Academic Year in Review and next steps

 Apologies for the long silence (March, really?). 

The semester and the academic year is over, so herewith is a reminder/self-reminder about this year, including what to repeat & what not to repeat, as I look forward. 

1. I poured my heart into my teaching this year. I came up with new assignments and added new readings. I tried to reach out to every student every week and definitely did so in the online classes. I figured out how to temper my rage at AI, which does not seem to bother anyone else at Northern Clime, and came up with a solution (hint: better rubrics) that addresses the issue without sending me on a pointless quest to report it to admin. 

I met with students. I was on campus and in my office all day multiple days each week. I went to student presentations and supported them. In other words, I showed up. 

I loved it. I loved the reading and the teaching and the students. No regrets about that part. 

Would I do it again? Not on your tintype. 

Did my students appreciate it, and did I gain new majors for us? Absolutely yes. Did I give them the best experience that I could devise? Yes. 

Did the administration value it? What do you think? As you may have heard about a billion times, teaching at an R1 is not highly valued unless I am "reflecting on my teaching" in a public performance countable for annual review metrics. I am not the boasting type, so what I heard back was "yeah, okay, teaching--well, moving on, what did you publish?"

Don't love something that doesn't love you back. 

2. I didn't publish much because see #1 above. Will I change my priorities next year? You bet. 

3. For the first time since I gave up administration, I had an extremely heavy service load this year, which counts for the width of a gnat's eyebrow in terms of value. 

So now, having Learned My Lesson, I'm looking forward to the summer and the next year with energy and hope. 

1. The big archival project I've been working on for years: moving forward more swiftly to completion.

2. The book project: I hope the same.

Here's wishing everyone a happy and productive summer! 

Two views of AI-assisted teaching (spoiler: I think I'm right and they're wrong)

When I teach online, I use tools that allow students to comment, some of which allow a longer response in a discussion board, and some of which allow line-by-line annotation of the kind you would get in hypothes.is. and assign an auto-grade. Let's call it hypothes.is for short. 

But based on the teaching philosophy I outlined in an earlier post--"I’m paying attention, and I hope that they are as well"--I have told them that I am reading everything they write in my class, and I am doing it, too. I turn off all the intrusive "AI can generate the instructor's responses for you" defaults lest they infect what's left of my brain. 

It is my (possibly touching and naive belief) that if you connect individually with students by responding to them, even if they are online, they will have a better experience and might be less likely to plop everything into ChatGPT or its numerous hellspawn siblings and give me AI instead of their thoughts. 

There are a few concessions to knowing that they might try AI. I've disabled copying and pasting, to "encourage" them to write their own stuff for two reasons. 

• First, if they use AI, they still have to type it out, and given how low-stakes this is, some of them might choose to do the work as the path of least resistance. I had a student inquire about not being able to copy and paste, and I said, "nope, not in this class."
• Some students in previous semesters have copied and pasted from another student's work, a bold move given that I comment and say things on the board like "that's what X said above" and privately "see me." If they don't think I'm reading responses, they might think I won't notice. I notice. 

The other day, I was talking to a colleague ("they" for anonymity) and mentioned that I had just spent a couple of hours responding to students in hypothes.is and writing individual comments. 

Colleague looked at me as if I had grown two heads. "Here's a tip. Don't you know that hypothes.is grades them? You don't have to read all those."

Me: "Yes, but I want to respond to the students."

Colleague: "I never read them! They talk to each other! I look at their questions and once in a while dip into the comments for fun. The grades post themselves."

Me: "I think it's important." 

Colleague just stares at me as if their opinion of my intelligence has just dropped by double digits. Clearly anyone who had any smarts at all, in their view, would stop paying attention to stuff like student comments.

My first thought was "IDGAF what you think."

My second thought was "Your poor students. No wonder they pile on the AI garbage and think no one is reading, because in some cases no one is."

Yes, all this time is time and brainpower I could spend writing. 

But doesn't someone have to pay attention?  

 

 

Mark Twain, AI, and the "Big Thoughts" Lie

It is Mark Twain's birthday--happy birthday, Mark!--and I am reading, or rather listening to, Ron Powers's biography of Twain as I drive and walk each week. I'm now in 1907, when Twain is basically past his authorship phase and well into his very creditable phase of anti-imperialist writings. And since it is 1907, an epic brouhaha is about to ensue with Isabel Lyon, his secretary/companion whose motives & actions have caused considerable debate for Twainiacs over the past many decades. 

But one of the key takeaways from any Twain bio is just how convinced he was of his own smarts as a businessman and just how much money he lost from that belief, from investing hundreds of thousands first in the Paige Compositor (which bankrupted him), to the miracle food Plasmon, to a new Jacquard loom printer for which there was no market. He would say he'd been a fool before, but this new thing would really work and make his fortune--once it was perfected, of course. 

I'm reminded of this because one of the big tech bro billionaires asserted recently that AI would revolutionize learning because we could teach children to focus on all the big picture stuff--big thoughts--and leave all the random junk like facts to AI. Since AI spreads literal fabrications like Johnny Appleseed on a mission, I thought he was kidding, but no. 

I've heard this "teach kids to reason abstractly and the rest will follow" stuff for 30 years, and you know what? Without actual facts or contexts, they can't draw any "big picture" abstractions that are worth anything. No one can. The reasoning that happens without a grounding in facts and contexts is nonsense.

And since nature abhors a vacuum, metaphorically speaking, we have become all too aware of what happens when we stop dealing with facts, and the news media stop reporting them to become either a mouthpiece of Jeff Bezos or worse. If we don't have facts and teach people how to think critically about the inferences we can draw from them, here's what happens: they make up their own, with "big thoughts" that emerge from their worst fears and impulses. (Insert your own example here.)

But the tech bros and ed tech bros aren't buying that AI can't do it all. As Michael Clune says in The Atlantic, trying to warn us about its limits: 

We don’t have good evidence that the introduction of AI early in college helps students acquire the critical- and creative-thinking skills they need to flourish in an ever more automated workplace, and we do have evidence that the use of these tools can erode those skills. 

There's that pesky word again--"evidence." 

And Charlie Warzel puts it even more bluntly: 

We are waiting because a defining feature of generative AI, according to its true believers, is that it is never in its final form. Like ChatGPT before its release, every model in some way is also a “low-key research preview”—a proof of concept for what’s really possible. You think the models are good now? Ha! Just wait. Depending on your views, this is trademark showmanship, a truism of innovation, a hostage situation, or a long con. Where you fall on this rapture-to-bullshit continuum likely tracks with how optimistic you are for the future.  

 So do we believe our own lying eyes about the effects of teaching "big picture" versus facts, or do we believe the tech bros? Or do we just plunge ahead while we wait for the AI rapture?

Twain believed that the Paige Compositor would outclass the Mergenthaler linotype machine once it was perfected--that is, to quote Warzel, "You think the models are good now? Ha! Just wait." 

TL;dr. At this point, AI in the classroom is the Paige Compositor, and we all now know how that turned out for our birthday boy. 

 

Why I am teaching like it’s 1990: no phones, no bikes, no motorcars—not a single luxury

Whether you recognize my subtitle from Gilligan’s Island or from Weird Al’s “Amish Paradise,” you’re still getting the gist of it: teaching old school style. What does it mean this semester? 

First of all, a disclaimer: my students this semester are smart and eager to learn, so these things might not work everywhere if, as happens to us all, you have a lethargic or uninterested class. But here are a few changes that evoke the 1990s Days of Yore:

• They write something short every day, on paper, and I collect it. I comment on and return their writing the next day, with handwritten comments, though it’s sometimes only a word or two. These are low-stakes assignments, but they (1) help with attendance, (2) provide guidance (through questions) on the kinds of things that are significant in the reading, and (3) act as a springboard for discussion.
• They also present their findings in class a lot, either alone or in groups after discussion. I listen and take notes and comment.
• If it’s not written in class, it didn’t happen. I’ve had a few try to AI & upload their way to an assignment after it’s been written in class, but nope—in class or it doesn’t count. There are dropped grades to account for absences, etc. Also, those in-class assignments aren’t posted until after the class. 
• They’re writing their papers in class, as I mentioned in August and September, and there are usually only a few weeks between some kind of activity or campus-based field trip. 
• Said papers (the final drafts) are printed out and returned with handwritten comments. 
• If they’re doing group or individual work before coming back to discuss something with the class, they can use their laptops/phones to look things up. Okay, that’s not a 1990 thing to do—but I am walking around & talking with them, making suggestions, and talking with them about what’s on their screens. If they don’t want me to see it, they shouldn’t be looking at it in a class space while working on class work.
• Remember transparencies? (Remember what?). No, I haven’t gone back to those, but I do print out passages for class-based close readings using the doc camera and mark it up as we talk.
• And, of course, there’s the whiteboard notes for discussion. Armed with markers and energy, I still make notes on it (recording their comments)  rather than standing at a lectern and doing the same thing on a piece of paper. Why? I’m not sure. It’s something about the space of the whiteboard and moving around in the classroom and darting to the back of it and making eye contact with them rather than with a sheet of paper. I get ideas from them as I’m synthesizing their ideas & asking questions. 

The general idea of all this is that I am engaging with them in real time and real life. I’m paying attention, and I hope that they are as well. If it can be done in person, that’s what we’re doing. 

I’ve explained to them that I’m trying to provide a space where we can talk, and where they can write, without being called to everything else in their lives. It’s busy out there, and there’s a lot demanding their attention. 

So there you have it—my pre-web (though not pre-Internet) 1990 class strategies in 2025. So far, it’s been working. 

Random bullets of September

•  First, the stuff you know: the news has been terrible and keeps getting worse. I thought we were a nation of laws and, you know, checks and balances, but All This is terrifying because laws are for the chumps like us that believe in them. We volunteer, and give money, and I canceled Disney (small victory there, as nicoleandmaggie have pointed out), but nothing's enough right now.
• But the old-school-style classes I set up for this year are going well, so that's good news. Lots of short-form writing assignments and lively class discussions make me want to go to class. 
• Side note: Sure, I can read their handwriting. Back in the olden days they wrote a lot (and longer papers, and more papers) in class regularly, and we all survived--even thrived. It goes against the sacred doctrine of multiple revisions for a paper, but have you ever noticed that sometimes their writing on the essay part of an exam is clearer and more direct and insightful than their out-of class work? I've seen this many times & thus don't worry too much about the sacred doctrine any more. 
• The students seem eager to connect, somehow. They chat with me after class, or when we go on our little library trips, or whatever. It's a human connection that (to me) is welcome after the Covid years. 
• The prep work is astonishingly a LOT. Rereading, prepping, grading, writing assignments--why, after all this time, am I surprised at how much time everything takes?
• I am on the road or away from home at least four days out of seven, and it is wearing me down. All those miles are making me tired. 
•  This means that on days I am not in the car (Sunday, maybe, or Monday if there's not a Costco hunting & gathering trip planned), I don't get much research done.  
• This also means that I'm getting a little testy with comments like "hey, I know what would be good! Let's all meet on [day when Undine isn't on campus] for some community building." Yeah, no thanks. 
• I did one of these extra trips early in the semester because I'd been asked to give a small local presentation, but "oops! we ran out of time! sorry" meant that it was a wasted trip. I'm now more careful with my time. 
• Long emails debating things are a complete waste of time. Have a meeting or shut up.  
• The weather is finally cooling off, so I guess that's the good news for now.  

 So, as Ishmael says--"time, strength, cash, and patience." I wish them all for you in October. 

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. 

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.

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 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.

Back in the saddle again, school edition

Gene Autrey’s voice is singing this song is in my head as I write this, so here’s to riding the range once more with reminders I’ve forgotten over the past year. 

1. Teaching

Is it good to be back? Pretty much. 

Did I spend too much time preparing syllabi? Yes.

Too much time writing up a lecture? Yes. 

What is it with power dynamics in the classroom, by the way? If I go in with puppy-like enthusiasm for the subject and with lots of additional information, they respond coolly—“whatever”—as though they know it already, which they definitely do not.  

But if I tone down the friendliness and am more distant and authoritative, they warm up. It’s a power dynamic in classrooms that I forget about when I’ve been away from teaching for a while. Friendliness is fine, and so is the decentered classroom, but the whole “make sure you give away your authority so that they trust you” trend of a few years back always seemed false: you are the authority in the classroom, and to pretend otherwise seems disingenuous, not to say dishonest. The students sense this and respond accordingly. 

It’s a way of showing mutual respect, I think.

2. Writing

I’m excited to get back to writing: I turned in a conference proposal today for research related to my next book. And I haven’t even bought the all-important new notebooks yet, which is sure to create more writing inspiration. 

3. Meetings

Since I’m not doing admin, all I have to do is (1) show up and (2) contribute if there’s something to say. It’s not necessary or desirable for people to hear every thought that’s in my head, nor is it necessary to smile all the time. Show up, be respectful, and be done. 

Here’s hoping you have a good beginning of the semester!

NYT: "My College Students are Not Okay" by Jonathan Malesic

 First, here's the article: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/13/opinion/college-university-remote-pandemic.html. 

 The TL;dr on this is that students are tired--exhausted, even--and disengaged. When they go to class, they won't speak up, as if they're watching you on Zoom. 

Based on an N of 1 (me) over the past two years, I agree on some things Malesic's saying, but not all.  

• First of all, we need to separate out Zoom classes, in-person classes, and designed-to-be-online and asynchronous classes. These are different animals. I only taught a few Zoom classes, and they seemed to work pretty well. 
• The in-person classes? I guess I didn't post a lot about them, but honestly, they were great. We wore masks but it worked fine (worked a treat, as the Brits say). Was it their energy, being glad to be back, that made the energy in that classroom? Was it partly me (ditto)? Was it the approximately 1.5 times the effort that I put into those classes? More effort doesn't always result in a better class experience (shudders in memories of classes past), but maybe this time it helped?
• Online classes: these take 2 x the effort of an in-person class, and this semester especially I'd estimate that my time was spent about 80% on teaching and the remaining 10% each on research and service. This isn't ideal and is definitely not what my contract calls for, but it felt hugely necessary. Some thoughts: 
• In an in-person class, you know how sometimes you feel as though you are emotionally lifting them, encouraging them to speak, etc. and are wiped out at the end of the class, and at other times you might be a little tired or whatever but their energy helps you? This semester, I poured so much energy and time into teaching that it wore me out--but then they started giving back, even though it was an online class--more & better responses, coming to office hours (via Zoom), etc. 
• And they deserve the credit for coming through so well--they really do. To borrow a piece from Bardiac's post, they really did exceed expectations, by and large; those weren't "well, it's COVID so it's an A" grades at all. They know what the expectations for writing are, and some of them complain mightily about having to write in complete sentences, etc., at first. It's a kind of "Do you know who I am?" attitude that sometimes afflicts seniors and majors who claim they haven't been called to account for their writing before, but then they learn and it's a pleasure to see the change for the better.
  
• While it's doubtless true, as some of Malesic's interviewees say, that you can't teach some courses online (hello, lab science!), I don't teach lab science and would say that some things can be taught & discussed just fine online. I'd say in any given class about 5-10% were "disengaged" in Malesic's sense.
  
• I just looked at course evals, and the students seem to have gotten a lot out of the classes, so there's that. 

But yes, to Malesic's point: more requests for extensions than usual, etc. do point to their being exhausted and burned out. 

And so are we, aren't we?

The teacher I want to be

 First of all, I do love teaching. 

Second, I believe in flexibility, and my syllabus has all kinds of alternative assignments, escape clauses, and get out of jail free extensions built into it--all stated right up front, with no need to have class privilege to know that they're available. I talk about them. They're in the syllabus. I email students about them, if they seem not to know.

For a lot of years--decades, even--this has been enough. If a student tries, it's hard not to succeed if they put any effort at all into it, because there's always another way. They may not get the grade that they think their writing deserves, because they insist that I'm the only teacher who's ever told them about picayune details like writing in complete sentences; however, they usually come around once we've met for a few times and gone over their papers. But in my classes, there other ways to succeed.

Yet it's been a tough semester for us all. Contra academic conferences, which are so over COVID, my students are getting sick regularly despite being vaxxed, and I've made a lot of allowances for that. I've responded to emails on weekends. I've been available. I've given feedback. I've met with them. I've notified them through the course space if they didn't turn in papers (online classes--you kind of have to do this). I have put in more hours on teaching this semester than in any recent semester I can remember.

And now, a minute and a half before grades are due, students who haven't checked into the course space for literally months want to turn in assignments that they had ignored for said months. Or they've skipped a bunch of assignments but are emailing "I need an A." Or they start rules-lawyering over some minor point, which is hard to do given the really specific details in the syllabus. Or “I have a lot of work in my other [implied: more important] classes and am handing this in late.”

And with all the "take it easy on your students; COVID, etc." directives being issued, it's hard to say no without seeming like a monster.

It's probably for this reason that I'm finding this really dispiriting, even though I know I shouldn't take it personally. It's like some kind of fall from grace, or a fall from the kind of teacher I thought I was and want to be. This didn't happen in the Before Times, or happen as much, and it didn't bother me when it did because I could just point to the numbers. 

I don't want to be that tough old rounder who rejoices in saying no, but it's getting harder to keep that store of goodwill and enthusiasm flowing and to be the kind of teacher I want to be.

Resilience, or learning critical distance when teaching

In class the other day, I was teaching some of my favorite stuff--call it dinosaur studies.

I had put extra time and effort into the brief lecture, including the pictures. I had found some video clips of T. Rex that I thought they would like and explained the context.

Some days, you go to teach a class just because it's your job, but on this day, I was pumped and excited.

As I wound up the whole thing and the video clip finished, I asked "Are there any questions?'

What I expected as I stood there:

• "Wow, I didn't know T. Rex could move that fast" 
•  "Who knew that T. Rex had feathers?" 
•  "What do you mean that less time separates us from T. Rex than separates T. Rex from the stegosaurus? That blows my mind." 

 What I got:

• "Are you going to hand back our quizzes now?" 

It totally brought me up short. I was in the moment. They really were not.

Now, they're a nice if quiet group, and I realize that I shouldn't let this get to me. But it did. I was totally deflated even in my other classes and, yes, oddly sad for the rest of the day. I started questioning whether I should even be teaching.

Rationally, this is nuts. Classes come and go, and individual class hours are unpredictable. We've all had spectacular days in the classroom sometimes and so-so days other times and "kill me now" days at least once in our careers.

Rationally, I know that they don't have to like what I like. They have their own interests that I doubtless don't share, and, while I try my level best to choose interesting as well as pedagogically useful materials, that's something you can't always predict.

But irrationally, I wanted them to share a little excitement about dinosaur studies. Irrationally, I felt that I'd taken a risk, like giving them a caprese salad only to have them demand the usual pizza.

And thinking about it now, I realize that we really need both perspectives. Yes, they have their own interests, and rationally that's fine, and I try to work with that as much as I can. But if I stop being excited about what's happening in the classroom and wanting them to love what I love in terms of literature, then what am I even doing?

Ten thoughts about lecturing

I should probably have called this "Ten weird tricks about lecturing" or "Lecturing: what you learn will shock you!" to grab more page views.

But it probably won't shock you.  Twitter has lost its mind over the "Lecture Me. Really" essay in the New York Times yesterday. The essay suggested that sometimes a good lecture helps listeners to bring together information in a compelling way and that taking notes might students help to assimilate information. You know, learn something.

Twitter responded with roughly this sentiment: "Lectures are evil. Did we not drive a stake through the heart of this awful practice? Everyone knows that constant interaction on Twitter is the One Best Way to teach. Students alone know how best to learn, and they know what they need to learn, too. Why are you trying to impose your terrible methods on them all the time?"

Herewith are ten thoughts about lecturing, in no particular order.

1.  No one would say that lecturing is the best way to learn all the time, or that instructors should do this all the time, or that other ways don't work.

2. When I began teaching, having duly learned how evil lectures were, I did not do it. Ever. Students began to ask for lectures. They wanted some information explained, so I learned to give lectures and to make them good.

3. Lecturing is storytelling.  It ought to have a point, and an organization, and interesting information bits along with the things that they have to know, which might or might not be interesting to them.

4. Pictures help. Interaction helps.  PowerPoint is really for pictures rather than bullet points.   Ask questions. Ask them to respond to what they're seeing.

5. If you think of lecturing as if you're telling a story, you'll keep it short. Henry Ward Beecher and Jonathan Edwards are dead. No one can hold an audience spellbound for 3 hours or usually even an hour any more.  If you keep it to 20 minutes, or even less, it'll work better.

6. Brief lecture + an activity immediately after that to capitalize on what students have learned = a winning combination. Not every day, but some days.  You have to mix things up in the classroom. See point 1.

7. Keep lecturing for some of the "big picture" stuff. I had some instructors who could come into a classroom, open a book, and keep us more or less spellbound (with not much interaction) by analyzing poems for three hours. That's not a sustainable model for most of us.  Lecture entertainingly on the big ideas, and then follow it up with a group project or an analytical exercise about a specific poem or piece of prose.

8. Sometimes when you're discussing a poem, you'll hear students say something as though they just thought of it, even though you said it earlier.  This is a good thing. It means that they're internalizing the ideas and taking ownership of them.

9. When students work in groups, they may not get all the meaning that you'd like them to get out of a piece, the kind that you would have said if you had lectured about it. This is okay.  They will remember it better if they engage with it themselves.

10. Bottom line: three methods.
--Say you give 100% of some necessary information in a lecture.  Students may remember as little as 60% of it, depending on the student.
--If students discuss the work in groups, they may only get 60% of what you think they should learn, but they will remember it.
--When students present their work to the class, they may only say about half of that, or 30%. But they will have a better handle on that 30% because they've worked with it or listened to it from their peers.  That's why it's important to use more than one method.

Updated to add: Miriam Burstein has some good thoughts on this.

Teaching: What's love got to do with it?

Xykademiqz has a good post and cartoon up about how teaching is valued at a research university (hint: aim for "decent") and What Now? has a good post about the tyranny of the online gradebook in which she discovers that her students haven't been reading comments on their returned papers but just checking their grades.

These struck a chord with me because they're examples of a slogan that gets repeated often, and cynically, over at the CHE discussion forums: "You can't care more than they do."

In Xykademiqz's case, the "they" would be administrators who care about grant dollars and researcher recognition, with adequate teaching being a baseline that, if you go above it, might indicate a lack of research seriousness, as a colleague of hers keeps insisting.

In What Now?'s case, the "they" could be students who care about the grades but not the comments.  She started putting the grades in later, so they'd have to look.  I did that, too, for a while, but then got lazy and posted the grades with the papers.  The result has been that I'm not sure whether they're reading the comments or not.

  In fact, I thought about putting in a secret word on the comments and then giving them an extra point on the paper if they could identify the word by writing it down in class. I didn't do it, because I don't want to treat grades as a game (and I "can't care more than they do," right?), but I was sorely tempted.  With the final paper, taking advice from all who chimed in on this blog, I wrote a little note saying that since they wouldn't have a chance to write another paper, I wouldn't be writing marginal comments but would be available for discussions about the paper if anyone wanted to talk.  The range of those who took me up on this was 0%-0%.

But here's the thing: can you live with yourself and are you happy if you approach teaching from an absolutely rational standpoint?  Xykademqz, for example, has more midterms because she knows it's pedagogically sound.  I write comments for the same reason and meet with students whenever I can to discuss their papers--that is, when they ask to see me (because "can't care . . ." etc.). Yes, I know that "minimal marking" has its adherents and is supported by research blah blah blah, but I think they deserve to know what's going on, especially when it's plain that they have no clue whatsoever why there's a checkmark in the margin beside a sentence.

Think about the tradeoffs that we might make if we really treat teaching rationally:

1. If you have a choice of teaching a class with a cap of 40-50, for which you have no grader but that you love, do you request that class or another that enrolls, say, 25?  How about a class that enrolls 100 for which you are well suited but that takes a lot of prep?

2. Do you eliminate one assignment or an exam, even if you think the students might need it, because of the time demands?

What other kinds of tradeoffs do we make?

Pedantry or self-preservation?

It's grading season--wait, it's always grading season, isn't it?--and as the papers come flooding in, it's inevitable that we'll get some of these:
--papers with no page numbers
--electronic papers called things like "myroughdraft.doc" or the ever-popular "paper1.doc."
--papers with no Works Cited
--papers with no names
--papers with Works Cited in a separate file
--papers in some odd format that can't be opened
--Works Cited in some peculiar numbered list, which we don't use in MLA

Now, on the papers themselves, we're used to explaining, or not explaining if you believe in minimal marking, when there's a comma splice or a fragment or a missing apostrophe. I am sometimes told I'm the first person ever to point these out to the student, which, if true, is kind of sad and inspiring at the same time (as in they're better off to learn about it now).  Along with commenting on the contents, which is the more important part, it's part of our jobs to note these.  We grade holistically, so we're not dinging them for points all the time.

But those format things in the list above used to make me bang my head on the desk.  Why would they not follow the guidelines that I'd given to them? I'm writing a final comment, and I have to number the pages myself to say "On p. 4"--why, oh why, is it up to me?

[Edited to add, in light of Tenured Radical's recent column: I don't make fun of them for this, or think they are doing it to spite me, or think it reflects on them as people in any way.  Anyone who's ever filled out a grant application or any other kind of form can testify that when you're trying to get it done, you'll always find some piece that you find arbitrary. That puts you and the students on the same level ground about requirements.

No, my issue is strictly whether it makes more work for me or not.]

Then I got smart.  The papers are still graded holistically, but here's a test: does it make more work for me if Stu Dent didn't complete the format things? Then Stu Dent gets a gentle reminder on the first paper, and after that, it's -1 for those things. It's not enough of a penalty to hurt them, but it's enough to get their attention--and it seems to work.

Some would call it pedantry.  I call it the "you make me work to do something you were supposed to do, you pay" rule, or self-preservation.

First day impressions

• I hope they're going to like the class. I worked hard on the syllabus and readings.
• I don't do much more the first day than explain the syllabus and introduce some of the assignments, since there's a lot to cover.  
• If your university is like mine, it now has lots of policies, goals, and so on in specific boilerplate language that has to go into the syllabus. The syllabus now resembles Henry VIII's divorce petition to the Pope with all the wax seals. 
• I wish I could add an interesting wax seal for each of the policies.
• I wish we could have a day of experimenting with sealing wax without giving the fire marshal a heart attack.
• It was nice to see colleagues when they are (and I am) relatively rested after the summer, even if we all worked all summer. 
• It felt strange to be on campus instead of out for a walk/run early in the morning, looking at the deer in the fields and speculating about which little buildings behind people's houses might be writing houses.

Through a glass eye, darkly: listening to the Alternavoice

Flavia has good a post up about a book that she read and that, quoting Dorothy Parker, she says she wants to hurl with great force out of her house.  It's a book about a guy having a mushy, lukewarm crisis of faith. She also says that she doesn't necessarily finish books any more once she's given them a fair (100 pages, more than fair) chance.

Finishing books? Not necessarily, any more.  I recently tried a modern classic, but after reading the preface about how it would be challenging, frustrating, and confusing, even a little boring with all the digressions, but that the 1000+ pages would be totally worth the effort, I let the Kindle app quietly return it to the library without forging ahead.  Maybe I'll try again in twenty or thirty years. If I'm going to work that hard, I'd rather work, if you see what I mean.

No, the thing that worries me a little is that in rereading some classics, including my recent stretch of visiting the mid-century males, my first reaction is often no longer "This is a Timeless Classic with Enduring Themes and Universal Truths," the gospel I was taught, but "Oh, great--more twentysomething guy problems."  As Mark Twain once said of James Fenimore Cooper in a very different but totally hilarious context, I'm seeing through a glass eye, darkly.

I can't tell whether this is a gender issue or an age one, since I've read so many more novels since first encountering those classics. I can still appreciate all the formal stuff and even a little stylistic fancy footwork, but in the big Crisis of Faith moments, a still, small voice in the back of my head is saying something like "Dude. You are worrying about this, really? Get a grip."

The Alternavoice hasn't always been there when I read. I think reading all the junk on the web has cultivated it, from listicles to the faux questions at Slate and HuffPo and now all the news sites.  It's not there with everything I read, which is a good thing.

And the Alternavoice isn't all bad.  It slips out in class sometimes, in some almost-snark pointing out problems in a text. I don't want to go all trollish on a piece of writing, of course, but it's good for the students to see that what we're reading isn't holy writ and that there's another way to look at the hero's dilemma.

Maybe I need to write up an assignment where they can let their Alternavoices loose, but once it's out of the cage, as evidenced in my brain in the last year or so, it's out for good.

Do you have this voice when you read literature? Is there some situation or plotline that especially brings it out?

At The Chronicle: Don't like teaching? It's okay to fake it.

At The Chronicle, "I Don't Like Teaching. There, I Said It" is part of the "Do Your Job Better" series. (Huh?)

The advice that "Sidney Perth" gives is pretty straightforward: if you don't like teaching, fake it and don't worry about it.  Liking teaching isn't the same as being a good teacher, he says.  Good teaching behaviors make a good teacher. You don't have to like it; you just have to care about it.

Part of this rings true.  I can write a good administrative report, but that doesn't mean I like to do it.

I like to teach. I like the process of discovery, both mine and the students', and I like the energy of a good class discussion. There's an excitement to that process, which is probably why the MOOC idea is so threatening to me. Not every class is going to be great, not every student is going to appreciate what you do, but enough do to make the whole process worthwhile.

But why would you spend your life doing something that you really don't like? This is the part of the article that fascinates me. It can't be the low pay, or the long hours, or the Hunger Games-type competition for positions, or the sitting-over-a-dunk-tank feeling you get every time some fool on the internet or in the legislature decides that the humanities are the problem with the good old US of A.

In fact, I'd disagree with one part of his premise, which is that not liking teaching is like not liking puppies. If you profess too great a love for teaching, especially if you're female, that can be scanned in some people's minds as "isn't serious about research." Is this article really a humble-brag about loving research instead of teaching? I don't think it is, because he doesn't mention research.

Do you like to teach? Would you do it even if you didn't like it?

The "get it done" grading system

It's the grading season right now, and we are pretty much all grading. Flavia just wrote a great post about this, and I'd agree: Grading can be satisfying if you just resolve to, well, "git 'er done."

The way I've graded for a few years goes like this:
1. Gather what you need to grade: papers, books for checking citations, etc.
2. Get yourself a "cool tool" or two. For me, it means this:

•  Filling up pens with an interesting color of ink (green, purple) for the paper versions.
•  Download e-versions to grade electronically on the iPad (iAnnotate has improved exponentially lately!).
• Or, if it's early in the semester where I'm still giving lots of explanations about things, open up the file of auto-text or cut-and-paste entries so that I can use those for routine things and spend more time really writing comments about the content.

[Update, because Flavia asked in the comments: students have the choice of turning in a paper version OR an electronic version, so the "cool tool" I use depends on what they gave me.] Now, these are not Hammacher-Schlemmer cool tools, but they are what pass for cool tools with me. They may seem frivolous, but they aren't.  They make grading exciting (yes, they do), and they make you want to get started.

3. Write down the students' last names in some kind of order. I mix it up so that I don't read the same students' papers first or last every time.  This serves two purposes: (1) you can't avoid a student's paper and (2) you get to cross the names off the list.  If you are at all the "cross it off the list is very satisfying" kind of person, this really helps.

4. Get a timer and figure out how long you're going to allot for each paper.  You may need to adjust the time after the first few, but if you've been teaching for a lot of years, you should have a pretty good idea of how long they should take you. If you're tempted to take longer, ask yourself this: "Is the student going to benefit from this additional comment or correction?" Sometimes it's "yes," but often the answer is "no," and you have to move on.

5. Build in some breaks or changes in activity. Flavia recommends taking a break every 6 papers, and that sounds good. I also change it up by grading X number of electronic versions and then X number of paper versions. A change may not be as good as a rest, but it helps.

I have colleagues who prefer the "10 a day, every day" system, and if that works for them, that's great.  Since I am an ace procrastinator, what this meant was that I would spend a couple of hours dreading grading, a couple of hours grading, and then a few hours trying to settle down to writing or reading because my mind was still back with the papers.  Where grading is concerned, I'm a monotasker and definitely not a multitasker.

Another advantage is that for me, there's a norming process that goes on so that I can grade more consistently from paper to paper, since the overall features of the whole set and its issues are in my head somewhere.

Grading still takes longer than I think it ought to, given this system, but the end result is what Flavia talks about: once it's done, it is done, and you don't have to think about it any more until the next set. That's incredibly satisfying.