I first met my spouse in college, where she was doing biology while I was doing French, so even though I’m now a tenured professor in a technology-focused major, I still think of her as the “STEM parent” for the purposes of helping with kiddo’s homework.

This Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comic from yesterday spoke to me at a deep level: My first thoughts went to generative AI, an area in which I feel like a fetishization of optimization is crowding out really important questions of what is good. As I put it in a university survey earlier today, there are undeniable benefits to the use of AI tools, but there are important questions as to who benefits.

Kiddo’s awesome “advent calendar of magic” is prominently advertised as a STEM toy, and that’s been bugging me. Not because it isn’t true, but because things don’t need to be STEM to be valuable.

I keep a journal using the Day One app for macOS/iOS, and while I have some lingering concerns about platformizing (and even digitizing) my journaling, there are also some pretty neat aspects to using an app like this. First, it’s very easy to copy text from other electronic sources into the app, and that really helps me capture things that made an impression on me from day to day. Second, it’s also easy to search for, read, and even be reminded of old entries.

I am skeptical about heavy emphasis on STEM as educational policy, but watching my kid learn to program with her new robot today was a real treat.

This is my issue with CS education efforts, especially ’teaching people to code.’ It’s narrowly focused on technical skills and not broader social and ethical reflection. I’d never argue that programmers shouldn’t work for defense contractors, but I’m uncomfortable with associating them so closely with CS education.

I am, technically speaking, a STEM educator, but the reason I get so cranky about STEM hype is that these disciplines cannot on their own address the problems I’m most worried about right now.