Everything happen so much

2026-07-15

One of the things that just messes with me a lot lately is that I'm developing so much in terms of materials for my classes, new tools and curricula and resources, and the thing that's so wild about it all is that I'm basically just reading things, taking notes, giving those notes to li'l guys and then they make it all and I edit some more and it's, well, done.

I feel like my place in things is getting, well, strange where it's mostly my experience and taste and wide background are what's useful about me. But for how long, oh Lord? How long will I actually be useful to the world in-and-of-myself.

Everything is changing faster than I thought it would and I feel like we have such a short time to save the academy before it obsoletes itself.

People are just constantly focused on "what if students cheat, what if students cheat" and I just want to say "we need to justify why, in a world of tools that are an autodidact's dreams and management might be the most important skill, an academic education still has value!"

I do think what we do has value, I think it matters more than ever, but I feel lost trying to get people to listen to me!

It's like how I felt when I worked in particle physics twenty years ago telling people "the Higgs search is probably going to find something roughly standard model and if that happens we need to be planning for new experiments, probably messy things like heavy ion experiments" and my colleagues wouldn't listen. Except that's what happened! And it's been awful for the field!

I just feel like a failure, like I should have been building the clout to actually have people listen to me rather than retreating from the internet when I had more attention.