I was working on a personal project yesterday to answer some questions I had about how liquidity risk works for money market mutual funds, and to forecast/nowcast liquidity risk and NAV risk for a bunch of funds.

Mind you: I don't know the first thing about anything financial. I was just curious.

chatgpt gave me a bunch of sources of data that I wanted, translating my lay description of things I wanted to know into financial terms of art. I could then look up legal definitions and formulas for those terms to make sure they were what I thought they were. chatgpt also told me which SEC forms those things are disclosed on, what data brokers I could use for other data, etc.

between chatgpt and copilot I saved at least an hour on the job of pulling down historical data from EDGAR for a bunch of funds and getting the stats I wanted (I didn't know EDGAR existed until yesterday, and the xml/html/txt formats are kind of annoying... like, fine, but a bit of a pita so I'm glad I had help because ughhh is that kind of code boring and damn are LLMs good few-shot inductive parser generators!). Also wrote some nice chart.js code for me and helped with automatically collecting, searching, and extracting some key stats and terms from prospectuses. I didn't know about chart.js until yesterday.

All of this would've been possible without assistants, and required a lot of "executive function" on my part to bring together, but it seriously saved me at least a couple hours of implementation work and up to a day on research and learning terminology and regulatory stuff. Again, verification of those things is way easier when you know what words to look up definitions for. And chatgpt did make mistakes/hallucinate.

I don't find much use in my professional life, where the code I'm writing is apparently too domain-specific for copilot to be helpful and the mathematics is too complex for chatgpt to help with. Maybe in a few years. We'll see.

But teacher and admin time isn't free. People with high political media engagement have lost their damn minds and are now offended about everything. Including thousand year old statues, apparently.

No one gives a shit if your pull your kid out of a class, but everyone -- including LOTS of clued-in conservatives -- are sick of teachers/admins/boards spending too much time holding the hands of parents who spend too much time reading political news and not enough time working on their emotional regulation skills.

If you want to control what your kid sees, YOU need to do more work. If you want more information, YOU need to review your kid's materials. If you want access to more than every other parent is provided, then YOU need to do the work of getting that material and deciding what your kid will see. It's called parenting.

If you want to curate your kid's educational experience, then put in the fucking work and stop demanding use of my tax dollars and my kid's instructional time to satiate your neuroses.

(Also: your innocent little middle school angel is definitely talking about boobies and balls recess.... because, y'know, they're middle schoolers and that is what middle schoolers do. But we'll pretend they don't as long as you stop stealing time and money from us.)

> don't get me started on the hap hazard parental controls for the internet

You can buy all sorts of software, but no amount of law or regulation is going to solve the problem of the internet being the internet.

Some publisher's course materials may fit your criticism. Lots of expensive garbage in K12.

The material I reviewed was quite the opposite. Instead of memorizing one way of performing an operation, you learn many different ones, discuss why one might be better than the other in certain contexts, and even think through why two different algorithms implement the same operation. The students I worked with/observed emerged from high school with a level of mathematical maturity that most students don't achieve until well after their university Calculus sequence, if ever.

Two other thoughts:

1. Everything you just described also describes how most schools implemented mathematics education prior to common core. If this is how someone taught with common core, it's almost 100% certain that this is also how they taught before common core, and that this is how they would teach mathematics regardless of what standards they were following. What you are describing is a bad mathematics educator, which is a serious problem in the USA but is orthogonal to choice of standards.

2. Most importantly, I never got even an articulation at this level of detail. People were angry because pundits told them to be angry. There were no articulated reasons. Just, "CC = bad".

The labs were about these things (and cards), and therefore gambling. We had to do purely abstract labs instead. The issue is that probability is hard to teach even with visceral physical examples of sampling from distributions.