own “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” dynamics, but many of them are writing about it anyway.

So maybe I spend a bit more time here writing about being a dad, raising and educating a kid, and so on. What do you think? Interesting or not?

Thanks for reading!