One of the most crucial aspects of a teacher, or *any* form of leader, is carefully listening and helping others make contributions. If the student has leadership aspirations, this is a crucial lesson, and sometimes enough to motivate listening.

Any moron can stand at the front and talk.

The town I grew up in (below) became a town when I was a kid. I think the population was around 1,800 people over an area of ~150km^2. So I think that the composition of many of these smaller places is different from at least the villages I've visited in the UK.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgewoo...

Unsure of the the history, but it may be to do with large local variations in size. I grew up in New Mexico, which is about 4/3 the size of the UK but fewer than 1/30th the people. Sort the table here by population to get a sense of variation of city/town village:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...

Almost 100% of the time, I ask for a week (or more) extension, independent of when I get that email.

Does Leverhulme retract prizes for defamation by association? 😉

So why do I let AI in my house? Don’t I care about the environmental consequences? What about the theft of intellectual property? Don’t I understand that these are bullshit machines?

Yes, yes, yes, and yes.

It’s what I do all day long.

I don't mean to shatter anyone's illusions about the academy, but there's literally no information anyone ever got from a professor that wasn't always also available from... reading.

Jk jk!

Heidegger's "Being and Time". It tells you everything you need to know about philosophical writing so you can quickly move on to more important things.

OK my (very rare but at least N=2 examples) of 5 referees suggests that perhaps Applied Mathematics may be an outlier here... 2-3 are standard, though, with 1 very rarely as well.

Teaching a comp math course this year. I used fun examples to hammer this home. The partial sum of the harmonic series up to 10^9 is radically different in 32 vs 64 bit floating point (and of course, the series also converges in any finite floating point).
0.1+0.2=0.3 is not true in floating point.

Of course, I entirely agree the problems are not due to these particular individuals, but things like much of the Russell Group chasing small short-term gains by massively increasing student intake while worsening everything about the ecosystem.

I think anthropomorphizing/personalizing enemies is an old and rather common tactic that fits our psychology innately. Social media doesn't help, but I don't think it's the root cause. We like thinking of "Hitlers" as archetypal villains, without which our problems wouldn't exist.

Understanding is always epsilon>0 away.

Even as a white US citizen, my partner and I paid somewhere upwards of £15,000 in immigration fees and related costs to finally get ILR after 10 years in the country, plus many many other hoops to jump through.

The current moment is not a pleasant one...