u/cmojess

I'm sitting here in a department meeting having to sit through a presentation by our Pearson rep about all the fancy new AI tools they built into their etext.

She is incredibly proud of the fact that students can get their AI tool to summarize the text for them or to tell them what questions they should ask. She loves it because it's internal and it's safe! It doesn't ping other AI models, just their own!

I pushed back on this and mentioned how much this is hurting the overall learning of our students. Learning how to ask the right questions is so important. Reading and pulling important things from the text is also important.

I have colleagues here thinking this is incredible and helps students learn so much. They're arguing that even our pre-med students need to know how to use AI since clinicians are using it and so our job isn't to teach them how to think, it's to teach them how to use the AI. The most vocal colleague teaches a class that is a prerequisite to the one I usually teach. The students coming out of the prerequisite are doing very poorly in the next class in the sequence. They're largely not retaining much at all.

AI is helping many students pass classes, it's not helping them learn in the vast majority of cases.

So many mixed emotions tonight. Back in May when my mom was diagnosed, we decided to take one last mother/daughter adventure together while we still could. At that point she could still walk mostly unassisted and was still overall functioning pretty well. We booked an Alaskan cruise because she wanted to go back one more time.

My mom has been cruising Alaska, mostly on Princess, for about 25 years. These would be her sister trips with my aunt because my dad hates the cold. They both achieved elite status from how many times they cruised. My aunt stopped cruising due to her health a few years back. Four years ago we did our first mother/daughter cruise, which was to Alaska, since my mom needed a new Alaksa buddy and was really excited to show me all these places she loved. We decided to stop buying physical gifts for each other and just do mother/daughter trips instead. We did one of our trips just this past January. That one was a basic California coastal cruise to San Francisco and Ensenada. We picked it because we could drive to the port instead of fly and we just wanted to spend time together. We were looking forward to many more years of these.

Previously we had gone on some awesome Yosemite adventures together, since my dad refuses to do the drive into Yosemite, including one where we wound up taking this really long epic hike and saw a bear. It was a whole thing.

We left for this final trip on the 7th and there was so much more to consider with how far she'd progressed. She was fully reliant on her walker, and several times her legs were just so tired we put it in "wheelchair mode" so I could push her around. I was definitely a disabled companion throughout the 9 days we were gone.

It's so hard to see how much she's declined since we first had an inkling that something was going on back in January. When we disembarked yesterday my mom had to do some walking but kept tripping over her feet because she couldn't get one of her legs up high enough most steps. It's been so hard to see my previously active mother struggle to walk, talk, eat, and just do basic things. She wanted so much to stroll around her favorite Alaskan towns one more time. We accomplished this, but she was just so worn out. I could tell she wanted to do more in each port, but even in "wheelchair mode" with me pushing her she just couldn't. My aunt was asking me on Friday night over text if I'd seen decline in the week we'd been gone because she thought she noticed more decline in the two video calls we'd had and I said yes, I absolutely had.

My mom celebrated her 78th birthday on this cruise and I did everything possible to make it as amazing as possible. I arranged things with our dining room staff to spoil her, including a conversation about what sort of dessert she could still eat with her swallowing issues and this strange problem she's having with her throat burning. I did other sneaky things like bring decorations to deck our stateroom out and upgrade our airline flights to better seats. I bumped us up to first class for our final flight on the way home since that's something my mom had never done before.

We chose joy the whole trip and decided not to talk about all the hard stuff. We mentioned it in passing here and there, but we really focused on spending 9 days creating more memories together that I can keep with me now and after she's gone. We'll go back to some of the hard stuff in the next couple weeks, because we're at a point where some decisions need to be finalized and she needs to get some paperwork started with her doctor. Her mind is definitely not as sharp, though it's nowhere nearly as atrophied as her body has become.

I'm so grateful that we had this time together, just the two of us. And Alaska decided to love us because we had perfect weather the entire time. Not one drop of rain and it even got nice and warm a couple of the days. Our time sailing through the Hubbard Glacier area and Glacier Bay National Park could not have been more perfect. I got a fun picture of my mom in front of the Margerie glacier. Same name, different spelling, and not something she or my aunt had thought of during their previous sailings.

But I can't believe our travels are over. I can't believe my mom will never set foot on a Princess cruise ship again or take another plane trip. I can't believe she'll never have a blow-out birthday celebration again. If she's still around next year, she won't be able to enjoy her birthday like this year. Not with her rate of decline or the hard line she has on what counts as a quality life. I'm just glad I was able to put all the details together for her to make this trip so special because she kept telling me how perfect it was, how this was her best birthday ever, and how much she appreciated all the time I put into every last thing including mobility assistance and stuff. I told her I appreciated her and that I was happy to help spoil her. Though, she spoiled me, too, because a good portion of the trip she refused to let me pay for. Thankfully we booked everything under my accounts so I was able to go in and be evil and pay for upgrades without her knowing.

I don't know what the point of this rambly post is. I guess just to ramble to people who get it. People who know how awful watching this disease is and how incredibly unfair it is to know when things are the last time because this disease has taken so much.

Thanks for reading and letting me ramble.

Four years ago my mom and I used EZAir on advice of her Princess vacation planner and it was okay. We flew into Seattle day of and had no problems getting on the ship in plenty of time for our cruise. My biggest frustration with the flight up was the hour I had to spend on hold with the airline itself to get our names corrected from the weird way our cruise booking smashed MrsFirstMiddleLast or whatever together so I could add TSA numbers. Our flight home, though, was super stressful. They booked it without much of a buffer, and we were rushing the entire way and came close to missing the flight.

This year we're doing a southbound voyage of the glaciers Whittier to Vancouver. Last month my mom was diagnosed with ALS so, even though we did an easy local cruise already this year, we decided to do one last grand Alaskan voyage before she looses even more of her mobility. (It's her favorite. She and her sister have been cruising Princess to Alaska for 25ish years and are Elite.) My dad hates the cold so since her sister stopped cruising, I've been her cold cruise companion.

Instead of flying in day of we did decide to fly in day before and just stay in Anchorage overnight. I had a seamless experience booking a hotel package and transfers from the airport and then down to Whittier. Since my mom's mobility has declined I'm trying to make everything as easy as possible for her. I decided to check into EZAir again since they guarantee you'll make the ship and make it home.

The website had insane fares for the same flights I could find direct from the airline itself. I called them today and what a major headache. The EZAir person would not listen to a thing I said. She absolutely refused to actually answer any of my questions. She kept quoting regulations about how we had to arrive in Anchorage by 11:59 pm the day before the cruise to be able to take our cruise, use the hotel, or use our hotel to Whittier transfer. She then proceeded to try and book me on a United airlines flight that didn't get into Anchorage until after 11 pm. I kept asking her if she could please focus her search on Alaska, as that is the airline my husband and I always use and accrue miles on, but she was insistent on United. I told her I found an Alaska flight that leaves my city at 8:40 in the morning and arrives in Anchorage at 4:20 and that was the flight I wanted. I found it on the EZAir website AND direct on Alaska. It was also significantly cheaper on Alaska directly. For some inexplicable reason she could not find that specific flight and then tried to book me on an Alaksa flight, finally, but one that also wouldn't get us to Anchorage until after 11 pm. I explained to her that if I was paying for one of their hotel packages I wanted to get to Anchorage with enough time to enjoy the hotel that evening. I also tried to talk to her about the return flight home from Vancouver, stressing my mother's limited mobility, and she wanted to book us on a flight that left at 10:30 am, which seems really early and not doable with someone who cannot walk fast.

Ultimately I begged off the call because I needed to pick my kid up from camp anyway. But, man, that was an awful experience trying to work with the EZAir rep.

How risky is it flying into Anchorage without it being tied to Princess? The last time I sailed out of Whittier I was on a Cruise Tour with my in-laws and we did the land portion first so getting to Whittier was all part of the land tour. And how risky is it flying home from Vancouver without booking through Princess?

My guess is if I'm flying in day before that should be a decent buffer and flying home if I book something that leaves after noon we should have enough time to get to our transport, get to the airport, get situated with whatever wheelchair service Vancouver has, etc.

Hi everyone. Backstory: My mother (77f) was diagnosed with ALS last month, limb onset, after several months of increasing symptoms and constant trips to her doctors before culminating in the ALS diagnosis. This is not my first rodeo with this awful disease. I watched a mentor die of ALS around 25 years ago in late high school (onset) into college (when she passed). The last thing I ever expected was to have to watch my mom go through this.

Right now the symptom that's frustrating my mom the most is how utterly exhausted she is all the time. While she has noticeable loss of mobility, she still has a decent amount of mobility and doesn't want to have to give up things she loves yet. Even spending less than a half-hour in her garden leaves her so spent she needs to go take a nap. She has always been incredibly active. She even kept working a part-time job well after retirement because hanging around her house made her bored. She is very much not ready to sit around.

Other than having her mainline caffeine, which is obviously a terrible idea, is there anything anyone has tried that can help increase energy? I would love for her to enjoy the things she loves while she still has her mobility.