Random bullets of another semester ends, and spring is here

 

How's everyone doing? The Economist cover says it all, really.

• Teaching.This semester is all done & in the books, except for grading. Based on all of your comments a long time ago (2011! We were all so young!) I'm providing a summary comment along with the rubric and telling them to contact me if they would like more inline detailed comments. 
• I kept a chart this semester of who actually looked at the extensive feedback I gave, since Canvas allows you to see whether the student clicks back in to see the comments. You'll be completely shocked to learn that the rate of looking at the feedback was about 30%, about the same number that ever looked at the Panopto videos, etc. 
• It didn't change whether I gave comments or not, but it did make me a little more understanding about why they still can't tell whether to put quotations or italics in a title, etc., and that I could save my breath--well, my iPad handwritten comments--because they weren't paying attention to it anyway. 
• I have been lurking over at the r/professors subreddit, which is teaching me (once I ignore the bitterness) all about tools: tools to gamify, like Kahoot (not doing that), tools to grade (not doing that, either), tools to catch AI (many of which seem sneaky to me). But there seems to be (again, ignoring bitterness) a sense that students are struggling with basic thinking & reasoning concepts, with reading even short materials, and with speaking up for fear of failure. With an online class, it's hard to detect those things.
• Speaking of which: I have 100% in-person classes in the fall and am the only tenured person in the department to be teaching 100% in person. I didn't ask for this, since I do like to teach online as well, but I'm kind of excited about it, since the experience a couple of years ago with the old-school methods (writing papers in class, working on revising them in class, exams in class, class discussion, etc.) was great. 

• Writing and Research. I've been writing faithfully every day, though it's all notes circling the new project rather than actual paragraphs I could put into the new book project. That time is coming, though.
  
• Conferences. Going to conferences is surreal. Budgets are being slashed, academe is under attack (you're saying "tell me about it!") but in the conversations I overheard, everyone keeps talking as though nothing is happening--"And after this fellowship, I've applied for X," "Are you going to Germany for Y conference?" etc. Loads of themes about environmental justice and the anthropocene and pious hand-wringing over climate change, all while we are burning up the atmosphere flying to these things when we could be doing them over Zoom. I confess to laughing out loud when a colleague brought up flying to a European conference about something something climate change and said "Are you kidding? No academic who goes to an in-person conference gets to preach about climate change without a raised eyebrow from the rest of us" or something to that effect. 
• Service. Still showing up in person for stuff, and often the only civilian (i.e., non admin) there. 
• The rest of it. Trying to walk in the woods, and read real books, and spend time by the water as much as I can.

Edited to add: I'm trying to comment on your blogs, but Wordpress, etc. is hurling so many obstacles that I'm not sure the comments are showing--sorry. 

Still hanging in there

 It doesn’t take a crystal ball to see that there are distractions in the country & in academe right now (waves hands in the direction of everything) as we swing between rage & despair & fight on as best we can. 

Anyway, here’s some non-news content: 

Regular life

• After a —let’s just say “weather-filled”—winter, it looks as though spring is going to be here at some point, so hooray! There’s something in the sky right now, some unfamiliar light—could it be the sun? 
• We can’t hibernate for February any more, but it is only 28 days, and this is the last of it. I couldn’t hibernate, anyway: the birds and the squirrels rely on my filling the feeders.
• One of my cats has discovered that he can climb onto the hammock, which is one of those that swings wildly, and he is extremely proud of himself, as indeed he should be.
• I’m listening to Dan Jones’s The Plantagenets and keep thinking “well, it could be worse, like the winter of 1314 worse, so keep moving.” Oddly, this gives me some hope: if they got through it, you can, too. 
• Since vaccines have been available, I’ve had them all—but I am also older than dirt and experienced a lot of diseases before there were any vaccines for diseases except for smallpox, TB,  and (later) Polio. Both kinds of measles, including one with a high fever during which I hallucinated voices; scarlet fever; mumps; chicken pox; shingles (yes, as a child)—you name it, I had it. My point is that seeing these come back is only one of the worst things that this kakistocracy has visited upon us—is plague next?—but it’s also one of the most pointless.

Teaching life

• We’re now, what, 4-5 years post-Covid, but I don’t think the students have recovered. I’ve tried to scale up the assignments a bit but received pushback that it was too much. Bear in mind that what I’m assigning for grad and undergrad students is about 2/3 of what I used to assign 10 years ago, but they seem to be really suffering under the workload, so I accommodate as far as possible. 
• I order books, but it seems that they will not buy the books. Would I rather have them have a chance at reading the materials, or would I rather have them buy the books & lose out if they don’t? I scan & OCR them & post them & hope that this makes reading possible for them.
• Lest I get a swelled head about making a difference with my awesome video lectures and extensive feedback on papers, I’ve checked to see the viewership of both. About 1/3 of the students watch the lectures, and about the same number actually look at the feedback I give. I guess making a difference for those who care is enough, right? 
• On the other hand, some students have reached out to say that they appreciate either the feedback or the lectures, so that’s a win.

Research life

• I’ve been writing most days, although it’s almost all reading & writing, making notes and working through ideas rather than creating finished prose. It’s kind of exciting, since the writing itself seems to generate the ideas—not a new concept, of course, but it seems to be working.
• I’ve also made progress on the collaborative project and can see the light at the end of one of the tunnels, anyway. 
• Conferences are coming up. They’re kind of the “return to work” version of academic life, but apparently virtual conferences can’t slake academics’ relentless thirst for travel and spending money in search of community. The COVID-era virtual experience wasn’t enough, apparently. 

I hope you’re all hanging in there!

Welcome to 2025!

Undine: "Welcome to 2025! New year, new me! This is going to be the year when I get so much writing ---"

Covid enters the chat, with a positive test line so reddish-purple that it looks like a murder scene.

Oh, well, eventually I will feel better. 

In the meantime:

• The fires and the political scene are terrible, but you already knew that.
• Reading actual books instead of doomscrolling through the now-canceled WaPo & NYTimes is better for mental health.
• Columnists like Jennifer Rubin have quit and have now gone to our old friend Substack. While I admire that in principle, it's the whole cable & streaming services thing all over again: you pay for cable, and then you pay extra for Hulu, Apple+, Netflix, etc.
  
• Teaching is going well, and if Covid 1.0 taught us anything, it's that we can hop on Zoom for a class or two if we are not too sick to teach but too sick to risk infecting others.
• Everyone on my social media counts the number of books that they read in a year and then posts it at the end of the year. I've never done this & don't remember seeing this before. Questions: Does everyone keep track like this? Should I start doing this? 

Hope your new year is going well!

 

Waning days of 2024

 

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and (nearly) Happy New Year! I mostly wanted to post in order to give you this peaceful picture to ring in the new year.

Academics think of the new year as beginning in the fall (because of classes), but I'm hoping this will be a new start. Herewith some wishes for myself and anyone else who would like them: 

1. For having a better work-life balance.

2. For finding new interests (crafts such as paper-making? more focus on local history?) and new sources of joy.

3. For finding more time for what matters. I've canceled both the New York Times and the Washington Post (sorry, Carolyn Hax) for their relentless cheerleading of guess-who. Anyway, I find more of WaPo's actual news reprinted in my local paper, since their digital format is all silliness and Trump. 

4. For spending less time on teaching, however fascinating I find it.

5. For getting unstuck and unstalled on one writing project and finishing a major part of another project.

6. For being outside more and using my standing desk adapter thingy (not a real standing desk) to stop the fidgets when writing. 

I wish you all joy, happiness, and peace in the new year!

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. 

Update 1/4/25

Here is Rachel Aviv’s superb article on the case in The New Yorker: 

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/12/30/alice-munros-passive-voice

It shows in detail in how some people can abuse with impunity if they have enough intellectual jargon (Gerry, the molester) and selfish desire not to inconvenience themselves (Alice Munro). All of Andrea’s pain was just so much grist for Munro’s fiction mill, so what Munro lost by denying the abuse she gained in a Nobel Prize.

The detective who interviewed Munro: “it was going nowhere. She was just disparaging her daughter” (39).

When Munro thought there would be publicity after Gerry confessed and was put on probation for two years (he’d also molested other girls), Munro was prepared to leave him if there was publicity.

There was not, so she did not.

Munro to her biographer Robert Thacker, who apparently did not discuss the abuse in his 600+ page book about her: she was out of touch with Andrea because Andrea is still somehow punishing her mother: “I thought maybe, as the years went by, it would become less necessary for her to make people suffer.” 

First of all, if Andrea was intending to make her suffer—good.

Second of all, it’s all “I, I, me, me, me.” No thought for her daughter.

 

Third of all, she imitates and mocks her daughters (Jenny, who stood up for Andrea, and Andrea), whining “What’s the matter—why can’t you let it be known that you’re married to a pedophile?” Munro’s answer: “I worked for a long time to be who I am,” so my children can just sod off (I added the last part). 

They are monsters.

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!