Degrees defined: PhD, Master, Bachelor, Associate–all about that expensive piece of paper called your degree.
The classroom sits at the edge of a small town in the Philippines. Gray concrete. Corrugated iron roof. Windows without glass, only wooden frames. Inside, a new blackboard. Chalk dust already in the tray. Desks in neat rows. Plastic film still on the surfaces. A plaque by the door says “Anonymous.” No one knows where the money came from. Everyone in town knows.
By Jinabout a month ago in Education
On the night of October 4, the temperature in Qilian County fell to minus four. The hotel front desk put up a No Vacancy sign. Tourists stood on the street with their suitcases. Staff from the Culture and Tourism Bureau arrived with a list and led them to two middle schools. The dormitory door opened. The matron stood to one side, a ring of keys in her hand. The culture and tourism director bent down to make the beds. The bedding was new. The bed boards had been slept on by students. Tourists said thank you. The director said it was what they should do. No one asked who used to sleep in that bed.
You know the words. Reading feels like automatic doors. Then you open your mouth. The doors jam. You want to say, “Wire this into the pipeline.” What comes out is, “Put this new code into the old process.” The other person nods. You nod. The conversation moves on. You also move on, but part of you stays behind, staring at the sentence you did not say.
You know the feeling. A question that once cost an afternoon now costs a sentence. The model returns a page, sometimes ten. Definitions, frameworks, examples, counterexamples, a plan you could paste into a slide deck. Answers arrive like tap water. Turn the handle, fill the glass.
A page from a German primary school German textbook has been circulating again. It comes from Klett’s Niko Sprachbuch series. The heading is “Unterwegs in China,” or “Getting Around in China.” Exercise 5 asks pupils to look at pictures, read the text, and discuss what is different in China compared with Germany.
A contest-admitted student had Advanced Algebra on his desk in senior year. He did not need to take the gaokao, but he still woke at 6:30 and left the study room at 11 p.m. Some classmates had already worked in university labs. Some read English paper abstracts. Some had taught themselves general physics.
When the college entrance exam scores came out, I could apply to Fudan or Nanjing University. The majors were similar. The cities were both good. I wrote Fudan first on the application form. My pen stopped. I crossed it out and wrote Nanjing University. Because of one line: “Four hundred and eighty temples of the Southern Dynasties, how many towers and terraces in mist and rain?”
The viral story is simple: at a university, the instructor of a general elective was absent repeatedly. A student could not stand it anymore, went to the podium, used AI to generate slides, and taught for an hour. It sounds like wish-fulfillment fiction. The course had already been canceled. Many students missed the notice, which is why there was an empty classroom. Even the premise that the teacher was absent repeatedly does not hold.
I October 19, 2024, Ithaca, New York. No one can currently give a complete account, confirmed by a court, of what happened that night inside the Chi Phi fraternity house at Cornell University. What is known: a then-20-year-old Cornell female student, after drinking at a sorority, went alone to the Chi Phi house to see a male friend.
I found the news late one night. Vals AI used 10 Claude Opus 5.5 agents. In 15 hours, they generated 289 files, built the C-HD shortest path algorithm, and passed Lean Kernel verification. The headline said: beats Dijkstra.
At a job fair, the computer science booth has a line. The civil engineering booth has empty chairs. Online, people say CS is dead. In group chats, students still ask how to transfer into it. Both things are true. They are just about different problems.
The argument over English as leverage flared again in September 2026. Supporters point to doubled salaries. Critics call it worship of a language. The surface fight is about English. The deeper question is whether ordinary people still have a low-cost way to change their situation.
By Jin2 months ago in Education
