Brave new AI world: UCLA comp lit course to be fully AI (except the grading, of course)

 https://newsroom.ucla.edu/stories/comparative-literature-zrinka-stahuljak-artificial-intelligence?fbclid=IwY2xjawHCkWJleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHevSkyx0i5RjId-pd4g4_W-cs4zgTUOz19XwrxVpLU7LD2jt9E4FEkX7Jw_aem_LRrvJbHS0TFgq9uokRfYFw

So here we are: some kind of highly monetized tech company called Kudu is going to take Professor Zrinka Stahuljak’s comp lit course materials and turn them into a fully AI-driven course—except for the grading, of course, which will be left to Teaching Assistants. 

Benefits to students? Consistency across multiple sections. 

Benefits to Teaching Assistants? They get to work on the students’ writing (autocorrect wants to make this “writhing,” and I kind of get it).

Benefits to the Professor? No additional work except for submitting grades. She doubtless has tenure and is not worried about her job. 

Any downsides? 

1. Well, the TAs are going to be stuck reading writing that is likely to be about 95% AI generated (ChatGPT, Claude, Google Notes or whatever) and maybe 5% from Chegg or Course Hero. And they will get to track it all down to report to Academic Standards.

2.  If you were a student, would you put forth your best effort, knowing that everything was canned and your professor was never going to look at any of it? If your professor was like the Karl Marx God in the clouds in a Monty Python skit, who, once having generated content, just says “Get on with it!”? Look, I teach online often, and one of the hardest but most rewarding parts is talking to students as real person to real person. What if you remove even that layer of connection?

3. Who’s going to answer their questions? AI. 

4. Oh, and the textbook that will generate all the AI? Is it OER? Oh, you sweet summer child; of course it’s not. It’s going to cost the students an additional $25 per semester. 

5. If this is the wave of the future—the MOOC of the future, if you will—what about intellectual property? 

Questions:

1. Is this going to cost the university more than simply having a course in D2L, Canvas, or Blackboard? 

2. Since Kudu is compensating the professors, how does this affect their employment with the university? 

3. Cui bono? Kudu and the University’s bottom line, probably. But what about the students? What about the connections that teaching a humanistic subject is supposed to foster? 

4. Out of state tuition at UCLA is 43K a year. Would you send your kid to be taught by a bot? Call me when Bezos and the other billionaires and millionaires send their students to be taught by nonhuman objects instead of people. 

Dear Ms. Undine answers your top 3 nonacademic advice column questions

 

And now for something completely different: I'm shifting gears by resurrecting Dear Ms. Undine for a post.

As an avid if shamefaced consumer of advice columns, I've seen more than a few questions and answers recur over the years: these are the absolute perennials. The questions and answers below are replies to  just the relatively lighthearted ones, not the ones where people are trapped in bad situations, etc. 

Ms. Undine is going to dispose of these in a sentence or so, although advice columnists are much more nuanced.

Dear Ms. Undine,

I sent my young grandchildren gifts, but they don't send me handwritten thank you notes. Sometimes they call or text, but it's not the same. I am miffed and stewing over this incessantly. Should I stop sending them gifts? What should I do? -- Fretful

A. Dear Fretful,

Did I miss something? They're your grandchildren, as in children. Sure, you can stop sending them gifts, but tell me: how is this going to improve your relationship with them? Also: get a hobby. 

Q. Dear Ms. Undine,

I've been living with my boyfriend for seven years, and we get along well. I would like to get married and have a family, but he says "maybe later" or "I don't want to get married." How can I get him to propose? -- Limbo

A. Dear Limbo,

There's nothing wrong with living together forever without being married, but if you want to get married, he is not the person for you. If he wanted to marry you, he would. Sorry. 

Q. Dear Ms. Undine,

I am planning a destination wedding to Antarctica, and the wedding aesthetic for My Special Day is that everyone wear yellow with purple feathers in their hair or they can't come.  I've already told everyone that they can't get married/have children/get engaged in the next year because it is My Special Year. It's going to be amazing, but people are refusing to attend. How can I get them to stop being so selfish and realize that My Special Day will be the event of their lives? - Bride of a Lifetime

A. Dear Bride,

Have you considered that they have lives, limited money, limited vacation time, and perhaps a limited tolerance for entitled shenanigans? Sorry--stupid question. 

Town without Pity

 If you can't stand any more election stuff, skip this one.

 

This song (music by one of my favorite Old Hollywood bombastic composers, Dimitri Tiomkin) has been running in my mind for the last, oh, 6 days since November 5. In case you don't want to listen to a pop song/movie title music from 1961: "No, it really isn't pretty / What a town without pity can do." The lyrics are talking about young lovers, but I'm listening to the part that's something about "this crazy planet falls apart." 

 

She ran a great campaign, and we supported her with as many dollars as we could muster. Those who held back from voting, or voted again for the worst president in American history, have put us here, and here we are. 

So we're about to see an administration without pity, only with more juice from billionaires, a corrupt right-wing Supreme Court, and, as Mad Magazine used to say, "the usual gang of idiots." 

I'm sure you've all seen this great  meme, from https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1870771-leopards-eating-peoples-faces-party: 

The Leopards Eating People's Faces Party is in power now, and, to complete the pity theme, I am having a very tough time dredging up any pity whatsoever for people who voted for that man and are now in for a world of hurt--like the rest of us, of course, but at least we tried.

Hope you are all doing well.

MLA on AI: I promised I wasn't going to write more about it, but here we are

 Internal monologue of the last 15 minutes: "You have papers to grade . . . don't look at that MLA AI report that you couldn't see the other day because its server crashed . . . papers to grade, remember?  . . . don't do it!" and here we are. It is the Great MOOC Panic of 2015 all over again, and it is pure catnip to people with opinions.

So as you probably already heard, CCCC and the MLA have joined their unholy forces to weigh in on Generative AI. (I kid because I love.)  https://hcommons.org/app/uploads/sites/1003160/2024/10/MLA-CCCC-Joint-Task-Force-WP-3-Building-Culture-for-Gen-AI-Literacy-1.pdf

There are three of these working papers; this one is the latest. I did read through it, although probably to get into the spirit of things I should have fed it into an AI engine and asked for bullet points.

Some positive thoughts:

1. I appreciate the work that went into this, truly. There are thoughtful people on the board, and they have really tried to make guidelines that would be helpful. 

2. It's really useful for distinguishing between AI and Generative AI and other forms as well as what they can and cannot do.

Some questions: 

1. Is it strongly promoting the use of GAI in every course? You betcha. I kind of see it, since they believe the wave of the future is training students to use it effectively, since the whole "help students to write better on their own" ship has apparently sailed.

2. What is our role as educators in all this? 

1. Training students to evaluate GAI for accuracy, which means that we--instructors--get to spend more time getting cozy with GAI and checking up on it as well as evaluating student papers. Two for the salary of one!
   
2. Teaching students 
1. to evaluate GAI output for relevancy, bias, and data security, 
2. to evaluate rhetorical situations where GAI is and isn't appropriate
3. to having them write metacommentaries on their use of GAI in a paper
4. to monitor how GAI helps (!) their development as writers. Yes, reading the GAI output and assessing it as well as assessing their papers: twice the grading fun.
   
3. Toward the goals of #1 and #2, seek out more professional development opportunities about GAI, and "[r]ead current articles and popular nonfiction about AI as well as emerging Critical Artificial Intelligence (CAIL) scholarship" (10). Are you tired yet?

3.  Can you opt out?

Yes. "Respect the choice to opt out" (10). 

   BUT if you opt out and are contingent, could you lose your job? 

Also yes. "Some instructors may face consequences in hiring and evaluation processes when they opt out of teaching AI literacies in their classrooms, particularly when shared governance processes have determined department-wide uses for AI in the curriculum" (10).

4.  But if I'm just one instructor, can I decide it's not appropriate for my course? 

Theoretically, yes; in practice, probably not. The report strongly, and I mean strongly, advocates for program-wide and department-wide if not university-wide adoption of a consistent policy of integrating GAI training as a cohesive whole.

I agree that this should be done in a systematic or coherent fashion, and it's much better to have something consistent. Will there be professional development time and funding devoted to this? 

5. I hear the tinkling of shiny "if you're not on board with the tech, you don't understand it" bells with this one. 

Faculty development meetings should be a space for building instructors’ conceptual knowledge about GAI literacies, helping them develop theory-informed pedagogical practices for integrating GAI into their teaching, and allowing them to experiment with GAI technologies and develop their technological skills.

Such gatherings can simultaneously address instructors’ resistance, fear, and hesitation about using GAI in their teaching while also recognizing that faculty development programs cannot make instructors experts in GAI, which is not an attainable goal given the fast-changing nature of these technologies

 Translation: 

• If you question it, it's because you fear it, which is stupid. You are stupid and not thinking correctly about this. 
• We are telling you that this is the wave of the future, and if you don't get on board with a new technology, you are just plain wrong. 
• If you have questions, you are wrong.
• If you hesitate rather than swallowing this wholesale, you are wrong. 
• You need to be persuaded, not listened to. Your fear and hesitation are not legitimate. They are resistance that needs to be overcome.

But this is not our first rodeo with the whole "look, it's shiny!" argument, is it? With MOOCs? With auto-graded essays? With Twitter? With every future-forward "get rid of the books" library?  

I'm not saying that it's wrong. I'm saying that rushing headlong into every new technology--tech enthusiast here, remember--without allowing for questions and a thoughtful assessment is what we keep doing, and I wonder if we will ever learn from our past experiences.

 

A minor sign of hope after the AI maelstrom

 AI, and the students' use of it to generate papers, consumed far too much of my brain earlier this semester. I'm teaching online, so my usual expedient of having them write in class isn't an option. 

It was wearing me out, between worrying that I was letting them get away with something and thus disadvantaging honest students or that I wasn't living up to the syllabus by checking everything. It was making me discouraged with teaching.

Turnitin wasn't helpful, nor was GPTZero, the supposedly good AI-catcher. The results could be wildly at odds with each other if you tried it twice in a row, unless something was coming up 100% AI generated. 

I called out a few students, per the syllabus. What that means: I had them talk to me. Many said it was Grammarly, which has gone heavily to AI, and said they wouldn't use it again. I am not anti-tech--eighteen years of blogging here should tell you that--but if they are not doing their own work, I can't help them make it better.

Then things started to get better. Aside from modifying the LMS discussion board settings and Perusall (no copy & paste, post your reply first before seeing others' responses--this I learned to restrict after a few students were copying from each other), I think what happened is this:

They realized that I was reading what they wrote. 

Now, I tell them this in the syllabus, but reading any syllabus, especially with all the required institutional boilerplate, is like reading the instructions for setting up a wireless router or, my favorite analogy, Beetlejuice's Guide for the Recently Deceased. 

Was it just adjusting the rubrics that made the difference? Maybe some. I discovered that having good criteria there would take care of the few AI-written posts, which naturally fell down to the C- or D level.

But I like to believe that it was that there was a real person in there, in those discussion boards, commenting and upvoting and mentioning by name the students and the specific things that they did well. They know that there is a person behind the class.

And on their papers, addressing the specifics of what they had written, suggesting other ways to develop the argument, and so on.

And in answering their emails quickly and with a sense of their real concerns. 

What I noticed is that the AI boilerplate--so far, anyway--seems to have died down, and I've mostly stopped looking for it and thinking about it.

This may, of course, just be an artifact of its being five weeks from the end of the semester, or maybe I'm missing something.

But their writing seems to be more authentic, more as it used to be, and not that MEGO AI boilerplate. 

With some of the professional organizations in the field throwing in the towel and writing guidelines not about if we will use AI but how extensively we ought to use it, I count my students' responses as a sign of hope. 

Maybe if we give them authentic feedback, as the MLA-CCCC report suggests, they will respond with authentic writing. 

What authors (and characters) could learn from When Harry Met Sally

 I’m working on an author now who made choices in her life—and whose characters make choices—that make you want to yell “don’t do it!” This isn’t anything I have a right to have an opinion on, of course: a dramatic life, and characters who make choices that seem irrational to me, are the stuff of literature. 

But I keep wishing that the author, and her characters, had the benefit of watching at least two scenes in When Harry Met Sally.

These aren’t the main scenes, but they seem to echo from classic fiction all the way down to today. 

1. This is actually a series of scenes. Throughout the first half of the movie, Carrie Fisher’s character, Marie, is having an affair with a married man. (I can’t remember their character names and so will refer to them by the actors’ names.) 

She keeps bringing up evidence that he’s going to leave his wife for her. I’m paraphrasing, but the dialogue goes like this:

Carrie Fisher: “I was going through the receipts, and he just bought her a $300 nightgown. I don’t think he’s ever going to leave his wife.”

Meg Ryan: “No one thinks he is ever going to leave his wife.” 

Carrie Fisher: “You’re right, you’re right, I know you’re right.” 

The scene is repeated, with comic variations, until the double date when she meets Bruno Kirby. Spoiler: the married man never leaves his wife for Carrie Fisher.

2. The second scene occurs when Meg Ryan tells Billy Crystal that she and Jack Ford don’t believe in marriage, that marriage isn’t modern, that Jack is holding off proposing to her because he doesn’t—they don’t, she hastily amends— believe in marriage. 

Later, to no one’s astonishment, he breaks up with her and is married almost immediately. As she tells Billy Crystal, weeping, when he comes to her apartment to comfort her:

“He said he never wanted to get married. What he really meant is that he didn’t want to marry me.”

Now, not everyone wants to get married, and that’s fine, equality, feminism, etc.etc. It’s not always a good choice, but it is a choice that people get to make. 

But as evidenced by a thousand advice columns featuring women who do want to get married, who hang in there for years and years to men who are just this close to proposing, they’re sure, if she’s just patient enough and gives up her dream of having children because he doesn’t like them or whatever—and to the aftermath, which is that they break up and he’s married to someone else with a child on the way in a year or two—Nora Ephron’s home truth—that “he didn’t want to marry me”—is something that the characters in this novel, and the author herself, could stand to learn. If men want to get married, they will find a way. If they don’t, they won’t. 

Patience may work for 19th-century heroines like Jane Eyre, but in the modern era—well, these characters should just watch When Harry Met Sally.

Random Bullets of Not Much News

 Happy September! Here's the not-much-news so far:

• Classes have started, as usual prompting a mad scramble to get everything done. 
• Also as usual, online classes take about 4x the preparation of in-person classes. 
• And, in the "some things never change" department, I am spending all my time on teaching instead of my own writing or some manuscript reviews. Did I write 2000 words over the course of several hours? Yes. Are those words for recording a 20-minute class lecture that usually I'd be giving extemporaneously? Also yes.
  
• All of a sudden the streets around here are filled with those tiny white Teslas. It looks like an airport rental parking lot. Did Elon send out a bat signal and make everybody buy them? 
• Speaking of Tesla, in my part of the world, some people have pickup trucks for show but a lot more have them because they need a pickup truck for real. The other day I saw someone driving a Tesla truck and it looked . . . out of place? Cute? Ridiculous? I guess spotting Tesla trucks is old news now, but if I can catch one beside those giant harvesting machines that are all over the roads at this time of year, I'll post a picture. 
• In non-Tesla news, apparently NaNoWriMo supports AI in its annual challenge and has a few other problems as well, as Chuck Wendig hilariously reports it:  https://terribleminds.com/ramble/2024/09/02/nanowrimo-shits-the-bed-on-artificial-intelligence/
•  For the second year in a row, the government has managed to make the misery that is FAFSA even more miserable and difficult to navigate. It's going to have another "phased rollout" on the twelfth of never, or December, which are the same thing if you're a student trying to get financial aid. 
• Also in education: After seeing chatter about it online I read--well, skimmed--a long article in the Chronicle about drama in the English Department at Pomona, but the main takeaway was how rich the college was. 

How's the beginning of your semester? 

Is the true measure of AI-written content the MEGO test?

Our eyes are precious things, and they are also smart ones. I know they only transmit images--it's the brain that interprets--so maybe it's the combination that I'm talking about here. 

One of the tasks I'm doing right now requires a lot of concentration and is visually intensive (intense?).  I try to stop for breaks at intervals, but sometimes my eyes can't make it till the next break, so they get blurry and tears run down my cheeks. That's when I stop for the day. But as Laura Ingalls Wilder says about housework when she's pregnant in The First Four Years, "the work must go on, and she was the one who must do it," so I press on, but sometimes my eyes just plain close. 

So eye time is precious time, and I don't want to waste it unnecessarily. Necessary time-wasting: looking at pictures of old houses or gardens or something equally soothing. 

Unnecessary time-wasting: AI-written text.

We're probably all seeing the evidence of AI-written text on the web--wildly inaccurate howlers passing as "facts," weird word usages, etc. Are we reading it in the same way as human-generated writing, though?

Oddly enough, when I read an AI-cheerleading piece like the one at IHE now, or my students' AI-written work, my eyes have started to skim rapidly and, in fact, they glaze over. Is it because the text is generated by AI, or is it because it's not saying much?

That skimming effect, though--that's the MEGO test, from a term coined in (maybe) 1973, according to the New York Times. (I canceled my subscription, so I can't read it and tell you for sure.) 

 MEGO stands for My Eyes Glazed Over, and it's a reaction to boring, obvious text. From the article: "A true MEGO, however, is more than a soporific piece; it is an article written about a subject of great importance which resists reader interest."

Of course, other forms of text have failed the MEGO test before--AI in its current form didn't exist in 1973--but maybe AI has trained our brains to spot it. 

You scientists out there know that this can't be a real effect and I can't be totally serious, but it's a thought experiment that's giving my eyes a little break before going back to the Big Task, 

 

The tradwives of Stepford

 Because I'm habitually late to the party with social trends, I'm only now catching up to the tradwife phenomenon. According to the NYTimes, the New Yorker, etc., a tradwife performs the traditional gender role of being a housewife, now "new & improved" with a heavy dose of white Christian nationalism. 

I say "performs" because they seem to be mostly rich influencers who make a fetish out of tasks that many of us (raises hand) have been doing forever--baking bread, cooking from scratch, taking care of children etc. These performances are apparently for the benefit of people who have the leisure and money and interest to spend time on TikTok and social media sites (lowers hand). 

The Reddit posts collected at BoredPanda provide a sobering counternarrative from women who lived this life a generation or two ago, and a lot of them focus on what seems the most obvious downside: without a way to make a living, what happens to the tradwife if the lord and master or whatever he's called loses his job, or is unable to work, or decides to take off with his secretary and abandon the family?

I thought the #1 lesson of feminism--and, oddly, of capitalism--is that without economic power you have no power. In fact, Ira Levin wrote a whole satirical horror novel about this, The Stepford Wives, which poses the question "what if men could have their wife fantasies fulfilled by replacing human women with robots?" The answer is, predictably, that men say "yes, please," and set about creating this utopia (which would include rollbacks in feminism, reproductive freedom, women working, and the rest) for a deeply bleak ending for women. (By the way, the original Katherine Ross movie was reasonably faithful to the book; the Nicole Kidman one was a mess that slapped on a happy ending.)

Levin was talking about what men would do, though. Why would women volunteer to be handmaidens/tradwives? I get why the influencers do it: there is not enough attention in the world, nor enough clicks, nor enough money, ever to fill that gaping void in their souls. But why would women sign up to have their rights curtailed more than they already have been in 2024?

The evolution of the blogosphere into Substack

On the HBO show Silicon Valley, there's a pivotal moment when VC funder Monica confesses to the protagonist, Richard, that, to her enduring shame, she "passed on Slack," costing her company potential billions.

"I mean, what is it? Is it email? Is it IM? I just don't get it."

"Turns out what it is is a $3 billion dollar company, and I passed on it."

That puzzled image of Monica? That's me with Substack.

  I've mentioned substacks a few times here, but what are your thoughts on them?

What I've learned so far: A substack is an email newsletter that you subscribe to. 

It's like a blog, in that it has a website and you can comment. 

It's not like a blog in that you have to pay for it, usually $60 a year and up, mostly.  Some are supposedly free, although most that I've tried to read has the familiar "subscribe to read more" sticker about a paragraph in. 

It's free to create and write a substack, and Substack provides the platform and an app. Remember the olden days of RSS and bloglines and Google Reader? It's like that.

Remember listservs? It's sort of like those, too.  Like Monica, I'm grasping for analogies.

Substack's had its own problems with content moderation and catering to--let's call them unsavory movements, so many people apparently left the platform.

I've subscribed to one (an academic acquaintance's) and have read several others & the comments. It's a nice community, no question, but it's still a bit puzzling.

Are the posts thoughtful and interesting and well-written? Yes.

Are they more thoughtful and interesting than most blogs, especially at the height of the blogosphere (around 10 years ago)? Not really, because there was (and is, for you stalwart bloggers) always interesting and fresh content to be had in the blogosphere. 

Maybe it's just the natural progression--Cory Doctorow calls it the "enshittification"--of monetizing what was once free on the internet so that someone could make a buck. Case in point: every single link here (except to this blog) will flash you a "subscribe now!" panel after a paragraph.

It seems unduly harsh to say that about the lovely Substackers I've seen, though.

So I'm having a Monica moment here: I don't get it. Your thoughts? 

Random bullets of June

• Still plugging away and making good progress on the long-term project that must get done this summer. 
• Still not going to fabulous places and conferences because to do so would seriously impede getting this work done. 
• It's easier to concentrate because I can skip most of The New York Times and The Washington Post, since they are working overtime to trash the current president and re-elect The Former Guy, which is baffling to me on so many levels. Are they willing to destroy democracy just to have a fascistic clown prince that's good for clicks? 
•  Also, it's all becoming news-lite, like an issue of Parade magazine, with features on what influencers on TikTok think. I do not care what the influencers think. If they keep going, they'll be a slightly more grammatical version of The Daily Mail. If it weren't for Jennifer Rubin (WaPo) and Paul Krugman (NYTimes), I'd cancel both subscriptions.
• Social media: Twitter is kind of a wasteland, with half the people I used to interact with there gone and the rest of the space taken up with ads. It's kind of sad that there's no conversation there any more, at least in my tiny corner of it. Bluesky is 95% political outrage and 5% Neil Gaiman and John Scalzi; I read it for the 5% and don't post, since no one there ever engages with any posts I do make (ditto Mastodon).
  
• Magazines: so I'm still subscribing to The New Yorker, The Economist, The Atlantic (I know, I know), TLS, New York, and (guilty pleasure) Vanity Fair. Except for The Economist, which actually has international news despite its secret motto of "Hot News Promoting the God of Capitalism," everything seems--hashed over? Uncreative? Apocalyptic? Boring? 
• But the sun is beautiful, and so is the morning air, and so are the beds of thyme and other herbs, blueberries, strawberries, and raspberries that have replaced so much of our grass. 

Hope your summer is going well so far!

Alice Munro on Writing (canceled post)

Update and content warning for sexual abuse: Taking down the previous "writing inspiration" post because of the following. 

https://archive.is/2024.07.07-111321/https://www.thestar.com/opinion/contributors/my-stepfather-sexually-abused-me-when-i-was-a-child-my-mother-alice-munro-chose/article_8415ba7c-3ae0-11ef-83f5-2369a808ea37.html

and 

https://archive.is/2024.07.07-154335/https://www.thestar.com/news/in-the-home-of-alice-munro-a-dark-secret-lurked-now-her-children-want-the/article_69a63202-34cd-11ef-83f4-9b4275c26d84.html

That her monstrous husband, Gerry Fremlin--whom Alice Munro defended against HER OWN DAUGHTER--uses Lolita and calls a 9-year-old a "homewrecker" to justify his abuse is just . . . wow. 

P. S. Deleted the comments on the original post for obvious reasons: we're not celebrating Alice Munro in this post.

Update 7/15/24: 

Retired Ontario Provincial Police Detective Sam Lazarevich remembers a very angry Munro accusing her daughter of lying when he visited Munro’s home in 2004 to inform the husband that he was going to be charged.

 In an interview with The Associated Press, Lazarevich said Munro was furious, defended her second husband and the detective recalls being “quite surprised” by her reaction.

“'That’s your daughter. Aren’t you going to defend your daughter?'” he recalls.

https://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/wireStory/canadian-officer-alice-munro-claimed-daughter-lying-abused-111898890

Writing inspiration: Clearing the decks for a writing summer

 Grades are in, and as I said over at Dame Eleanor's, I deliberately did not submit to the conferences I usually attend, however shiny they might be. Herewith a few random bullets of writing inspiration (or should I be all modern & say "writing inspo"?) for me to keep in mind:

1. This is meant to be a writing summer, whether that means doing the #1000words challenge or something else. A sit-and-write group? Already signed up. An accountability group? Same. Let's let them work their magic without conference paper distractions.
   
2. Fun fact: the things that have generated the most ideas and the most writing, brainstorming and otherwise, are these: 
3. Being under the gun to write a conference paper. Q: But wait--didn't you give up conferences for the summer? How's that going to work? A: The stress of that became too much, so I'm trying something different.
1. Committing to the 750word.com for brainstorming & putting down any stupid idea that comes into my head, because eventually something useful comes out of it. It's boring until it isn't.
   
2. Taking notes or making notes on texts I'm reading, because sooner or later simply summarizing becomes too boring and I branch out into thoughts, questions, speculations, or just plain writing parts of something larger.
4. So, to sum up point 3: the beginnings of generative writing and getting past writing anxiety come from (1) stress or (2) boredom. I'm choosing boredom over stress and will see how it goes.
5. Another task (Task B) that is ongoing is kind of low-hanging fruit: it's satisfying because it has to be done, but the time spent on it doesn't translate into writing. Moreover, there's no stress involved with it, so my tendency is to sit with the writing anxiety for a few unbearable minutes and then say, "Oh, I need to work on Task B anyway." Solution? I'm limiting myself to two hours of Task B per day.
6. Finally, after making pretty much no progress on the next idea I had for a book project, I remembered this axiom from somewhere: Don't write about what you think you ought to write about. Write about what excites you. I've had an idea that excites me for a while now & am going to pursue that. 

Hope your summer goals are off to a good start!

The Wizard of AI

Based on the two or three students who consistently use it according to the evidence of (1) my own eyes and (2) GPTZero, AI produces papers that are matched in grandiloquence only by Frank Morgan, AKA The Wizard of Oz. 

You remember the Wizard, right? All smoke and mirrors with nothing behind it? No powers, just word-shaped noise from a bloviating charlatan. 

 

 

If I read one more content-free BS paragraph about the "nuances" of the "rich tapestry" of "intriguing" deep dives into the injustices of the "structural inequity of gender norms" by a writer whose "magnificent prose" has made her work "a landmark in the history of twenty-first century literature,"  I might lose my temper, or my lunch. 

Really, though, it's always my temper that I lose, in a "how can I stop this?" way. I waste perfectly good ideas-in-the-shower time by plotting ways to circumvent it, which means it lives in my head much more than the 10 seconds it took the students to churn out this insult to human intelligence.

And I may be going against the tide. This so-called "article" at CNN--written by AI? who's to say?-- says to embrace the bloviation and advises teachers to go with the flow and grade with AI. 

But listen up, CNN shills: reading student work is not only literally my job; it is also my pleasure. I like to see students grow and learn. If I didn't, I'm in the wrong profession. (Figure 2, opposite, is me making this argument. Blogger won't allow captions any more, for some reason.) 

And there are problems with just accepting its use, as the CNN shills and some colleagues in the profession have advocated.

1. There is no reason on God's green earth why I should read what students could not be bothered to write. 

2. It harms honest students and lowers morale if some students are using AI and "getting away with it" by having high grades. Spoiler alert: they do not get high grades because there is no there there, so to speak; the AI doesn't have to enter into the grading equation itself if the paper is content-free. But a D+ or C- is still a passing grade, and if the student doesn't care about the course, that's enough to pass.

3. The students have ideas, and they need to be encouraged to develop them.

So what's the solution? 

1. Writing first drafts in class, which is going swimmingly, by the way.

2. A much more robust and specific policy on academic integrity and the use of AI. It's too late for this semester, but it's there for next semester. 

 The Wizard of Oz used to be televised exactly once a year, at Easter. Although it's more available nowadays, the Easter rule still holds: I do not want to listen to the Wizard of Oz any more often than that.

Signs you may be ready for Spring Break

• When you know intellectually that the snow will stop some time, but in your heart, it's Groundhog Day forever: "It's going to be cold, it's going to be gray, and it'll last for the rest of your life." 
• When you feel that if you have to go warm a chair at one more event where there are speeches, you will lose your mind.
• When someone writes "I have been very busy, but someone ought to answer these 10 questions that I have" and your impulse to write back "Yes, you are busy and I have been sitting here eating bonbons with nothing to do, naturally" is growing strong enough to win, one of these times. I have to remember that, as Captain Awkward or someone said, they're not being busy *at* me, but by stating that, they kind of are being busy at me, aren't they?
  
• When someone always has, say, four tasks in a project that all of us in the group must do and only does two of them--the easy, fun ones, leaving the hard ones for someone else because they're "too busy"--well, I have to remind myself through gritted teeth that they're not being busy *at* me and also decline to add those two tasks to the tasks I've already been assigned.
  
• We've been through MOOCs, and now AI-assisted grading is rearing its Medusa-level ugly head again with this cheerleading piece from Axios:  https://www.axios.com/2024/03/06/ai-tools-teachers-chatgpt-writable . I say "again" because composition teachers have been fighting this auto-grading trend for at least 25 years (I even have some posts about it on here, though I'm too grumpy to find them right now). 
• AI plagiarism is feeling too personal right now, just like the regular old-school variety. You think I am stupid enough to be fooled by this? And you wasted my valuable time by turning it in and expecting me to read what you couldn't be bothered to write? And if I call you out on it I go into conduct proceedings and an administrative hell of documentation and meetings in which I can only hope that the powers that be have my back? 

Anyway--flowers, bunnies, birds building nests: spring break will come, and not a moment too soon.

Random bullets of It's Leap Year! Take a Leap!

• Those of you who are Frasier fans may recognize in my title one of the all-time great episodes, "Look Before You Leap." I will not tell you one single thing about it lest I spoil something, but one phrase may suffice as the crowning glory of the episode: "Buttons and Bows."
• It's a mercy to have one more day until March begins.
• Another thing I'm doing differently in my old-school style classes is to assign some minor points to daily class activities, the way I used to do In Days Of Yore. You show up, do the activity, and get full points. The points are almost inconsequential, and one assignment can be dropped to account for illnesses, but . . . they add up.
•  I just received my first paper (not in an in-person class) that seemed off--word-salad-y, generalizations, etc., almost as if--as if it hadn't been written by a person but by AI (confirmed by GPTZero, which I had never used before). Did I confront the student about it? Readers, I did not, because detection sites can be wrong. Instead, I took a very close, painstaking look at it and graded it rigorously as if it were a regular paper. 
• In the comments to the previous post, xykademiqz mentioned that students seem done with things being done online and Julie said that they don't seem to want to attend, maybe in part because the lectures are online, which is demoralizing. I think you're both right. There's a sizable proportion of the class (maybe 1/5?) who don't seem to show up, though they seem agreeable enough when they do. My attempts at lecture capture for them in case they're ill have been kind of dismal, because I can't stand at the podium and just talk but must walk around and use the board. This makes for hilarious but unhelpful captions that are worse because somehow the Zoom screen share always captures something other than the PowerPoint or document camera. 
• Are the rest of you being inundated with emails about How To Do Things with AI/GPT? "It can generate ideas! Write a first draft! Take your dog for a walk!" etc. The only thing that sounds more like the 7th circle of hell than grading AI papers would be grading AI papers knowing that your students had been told to use AI and then expend more of their labor making the first draft somehow better. I feel bad for them. They have ideas of their own, and that's what I want to see them working on.
  
   Anyway, happy Leap Day!
  

Random bullets of mid-February

•  Writing inspiration: This may not sound like much of a win, but I finally (finally!) finished the piece I've been moaning about here for lo these many months. I thought for a while I'd be like Mr. Casaubon in Middlemarch, gathering sources for The Key to All Mythologies until I keeled over at my desk, but not so. That's done, but wait--what's that on the horizon in a couple of weeks? A conference paper for which I made all sorts of rash promises? 
• At least having finished one thing means I can finish something else. I'd become--what's the writing word for gun-shy? write-shy?-- and this has restored my confidence.
• Being in an accountability writing group and a sit-and-write group has helped a lot.
  
• Teaching: I am loving teaching my old-school type classes this semester and the students seem to be doing all right with it, too. 
• Maybe it's a post-Covid phenomenon, but it feels as though they have a hard time sitting still and not participating, and since participation is what we want anyway as teachers, I'm leaning into it. And really, how is their difficulty in sitting still any different from ours when we're trapped in a meeting where our betters are discussing obvious points, world without end?
• Do any of you feel as though you have another part-time job just attending all the meetings, presentations, etc. that your colleagues have arranged? 
  
• Have you ever been in a group project where if one person--call him Comrade X--is outvoted in a decision, he will bide his time and come back to it over and over and over again to try to bend everyone else to his will since he is always right? Asking for a friend.
• There needs to be space in the middle of all this for imagination, but that space is in short supply right now.
  

Caitlin Flanagan in The Atlantic: facts and logic? Who needs 'em?

 Just when I thought it was safe to re-subscribe to The Atlantic,  our friend Caitlin Flanagan is at it again, opining that colleges aren't teaching students to think, or driving a car, or something (the metaphors get confused). 

Let's examine the logic, shall we?

1. "A teacher should never do your thinking for you."

Straw man fallacy. Who the heck ever said that they did or would?

2. "When you’re visiting a college, walk through the corridors of some of the humanities departments. Look at the posters advertising upcoming events and speakers, read the course listings, or just stand silent in front of the semiotic overload of the instructors’ office doors, where wild declarations of what they think and what they plan to make you think will be valorously displayed.

Does this look like a department that is going to teach you how to think?"

Soooo much to unpack here.

• "semiotic overload of instructors' office doors": if you mean some weak sauce attempt at humor that struck me funny in The New Yorker, guilty as charged. Otherwise, here's a thought: Flanagan hasn't been on a campus in years, let alone walking down the halls of a humanities department. This is some Fox News/Hannity-inspired fever dream.
• "wild declarations of what they think": Unless I've posted office hours as "Step right inside, folks, and hear the crazy feminist declaim on M WF 10-11," I don't think this is true, to put it mildly.
• "valorously displayed": Does 3M make a valorous brand of Scotch tape specially to hold wild declarations on office doors? Otherwise, no. 
• Logic leap: faulty evidence. From a few pathetic faculty posters, you're inferring how those therein "teach you to think," which you've already declared is impossible?

3. "The truth of the matter is that no one can teach you how to think; but what they can do is teach you how to think for yourself."

You don't say.  Is it also possible that water is wet and that human beings breathe air?

Mind. Blown.

4. "To the extent that I have learned how to think for myself, it’s because my father taught me. Usually by asking me a single question."

It's a nice anecdote, but there's more than a trace of the ubi sunt lament usually found in the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere: why are there no professors like my dad?

This is an example of begging the question: that is, to assume prior agreement on a point that's very much not in evidence. ARE there no professors like her dad? 

Also, the ubi sunt part: 

When I was at beautiful Ivy or Oxbridge back in the olden days, I had an extremely famous professor (this time: Frank Kermode) who inspired me with the timeless truths of the humanities curriculum. 

Alas, there were few such professors then, and there are none today. That pesky GI bill opened education to the masses, and now students want grades instead of reading literature for timeless truths. Literature has been sullied by the grade-grubbing paws of these students. Where is the pure love of literature of yesteryear?  

5. And finally: "Many college professors don’t want to do that today. "

This has the former guy's fingerprints all over it: "many people think that drinking unicorn saliva will cure COVID"; "many fine people on both sides." 

Where is the evidence? 

I know I've made fun of The Atlantic before, but honestly: Atlantic, do better. 

Random bullets of teaching in the new semester: Zoom, teaching, AI

 

- It's my umpteenth year of teaching in person and my umpteenth year of teaching online as well. Does it take far longer than I ever imagined to prep courses that I have taught before? Yes. Is it exhausting? Yes. Do I still love it? Also yes.  

- I love the energy of teaching in a classroom and seeing the students' expressions.

- Teaching via Zoom on occasion: I still like it, and the students are old hands at it by this point.  But I had to stifle a laugh at the image that came to mind when they all logged on and then immediately turned off their cameras: it was like Sean from The Good Place sealing himself inside a cocoon whenever he heard something he didn't like. All those little black squares = all those little cocoons. (Image via DeviantArt.)

- That doesn't mean that I'm opposed to the Zoom cocoon. Indeed, during Zoom presentations when we're asked to turn off our cameras, I can listen a lot better, especially if I can move around. I don't know what it's called, but I can either (1) look intently at the speaker in person or on Zoom but not hear a word that they say or (2) look down, take notes, walk around, or whatever and be fully engaged with the topic. 

- Apropos of the last point: I think the MLA should place a walking meditation labyrinth in all of its larger meeting rooms, maybe in back of the chairs. Those who can watch a speaker and sit still and listen can sit in the chairs, and the rest of us can walk the labyrinth and listen in our own way. Activity is the key to engagement for some of us, as it is in the classroom, and conferences would be so much better if we could move (and also if the room temperatures were set at something less than blood heat).

- We are going old school in my classes this semester: writing drafts by hand and revising drafts in class. I have a lot of reasons for this: (1) replicating the experience of giving an uninterrupted space for students to write; (2) being able to comment on their drafts before they revise them; (3) giving them time out of their busy schedules to focus; (4) being there if they have questions. 

- The whole AI thing is about a distant number 40 on that list. Yes, I suppose they could have AI write their papers, but the vapid nonsense that AI usually spews out--like a mission statement on steroids--would be a waste of their time. 

- It would also be a waste of mine, and spending any time at all on wading through that slush and figuring out whether it was plagiarized or not would be maddening. Sometimes students write slush--don't we all? and haven't we all?--but if it's honest slush, it has promise. If it's AI slush--well, why should I bother to read what no one was bothered to write? 

- About reading what no one bothered to write: I grant you that the Washington Post and New York Times seem to have dispensed with their copy-editors--you know, those people who catch things like geographical errors and subject-verb agreement--but I'm not paid to read them, and if they have news (hint: read the digital images of the print edition rather than the fluffy stuff that they put on the front pages of their app), I don't mind as much. 

- Speaking of reading the news, I picked up and reread Rosemary's Baby the other day and laughed when I realized that I would rather read about the literal Satan incarnated than the former guy.

Random Bullets of MLA 2024 (Philadelphia)

 Time for the MLA Random Bullets Roundup!

• First, despite the weather Philadelphia  was a good conference venue. The Marriott, Loews, and Convention Center were all close and within easy walking distance of each other. The Loews and Convention Center had had former lives as a bank and a train station, respectively, so it was fun seeing the traces of what they used to be. 
• There were, as always, a few directional challenges for your geographically inept correspondent—hidden escalators in the Loews, etc., but I used the usual strategy of following people who looked like they knew where they were going and eventually got there. 
• The book exhibit, though smaller than pre-COVID, is growing. There was space to get around and see the books, which wasn’t always the case in the pre-COVID crammed exhibits world.
• The MLA theme this year must have been something about emotion, or it may be that emotion is the new critical trend, because there were lots of panels about feeling. 
• “The — turn” must be on its way out.
•  I was, I confess, a bit taken aback that a profession that runs on being (1) “smart,” (2) critical, (3) hierarchical, and (4)  insanely and incessantly productive suddenly cares about feelings, even if it’s only to analyze them, but it’s an intriguing trend. 
• Maybe it’s like all the self-care & wellness & work-life balance programs we now get at the workplace, where you’re supposed to take MOAR time and add MOAR to your schedule to testify that you’re being relaxed and healthy in exactly the right quantifiable way. Their hearts are in the right place, but  . . . maybe not the outcome they're looking for.
  
• I saw in the program and heard about a session where people were to bring (or come as?) their favorite object but didn’t attend that one—perhaps it was a working group? 
• In terms of technology: the tech mostly worked, and people finally seem to have stopped being precious about using the microphone and started using it so everyone can hear. The Wi-Fi codes were published in a separate guide that I only received late in the conference; I couldn’t make it work, but that’s on me.
• Masking—maybe a third of the people were masked at any given time, which is a good thing. People sometimes commented about protecting vulnerable family members, etc., but really, no explanation is necessary or expected, which is a very welcome change. I wore my mask on the plane and in the airport, of course, and increasingly put it on during sessions, especially when I heard someone coughing behind me.
  
• There was a public awards ceremony, but it was really (when I went there to hear the remarks) more for awardees and their academic families, so to speak, so I left.
  
• The Big Meeting was unanimous on some things but contentious on others. The voting clickers stopped working, so voting was held by a show of hands (not a private ballot). 
• This conference seemed a bit less expensive than previous ones, or maybe it's that Reading Terminal Market and Trader Joe's made quick dining much easier. 
• Edited to add: I overheard someone, recounting to a newbie in the manner of the Ancient Mariner, that there used to be job interviews only at the MLA in the olden days before Zoom. There were doubtless still job interviews happening, but it wasn't as obvious as it used to be.
  

Other MLA Conference Posts:

• 2023 San Francisco 
• 2022 (Washington--virtual)
  
• 2019 Chicago
  
• 2018 New York
• 2015 Vancouver
• 2014 Chicago
• 2013 Boston
• 2012 Seattle
• 2011 Los Angeles
• 2006 Philadelphia
• Conference tips no one ever tells you
• Random conference thoughts