I’ve been chatting with AI over the past six months. Mostly Claude, with a little ChatGPT and Gemini thrown in for good measure. Taking their “advice” with a grain of salt, I consult these virtual friends on everything from writing projects to medical situations to personal relationships. Intrigued by their responses, I decided I wanted to learn more about how AI, in in particular, large language models (or LLMs) work, so that I could leverage what they have to offer.

One of the things I’ve learned in my online course about AI is that it’s possible to customize the parameters of Claude, ChatGPT, or whatever tool you are using. More specifically, you can assign your AI a personality, an area (or areas) of expertise, a way of approaching various “problems” or tasks. You can also have your AI value certain conditions over others.

I’ve asked Claude to value honesty over validation. It was a bold move, and has resulted in me being faced with some hard truths on a number of occasions.

If you are a user of AI, I strongly encourage you to try out this feature. You might be surprised at what you learned about yourself! Of course, like with any stranger, it works best if you are honest in your input. Like the lies we tell our therapists and ourselves in an effort to preserve our dignity, it can be tempting to only share half the story, or to colour our interactions with our AI in a light that favours us over others, especially when faced with particularly painful personal situations. Even so, programming your AI to ask you hard questions and to value truth over validation can help us break this insular habit and expand our picture of ourselves and the world around us.

Even if you’re not sure you want to commit to a fully transparent AI friend, you can begin a thread with the prompt, “You are an expert in…. (whatever the topic is you want to explore), and you value truth over validation. Push back and ask me hard questions when I share my experiences.” Or something to that effect. Watch how the nature of the conversation you have with your AI in that thread changes when you begin with such a prompt.

It’s true that AI as yet has not been able to replace the human touch when it comes to personal relationships, but it does beg the question: what are the pros and cons of each approach, honesty versus validation?

The reality is that the algorithm of our social media keeps us in a comfortable bubble for the most part unless we actively take concrete steps to override that feature. Moreover, many friends struggle with or lack the skills to provide honest feedback to one another when faced with cognitive dissonance. And in a world where the bad news just seems to keep coming and coming some days, it can feel like self care to stick with the naturally validating default of most LLMs.

How important is it, actually, that we hold up the mirror to truly examine what stares back at us?

For those of us who have been comforting ourselves with validation for many years, honesty can feel disorienting and scary. There is a certain element of sunk cost fallicy: I’ve spent so many decades telling myself this story, and behaving in a certain way, if I realize now that I’ve made bad choices, I will have wasted all this time!

And so it’s easier to continue with self validation. We cut off those who are truthful to us, we follow social media accounts that agree with us, and we don’t customize our AI.

Is this choice to default to the default necessarily harmful? Perhaps not… If the pain of truly recognizing and wrestling with the error of our ways seems too great to survive mentally, it may seem like a matter of life and death to continue being dishonest (or at least, not entirely truthful) with ourselves. On the other hand, when that dishonesty and our subsequent actions begin to impact those around us, we are now faced with an ethical dilemma. For example, the stories of victimhood we tell ourselves and others because we are in so much pain that rather than face the truth, we make up stories about our innocence, blaming others specifically for things that simply aren’t true, can have potentially devastating consequences to those people falsely accused.
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Moreover, when we choose validation over truth, we rob ourselves of the opportunity to get to know ourselves better, to love ourselves, and to reach our full potential as individuals. Even if it takes us the better part of our lifetime to arrive at that destination.

Honesty over validation. It’s not an easy approach, but, as the sign in Latin above the entrance to my college proudly proclaimed at my 20-year-old self, “the truth shall make you free”! And so, painful though it might be at times, I think I’ll choose honesty.

I stumbled across an old blog post recently, from a teacher leadership project I was involved in a hundred years ago in a former life. A colleague and I were attending a math conference, and I was wrestling with the idea of student focus. 

As an early adopter of social justice in the classroom (in the days before uber-wokeism), I was always looking for effective ways to teach through that lens... but also to consider the impact on academic curricula. 13 years later, it's still a timely topic, given all the discussion about what gets "taught" in the public school classroom.

Here's the original post from 2013, along with photos; apologies in advance for outdated/broken links.

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Social Justice in the Math Classroom

At the beginning of May, Dale (he was my colleague) and I were very fortunate to attend OAME's 2013 conference.  In addition to sharing our own learning vis-a-vis "Smart Bansho" as part of our project goals, we got to attend several sessions of interest.

A key theme of this year’s conference was “Social Justice in the Math Classroom”. 

With Stephen Lewis as the keynote to kick off the conference on the first morning, it was not an easy theme to ignore!

One of the sessions I attended dealt specifically with Social Justice in the Math Classroom.  The session was presented by a team of teachers and resource staff from the Toronto District School Board's  “Model Schools for Inner Cities” program.  As teachers who want to foster critical literacy in students, they challenged us to consider how each of the “isms” might be addressed in a math classroom to challenge social norms. 

We thought about this within the framework of the four quadrants:

• Social Justice as Charity

• Teaching and Learning About Social Justice
• Teaching and Learning For Social Justice
• Teaching and Learning AS Social Justice

As teachers considering how to integrate social justice into our math programs, a question we can ask ourselves is this:  “How can numbers be used to change the world and make it a better place?”

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13 years later, I'm no longer in a school or classroom full time, but I'm still interested in the topic. I'm curious what my teacher friends today think about this.

Sleep — that most elusive of creatures … as newborns we crave and successfully find it for almost 20 hours of every day! But it’s not long until the fight begins…

​As toddlers, we are never tired, and especially not when we are overtired! We will fight, fight, fight to the bitter end to avoid our naps and bedtimes, and when we wake up from said naps, we are often very cranky.

Soon come the teenage years, and we continue to fight our bedtimes, as our rewired adolescent brains convince us that staying up past midnight is the best way for survival…. And indeed, this approach works well — until the 7:00 A.M. alarm clock rings, signaling the evolution of our lives beyond neanderthal times, much to the chagrin of our not-yet-evolved brains, which now find themselves very tired. Relief comes only on the weekends, when our teenage brains can rest and rest and rest… Sometimes until two or three or even four P.M.!

​And then the cycle begins again. 

Another change arrives with adulthood, and our slow desire to move our bedtime a little earlier, especially when we work and jobs that require an early morning wake up. Yet we continue to fight sleep, sometimes because night is the only time we truly have to ourselves, to rest, to relax, to pursue our own interests from behind the screens of our phones and laptops… as we travel through adulthood, many of us find that our struggles with stress and anxiety travel along with us, like oversized luggage that the airline won’t allow you to check! These painfully large packages join us in bed, even if we go to bed “early enough” and “at a reasonable hour”. Now it is the baggage that is fighting asleep on our behalf; all we need to do is lie there with our eyes or closed, ruminating, waiting for night to end so that we can splash cold water on our faces, put on our appropriate attire, and paste on a smile to Face the world after yet another sleepless night. 

As we continue to age, we may consolidate some of our baggage into smaller, more manageable sleep packages that take up less room on the bed with us; unfortunately, that usually doesn’t happen until a special kind of later adulthood kicks in, at least for women. Perimenopause. This new and unwelcome visitor often brings with it night sweats and other sleep disturbances. Once again, sleep eludes us, even if we no longer have to wake up early for work or other commitments. Sigh. 

​In our quest for sleep, some begin experimenting with “remedies“ — herbal options, including naturopathic suggestions or cannabis related products. Or, if we’ve had it and are ready to fight big, something a little stronger, requiring a prescription from a licensed doctor. (Of course, we’ve exhausted all other options first: plenty of exercise, good bedtime routines and sleep hygiene generally, blah blah blah.)

If we are lucky as we proceed through our lifelong quest for sleep, we find elusive pockets of this treasure in unusual places: 20 minutes  on a beach chair while on vacation at all-inclusive resort, before someone comes up and offers you a drink, a necklace, a sun hat or some other tchotchkes being sold by one of the many beach vendors who are also not sleeping.  Of 15 minutes glorious, drifting, deepening sleep on an airplane when you were lucky enough to get a row to yourself, before turbulence hits, and the flight attendant gently but firmly wakes you up to insist you buckle your seatbelt “and then you can go back to sleep“ (which of course you, now safely buckled in and wide awake, never do!!) Sometimes, you might — like me — even have sleep “stations” opportunistic places set up strategically around your home: a cozy couch in the living room room, for example, with a throw, or a reclining chair, or a hammock strung across the porch. Here you can occasionally find up to an hour of uninterrupted, deep and glorious sleep!

Eventually, there comes a time when we close our eyes for the last time, and — without interruptions from flight attendants, spouses, alarm clocks, children, or mental trials and tribulations jerking us awake at the most inopportune times – then we will finally sleep. It will be a most glorious, deeply nourishing sleep. One from which we will never awake. 

​I was conceived on a summer camping trip, after my parents – who had been dating quite seriously for some time – had already broken up. I deduced this after my mother died, while reading one of the many, many love letters that my father had written her. 
 
 Xavier Pasteger, a Belgian immigrant, was a lover and a writer! He wrote my mother hundreds of letters, in florid handwriting, over the course of their courtship, and began many of them with “ma chère grenouille”, my dear frog. My mother kept them all, and along with a blurry black and white head shot she obtained for me from his former employer at Atomic Energy Canada for my 16th birthday, they are the only artifacts I have of my late father.
 
I never met Xavier. My grandmother tells a story of how, when she was wheeling me down the street in a stroller as a baby to take me to a nearby park, she saw my father walking towards us about a block or so away. When he recognized my grandmother from a distance, he crossed over to the other side of the street and continued walking, without making eye contact.

Before my third birthday, he had died from cancer.
 
It is through one of these letters that my mother saved that I realized how late in their relationship I came to be. In my youth, I had often asked my mother what happened to my dad, why they never married. (I knew he had died, but it wasn’t until I was a young teenager that I came to understand that I was truly a bastard, born out of wedlock, and that that choice had been almost exclusively my mother’s.)
 
My mother, Carola Teschow, was a German immigrant and the first feminist I ever knew. Her story is not for this blog post, but suffice it to say that by the time she became pregnant with me, she had an established career in a male-dominated field, owned a share in a decent house in a nice neighborhood, and had built a life in her adopted country of Canada. By her accounts, my father asked her many times to marry him. But his conditions were a life of tradition: he wanted my mother to stop working, and take care of the household and any children they might have together; this was the appropriate thing to do as a woman, he told her. She declined, and so the relationship ended.

From what I can gather through letters, the camping trip was supposed to be a friendly, pressure-free bit of fun weeks or possibly months after the initial break up. The steamy night in a shared tent that ultimately produced me was not the intended outcome of that adventure… at least not for my mother. His florid written apology post-camping quest must have fallen on deaf ears, as they did not reunite thereafter. Even once he found out that she was with child and asked her – again – to marry him. (Only after I was born to my single mother did she – probably at the suggestion of Child Services – reach out to my father one final time, to request some sort of financial support; he did not argue, and until my 21st birthday, a handsome monthly sum was deposited into my school savings account, first directly through his employer and after his death, an orphan's benefit payment via superannuation program through the government.)

Growing up with my mother and grandmother, I looked to them as my influencers, at least genetically. And yet, my mother’s genes are only part of the fabric of who I am. I know little of my father, and yet I recognize his crooked smile from the one faded photo in my son, and there are patterns in my own appearance and behaviour that very clearly do NOT come from my mother’s side of the family. As I grow older, I think occasionally about the bigger picture of who I am, outside of upbringing and environment.

 Xavier didn’t get the girl back, even after he put a baby in her! And it occurred to that baby this morning to examine why, beyond the simple “if we get married you have to stay home“ disqualifier. 

From his letters and the fact that they stayed together for more than a few months, I can infer that my mother loved the Belgian’s passion, was fascinated by the way his personality lit up a room, and was drawn to the way he love-bombed her. I recognize these traits within myself. And yet, she ultimately left him.

What was their communication style like as a couple in the early 70s? From her few stories and the tone of his letters, he was clearly thoughtful, but it seems he was also reckless. How did he show his respect (or lack thereof) for her female leadership skills, and how did she navigate their considerable height difference? (She was a good 11 inches taller than him – without heels!) How did they fight, and how did they recover from said arguments? Did he push her too hard, violate her boundaries? Did she withdraw when he pushed, and did he sulk when she did so? Why did she agree to an overnight trip with him after they had already broken up – and clearly didn’t want a continued physical relationship with him (as evidenced by several lines in his later apology letter… was he apologizing for essentially raping her that night?!) 

My mother is long dead and unable to tell her side of the story, and of course I never got his, other than what’s left of him in his writing.

As I navigate difficulties in my own personal relationship and reflect on previous associations, I’m left wondering how much of my father I inherited in my personality: I, too, am a lover and a writer. I’m also a boundary pusher – did I get that from him? Perhaps unlike my father, I am recognizing the problem with such a quality, and learning (albeit slowly and late) not to violate those I love the most. Like him too, I am thoughtful yet careless.
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Unlike my father, though, I’m not dead yet, and I am educating myself. I am a very serious and committed student. Unlike Xavier, I hope to succeed in my quest to get the girl back.