Anxious Adventures

BISEXUALS GROW FROM THE GROUND

my partner was a TA for an intro-to-subject course in grad school. finals week rolls around and the students are required to submit this big module assignment they've had like a month to do for a decent chunk of their grade. if you've submitted everything, you'll see a summary screen with a star beside each module name showing it's been completed.

an hour before the assignment deadline, he receives an email from a student claiming they completed the assignment, but the system is not allowing them to submit. there's an image attached to the email. partner goes to open what he assumes is a screenshot of that summary page.

instead, he sees that the student has taken a photo of their laptop from about 2 feet away, with that page open. strange, but it wouldn't be the first time a college freshman has lacked the tech literacy to take a screenshot. he almost doesn't look twice at it, but he realizes something about it just feels a little bit...off. so he zooms in.

the student had CUT STARS OUT OF CONSTRUCTION PAPER and TAPED THEM TO THEIR LAPTOP SCREEN BESIDE EACH MODULE NAME. you could see where they actually had completed the first couple of modules, but the stars for all the subsequent ones were like, double the size of the first two and exactly as uneven/irregular as you'd expect if you were freehanding them with scissors.

About a year ago, teaching an online World Lit course in summer session. First writing assignment is a short paper requiring one (1) outside source; half the class turns in papers with “AI-hallucinated” quotations & citations because they’re just savvy enough to fiddle with the text and get past Canvas’s built-in & very-unreliable “AI detector” but not savvy enough to actually double-check what the computer is telling them. I send out emails to the tune of “if you want credit on the assignment you have to prove this source you quoted actually exists.”

One student apparently clicks the link in their bibliography for the first time, and is presumably surprised to find the same thing I found: working URL, but the page it goes to is not the article they cited (which 100% does not exist; I checked). Student goes into Inspect Page Source, changes the title of the page to display as the title of the hallucinated article, then sends me an email saying they can’t give me a URL because something something VPN but here’s a photo of their laptop displaying the article in question with the URL bar conveniently cropped out of frame.

They didn’t change the body text of the website, so it was pretty clear what they’d done. And what I’d actually asked them to send me was a PDF, since they were claiming this was an article from an academic journal, and it was a real journal we had institutional access to, so the involvement of a regular website at all was actually a screw-up on the “AI”’s part anyway. I eventually went back at the end of the course & gave them partial credit on that assignment (just enough to bump their final grade from a C to a B-minus) for being the only student all summer to put actual mental effort into lying to me — everyone else just took the “nuh-uh” approach.

Me, watching: is this estate entailed or under a strict settlement? If it’s the product of a strict settlement, how was that disclosed to the viscount given he was of minority age (and thus barred from contracting) at his father’s death? Did he later perpetuate the strict settlement in his lineal favor despite having zero obligation to do so given that he now stands as legal fee tail owner? Maybe he just saw it as a way to perpetuate the power of the family and bar against less successful descendants wasting the estate resource, all at the direct, deliberate expense of barring his siblings and their families from a landed inheritance? If that’s the case, why are the younger Bridgerton sons such desirable matches among the gentry?? But maybe that’s not an issue, since all of his younger brothers seemingly have independent allowance, and if that’s generated from the family estate, this must be a strict settlement with a life estate income provision for siblings - def NOT an entailment. Is that why these younger brothers are considered good matches despite being unlanded untitled gentlemen in need of professions? Or maybe their mother’s marriage settlement provided for their independent allowance should their father die?? Are they to obtain their own property without title???

Bridgerton hot people: *have now actively started getting down in said gazebos and library locations*

Me, flipping through a facsimile of a 1788 English law textbook: on that note, why are the featheringtons kicked out of what appears to be an owned home by a male cousin upon their father’s death? Was their estate a strict settlement that benefited a cousin instead of a descendant?? Why would their grandfather force their father to settle away from his own descendancy line, with no allowance or dowry provided for the girls? But if it’s entailed and thus out of their hands (also explaining the lack of allowance), why didn’t their father employ common recovery to undo the entailment???

This time I decided that historical laundresses probably knew what they were doing, and grabbed a metal pole to stir my DIY laundry cauldron and poke the floaty bit back under the surface. Historical laundresses were right, it works great.

As I stood there, I had a moment where I though, ‘oh wow, so many women in my family tree must have done this exact set of motions throughout history.’ Which should be a humbling and heartwarming feeling of connection, right?

Wrong. I swear I could feel twenty generations of shtetl women going “For this you went to college? You want to work with old shmattes all day, fine, but you could have saved the tuition to buy a house.”