boy, did I underestimate my workload

I hate to say it, but that first quiz still isn't ready to go. I slapped up—once again—my GPT-generated religion quiz in its place to give newcomers a vague idea of what to expect, but the quizzes and tests I'll be making for Substack will have, as I wrote, more layers of complexity to them: the quizzes in particular will be "checkboxed multiple choice" in nature, i.e. the answers could be any one of 16 combinations of sets and subsets—from no answer (null set) to one answer to two answers to three answers to all four answers. The order of the multiple-choice answers will be randomized, the order of the questions themselves will also be randomized, and which questions will appear will also also be randomized. If I'm going to use multiple choice, a format I hate, I'm going to make it as hard as possible for learners to bullshit their way through even the smallest quiz. Not because I'm a mean asshole, which I might be, but because, if they take and retake those quizzes, they'll start to learn.

Tests, in contrast to quizzes, will include matching and fill-in-the-blank questions, and while I'd thought of doing 20-question quizzes and 60-question tests, I'm now realizing that that's an insane amount of work for one person to do, but I also refuse to generate questions via AI: they're all being pulled out of my blood-soaked, overworked, ever-shrinking brain (the AI I'm using is just to code the final version of the quiz; content is all mine). So it'll be 15-question quizzes and 30-question tests. I'm learning as I go, which has always been the case.

But the sad upshot remains that I have no quiz to upload for Monday. It might materialize this week; it might appear the following week. A single quiz, I'm realizing, is a multi-day endeavor. Of course, it would help if I started a little earlier in the day, but I'm balancing work with resistance training and Spanish, not to mention more Skillshare viewing. Sigh.

Still, it's nice to feel life coming full circle. It's a bit like being a student again.

I also changed the text of my welcome email to new paid subscribers, adding something like a mission statement that says in part:

Some people, like me, are late bloomers, only belatedly realizing that a good life is one lived in service to others. While I’m no genius or expert about anything, I’ve lived long enough to know and to have become good at a few things, and I’d like to share those things with you. (I just realized that that might sound creepy.) Thank you for thinking that my Substack might be worth your time and money. I deeply appreciate it. I will do what I can to share a love of proper grammar and good-quality writing that doesn’t equate idiotic sloppiness with “creativity.” People who think creativity is all about throwing away the rules are like the wannabe gym rats who use bad form in the gym, injure themselves, and quit. True creativity comes through proper constraints. I call this the paradox of freedom; you can read about it in my humble little book.

I seriously doubt the notion of a paradox of freedom is original to me. If anything, I hear the influence of SFF author Stephen R. Donaldson in that phrase. Alas, understanding the paradox of freedom doesn't get me any closer to getting this damn quiz done, and I'm not sure when I might have time to write that BSG review. Sit tight.

Righto—off to bed.

UPDATE: I've concluded that, if I make these quizzes only five questions each, I've already got nearly three quizzes' worth of material. So I can definitely start generating code for the quizzes Monday afternoon. This also minimizes learner torture.