Teaching

Thoughts on teaching asynchronously

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TL;DR: It is rough.

First off—and I’m not expert in this—but I want to say that students are not “using AI to write their papers.” Based on my understanding, the Chat-GPTs and Claudes and Geminis now forced into my midst are not the Artificial Intelligence that Turing talked about over 75 years ago. These are “large language models” that are basically doing text prediction in a very sophisticated, expensive way. In my opinion, we really should not be doing free advertising for these companies by falsely inflating their products and saying they meet the definition of “AI.”

Second, I mostly avoid using these tools myself for ethical reasons. Also because I like writing, I like mistakes, and I am already more screen-addicted than I want to be. Frankly, the couple times I tried to use an LLM “for research,” it consistently issued forth fake sources, and that’s embarrassing. I can make mistakes on my own, thank you very much!

As an English professor, I can attest that it’s incredibly difficult now to assess whether or not a student has authentically produced a work of writing unassisted by LLMs without surveilling their process live, in class. So, given the fact that our colleges are still running asynchronous courses, I decided to give one a go over the summer simply so I could see for myself how well I could do it.

Teaching an online course is rough for me. I rely on my in-person goofiness to entertain students, and I really like getting to know people face-to-face. I also hate working within the constraints of the Learning Management Systems (in our case, BrightSpace). Online learning has its own conventions at this point, and many are worthy of derision (see meme below). I also hadn’t taught online since the pandemic, so reaching into that quiver of tools evoked some gloom for reasons unrelated to the here and now.

A meme I saved during the pandemic, while teaching online. I have a large meme collection saved in a file called “Memes for Lols.” These are deployed, in class, at pertinent points in the semester.

I faced the challenge with a question: Could I design assignments and motivate learning in such a way that would preempt student use of LLMs? (I take it as a given at this point that I cannot assess a student’s ability to meet the learning objectives of my courses if they use LLMs to do their assignments.) I viewed this challenge with the sort of enthusiasm I bring to a Sudoku or crossword puzzle: a tepid enthusiasm that can easily turn into frustration and existential self-doubt. In anticipation, I read a bunch of articles on the topic, I consulted with my tech-savvy colleagues, and I spun my pedagogical wheels.

Did I succeed? Hmm. No, I don’t think I was extraordinarily successful at solving the problem posed by teaching asynchronously in the age of LLMs. But I did have a handful of awesome, motivated, intellectually driven students who turned in great work.

What did I do to try and solve this puzzle?

First, I assigned some art projects. I always teach students how to analyze and understand imagery and figurative language, and this lends itself well to illustration: “Illustrate the metaphor” is a great assignment. Getting students to tease apart literal from figurative language, to infer the implied comparisons, and to derive meaning from it all is a really important and fun task. Even just “illustrate a scene” in detail prompts students to examine text carefully and deliberately choose aspects of it to emphasize. Students regularly tell me that they love the chance to just “color” in this way – they can tap into their childhood selves. Students also loved seeing their classmates’ work. I don’t give students a grade based on how “great” they are at drawing, but it’s obvious when students spend time thinking through the details and conveying their interpretation of the language. I value the time that they spend on the assignment, and it’s clear that they do as well. I also do these art assignments myself so they can see what sort of effort I’m looking for, and so they don’t feel like I’m asking them to do something I wouldn’t do myself.

A detail from my own illustration of a scene from Orwell’s Animal Farm. I mean, not bad but not the world’s finest illustration!

Second, as an experiment, for one discussion board assignment, I required that students recorded themselves talking—unscripted—in response to a prompt. It was truly wonderful to hear all their voices! Remember, this was an asynchronous class, which means you never “meet” live. Only a couple of them had ever scheduled Zoom meetings with me, so this was the first time I’d gotten a “hit” of them as humans with bodies. Many also told me they loved hearing their classmates’ voices.

Third, for a fun “optional” assignment, I told them to take selfies of themselves reading one of the novels I’d assigned. Most participated, and the results were cute. One girl was reading at the hairdresser, under the dryer. One girl was in a cozy nook under a bunk bed. One man was sitting at dinner, reading over some soup. Reading a long novel (some for the first time) can be hard, and creating some sort of feeling of solidarity and community was worth the small effort.

In spite of a few wins, I didn’t solve the puzzle: I find it difficult to design assignments for an online course that meet this new moment. LLM use has to be at the forefront of an instructor’s mind if the credits we issue are to mean anything. Surely we have to be diligent about authenticating student work, but any easy answer to this is too good to be true. And you can’t hang any hope on the idea that tech will defeat tech, given the widely documented failure of AI-detection software to work. So I’m going to have to keep spinning my pedagogical wheels – and teaching in person.

For the first weeks of the summer session, I felt agonized by the choices I had to make: Would I embed hidden, white text into assignments that would trigger absurd responses in the LLM? Would I issue draconian “Fs” and accuse students of LLM use when/if I could reproduce their responses with low-token LLMs myself? Would I give up and just reward low-effort copy-and-paste write-ups since you can’t do much to prevent them?

But by the end of the semester, having gone both ways in response to all of those early choices and coming up short, I did get some positive feedback from the students, particularly about the more unconventional things I tried to have them do. Additionally, a few students had actually read novels for the first time in their lives thanks to the class; a few could now graduate (this being one of the final courses they needed to fulfill some requirement); and a few felt eager to read even more! Knowing this makes me feel as though teaching the class actually had been worth it, in spite of my own sense of fatigue and failure.

Teaching, Writing

It’s “Paper Time” (as opposed to “Screen Time.”)

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In the last couple of years, as I introduce myself and my class to students, I explain that we will be employing a mode of learning I call “Paper Time.” This is to counter act the ever-deadening effects of hours of “Screen Time.”

To begin, in my first-semester freshman writing class, we read “How to Focus Like it’s 1990.” This NY Times article tracks the declining attention span of Americans, attributing that decline to the way in which so much reading now occurs on screens. The decline in attention (to text) is bad because sustained attention while we read and re-read is how we develop “critical analysis, inference, deduction and empathy.” These are, like, the four most important skills or qualities we can develop as readers, and frankly as humans who inhabit a shared Earth. We discuss how great an advantage it would be to deliberately cultivate our attention spans and hone these skills and qualities, considering how dire the current situation is.

The article notably describes the difference between the type of attention afforded to text when it’s on a screen versus on paper, and it explains that reading on paper is more conducive to re-reading, which is key to the development of these four essential qualities. For this reason, I explain, I require that students read all the class texts on paper. In this particular class, we mostly read articles and chapters excerpted from non-fiction books, so I usually provide students with these readings.1

To reinforce this lesson, I ask students to take out their phones and take a look at their average daily screen time reports. Most students voluntarily share what they see – and sometimes it’s truly shocking. I had a student once who averaged (AVERAGED!) 23 hours a day on their phone. When asked, she explained that this was because she couldn’t sleep without having YouTube videos playing in the background. Most students will average approximately 8 or 9 hours a day. When they look into the details of how those hours are spent, it’s usually on TikTok or Instagram. Everyone walks away from this experience feeling a lot of alarm.

Incidentally, I also let students scrutinize my phone-use habits. I’ve worked hard over the last few years—by quitting social media and taking anything interesting off my iPhone—to keep my use under an hour a day. I’m usually successful at hitting this goal, though not always. I talk to students about my own struggle to reduce screen time, and we all fantasize together about what we would do with those extra hours if we could wrest back from the phones. No one ever says that they feel great about giving over more than half their waking hours to smartphone apps!

Students in my classes learn that they will be forced off their phones to spend time annotating the readings I assign – looking up every word or concept they don’t know and writing down the definition, summarizing in the margins, and marking passages that they consider important. I show students examples of my own heavy annotation, and I loudly and publicly praise students who come to class showing a lot of ink-based engagement with the readings. Students willingly show one another their annotations, and they start to learn what is possible from one another.

Eventually, I grade the annotations and quiz students on learning any vocabulary. Students often complain at first about this annotation requirement because it slows them down when reading and some are scared about having to memorize definitions, but eventually most get into the habit of it and develop techniques and strategies that they then apply to work in other classes. Some get really into it – buying colorful pens, creating vocabulary lists, and making up their own annotation keys to denote their own markings. Nearly everyone loves it when they start learning the new words – seeing them in other contexts, using them in their own writing, and feeling a sense of command over language.

I am sharing my “Paper Time” strategy here in part because it involves a fun lesson that goes over well in the first weeks of the semester, but also in part because it now provides a great way to counteract the overpowering and overwhelming presence of “AI”-based tools in the classroom.2 Social media is no longer the main culprit, stealing away students’ attention. Now, the LLMs are stealing away their cognitive labor, the main activity that used to constitute “education.” What is worse is that first-year college students are already so used to revving up the LLMs to do their work—many spent all of high school on a computer, and some professors actually require that students use LLMs—that when you instruct them to use a piece of paper and a pen, they are actually very receptive to the change. In fact, most students are extremely happy when I explain “Paper Time” to them. They seem to crave this sort of engagement.

This summer, incidentally, I taught an online asynchronous course for the first time since the pandemic. It was rough for many reasons, one of which is that I’ve become so happy teaching in the “Paper Time” mode that basing the course on a screen once again was unpleasant. Creating an online course is extremely difficult and requires a lot of work to do well; it also involves a lot of screen time, which I eschew. I still attempted in various ways to help the students experience the benefits of “Paper Time”: I tried to require that they print out and annotate the readings and upload images of their annotations.3 I also required that they purchase two books (it was a fiction course, after all). There were two assignments that required students to illustrate imagery based on figurative language in the texts. I made an extra credit assignment in which they had to take a selfie while reading an assigned novel – to show off their cozy reading nooks. The results were super cute (one student was sitting at the hair salon, reading with a huge dryer over her head). A few students told me directly that they appreciated these requirements and assignments, but still it was inevitably hard to create a culture of reading and writing on paper in the online, asynchronous classroom. And for sure it was hard to stem the tide of ubiquitous LLM use. I honestly do not believe it is possible in an asynchronous setting.

I have repeatedly said to students and colleagues that I do not feel like I can measure a student’s ability to meet our learning objectives if they try to meet them using LLMs. I am skeptical and even cynical about attempts to offload any of our cognitive labor to the companies that developed these technologies; I am highly resentful of any attempts to sabotage this precious opportunity we have in the classroom to help students develop “critical analysis, inference, deduction and empathy.” (I’m not sure what this means for online education.) Developing these qualities remains the goals of the classes that I teach, and I don’t think that students can do the cognitive work necessary to become sophisticated readers without getting the chance to put down their screens, turn off their LLMs, and put their pens to paper as they read.

  1. I do some legwork to take into account the various accommodations students need in order to support “Paper Time.” For instance, I had a student who needed all the texts to be in a really large font in order for her to read them. For her, using screens was a matter of convenience given her need for large text, but she actually preferred reading on paper. When I started giving her large-text versions of the readings, other students also wanted the large-text versions because then they had more room for marginal notes. Eventually, I started giving everyone the large-text versions that semester! In short, sometimes accommodations actually improve life for everyone. And I also don’t think that the accommodations that require disabled students to use their screens are necessarily the ones that the disabled students always prefer. So it’s worth it to have conversations with individuals to figure out what works. ↩︎
  2. I put “AI” in quotation marks because the Large Language Model LLM tools such as ChatGPT, Copilot, Claude, etc. are not actually AI. ↩︎
  3. Our college provides students with nearly unlimited access to printers, so this is not an unreasonable request, in my opinion. ↩︎
Caribbean, Research, Tourism

As the Early Caribbean Society’s New Secretary/Treasurer…

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…I encourage all and sundry to check out our website and consider joining the group.

Professor Kerry Sinanan encouraged me to take part in a number of conference panels sponsored by the ECS (at MLA and NASSR). Working with other scholars in the field of Romanticism and the Caribbean has inspired me to start investigating early tourism in the region, particularly around the time in which modern guidebooks evolved – the early 19th century.

This has proven to be a fruitful path of research for me, and I am eager to share more of my work over time – including in a forthcoming issue of The Keats-Shelley Journal.

Instructional Technology, Teaching

Self-Conscious Online Teaching Considerations

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I’m building my online courses for the fall. The fall of 2020. The one wherein we’re still in the midst of the pandemic. I have all these aspirations for my online pedagogy: open pedagogy, OER pedagogy, pedagogy that empowers students to learn how to make online content, pedagogy that inspires students to become readers and writers. And then there’s the fact of the pandemic. I can barely read anything longer than a tweet. I can barely concentrate on anything for more than three minutes. I have a baby. Nearly my entire family just recovered from COVID19. Two of my friends’ parents just died on ventilators.

This is all to say: I can barely put together a regular-degular-schmegular Blackboard site for my students. How am I going to expect students to be more functional than I am? Can I design a course that helps students meet the learning objectives of the courses while accommodating the stress of living in the midst of a pandemic?

I have spent a couple years operating under a philosophy that quantity could lead to quality: get students to read and write a lot, then they’d get better at both. I still believe this, but unfortunately, these activities take time. I read this tweet by Marcos Gonsalez last night:

“more reading/more work is better learning” assumes a universal student, one that has enough time & resources in which to dedicate to the work, & one with a body/mind that can process all that material in short spans of time. More work doesn’t mean better quality of learning.

https://twitter.com/MarcosSGonsalez/status/1284939181735780360?s=20

He emphasizes “method” over “content”. Earlier in the thread, he advocates teaching “fewer texts, carefully selected, paying closer attention to what those texts are doing is more generative for students’ learning & time.” Being more deliberate about the method involves “care,” as he states here. That care takes almost more time than just assigning an entire chapter or article or book does. It means that the instructor has to find the specific bit that generates appropriate student experience.

In mulling over this problem of quality over quantity for the coming semester, culling many of the texts and deliberating deployment, I feel sad. In part because I’m asking myself “Did I make students do a lot of unnecessary work all these years?” (yes). Also because I’m realizing how many of my pedagogical decisions are guided by my ego rather than my consideration of student needs. When I’m planning my courses, I’m always considering what other instructors would think when they look at my materials rather than what students are going to think when they look at them.

Being self-conscious of one’s syllabi and teaching decisions is baked into the cake: we have to submit the syllabi to administrators. They’re evaluated by committees when we’re being promoted. We have to design them for bureaucracy rather than students’ eyes. For instance, how many students spend a great deal of time poring over our learning objectives or boiler-plate course descriptions anyway? I know that I never did much of that – I’d scramble through looking for the number of essays required and the books being taught. I’m also in a position where I collect and glance over faculty syllabi for a particular course every semester to make sure components are not missing and that grading requirements are being followed. The very things students don’t look at are the things I have to assess when I do this.

The issue of “two syllabi”—one for students, one for administration—irks me before the beginning of each semester. This brings me back to the issue I began with: the issue of designing a course on Blackboard versus building one that I would be really proud of. I’m going to fall back on the former this fall because we are still in “emergency mode”. A colleague of mine made a compelling case for this, saying that students already have to learn to use Blackboard for all their courses, and that it’s unfair to force them to learn whole other platforms in addition in times like these. I will reduce reading expectations and make the site as accessible as possible, but maybe along the way I will build a foundation for a more innovative course for the future.

Community College, Hostos, Instructional Technology, Publication, Social Justice, Teaching

Your Suddenly Online Class Could Actually Be a Relief (from Inside Higher Ed)

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In a state of helplessness, I wrote a guest post for John Warner’s blog on Inside Higher Ed. As I’m on parental leave for most of this semester, I have been watching my college “go online” with its instruction from afar, so I thought if I put together some of my thoughts on teaching online, I could be of help.

“Your Suddenly Online Class Could Actually Be a Relief” in Inside Higher Ed

I wrote the post thinking of all the instructors at my college who were posting back and forth on the faculty listserv about their anxieties about using technology. And then there are some emails from folks over in EdTech with links to trainings and tutorials. I’m thinking, “This is all well and good, but how are the servers going to handle all this?” And also, I’m pretty competent with technology, and even I had a lot of technical kinks to work out in the process of deploying my online classes last semester. There’s absolutely no reason to tax everyone further with these ridiculous expectations.

This article by Rebecca Barrett-Fox, which I read right after I wrote mine, gets to the heart of the politics of this suddenly online education crisis:

“Please Do a Bad Job of Putting Your Courses Online”

Barrett-Fox nails it. Especially here:

Ask yourself: Do I really care about this? (Probably not, or else you would have explored it earlier.) Or am I trying to prove that I’m a team player? (You are, and don’t let your university exploit that.) Or I am trying to soothe myself in the face of a pandemic by doing something that makes life feel normal? (If you are, stop and instead put your energy to better use, like by protesting in favor of eviction freezes or packing up sacks of groceries for kids who won’t get meals because public schools are closing.)

I wish I knew how to put my energy to “better use,” but until I figure out what that looks like, I’m hoping that a few people who read my article will ease up a bit on themselves and their students.

Reading, Research, Tourism, Writing

Dusting off

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I’m on day 50 or so of parenthood – I’m on family leave from work. I had a rough delivery and hard recovery with postpartum complications. Now I’m feeling better physically and able to handle some intellectual tasks when the baby is sleeping or chirping to herself in the bassinet.

In an attempt to brush off my scholarly chops, I perused the intros to a few Oxbridge travel-writing anthologies. I recognized much I’ve absorbed over the past decade reading on this topic, but I also re-realized vast swaths of ignorance. Of texts, authors, historical facts, and so forth. It’s downright humiliating, though it’s fortunately a humiliation I can suffer in the privacy of my own maternal convalescence.

Of course, as is my nature, I began curating a list of sources—primary and secondary—that I’d need to read to help reckon with the gaps in my knowledge, but I also began to parse what about travel writing per se is different from the area I’ve actually been studying and writing about, which is tourism. And perhaps in parsing this, I began to forgive myself for not actually knowing All The Things. I don’t actually study travel-writing when it comes down to it. I’ve always sort of known this, but this is the first time I’ve really articulated what this means. It’s not that I’m not interested in what people write about while they’ve toured around, it’s that I’m more interested in what they have written about touring around – the boat ride, the way of transporting luggage, fellow tourists, how the trip affects how they feel about home, and especially what they think about tourism. It’s a difference between focusing on the subject of the trip rather than the object. “Travel writing” usually featurees both types of observations – those which are about the trip and those which are about the mechanics of travel or maybe rather meta-reflections on tourism.

In perusing these anthologies, I have come to the conclusion that I’d really benefit from studying medieval pilgrimages and the Crusades. And I need to learn more about the tourists that put graffiti on the Pyramids in Egypt in 1500 BCE – my archaeologist friend from graduate school says to consult The Graffiti of Pharaonic Egypt by Alexander Peden for information. Again – so many directions to go in here. Sometimes I fantasize about what I would write if I had more time to write: a book on medieval tourism and its relationship to (future) empire. Also, something about the ironic relationship between the purported religious purposes of the Crusades and the fact that the journey itself was rumored to be one of dissipation and, well, sex. This is supposedly why priests etc. would warn against the lure of the curiositas.

I’ve much to add to my “Uncomprehensive Travel-Writing Database” after this brief trip through the anthologies. As ever, academic scholarship proves humbling and intimidating. I do feel recharged and somewhat validated though to discover that for whatever reason, I remain compelled by the topic I landed upon in my senior year of college.

Books to peruse or re-peruse:

  • Finucane’s Miracles and Pilgrims, 1977
  • Zacher’s Curiosity and Pilgrimage, 1976
  • Batten’s Pleasurable Instruction: Form and Convention in Eighteenth-Century Travel Literature, 1978
  • Clifford’s Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century, 1997
  • Munter and Grose, eds., Englishmen Abroad, 1986
  • Korte’s English Travel Writing from Pilgrimages to Postcolonial Explorations, 2000
  • Stafford’s Voyage into Substance, 1984
  • Leask’s Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing, 2002
  • Ashcroft, Griffiths, & Tiffin’s The Empire Writes Back, 1989
  • Pratt’s Travel Writing and Transculturation, 1992
  • Holland and Huggan’s Tourists with Typewriters, 2000
Community College, Hostos, Social Justice, Teaching, The Bronx

Hostos Community College History

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One extraordinary thing I’ve come to appreciate in the past two years at Hostos is the fact that its history is fascinating and even inspiring. As I learn more and more about the institution—why it was founded, whom it serves—I feel quite privileged to be a member of its faculty and in a position to promote its mission. I have been affiliated in the past with institutions built upon shameful legacies, so to serve an academic community with the potential to dismantle oppression motivates a lot of the pedagogical work I do.Mural featuring Hostos' main building in the background, surrounded by people apparently celebrating, playing music, and holding protest signs. The head of Eugenio María de Hostos floats in the sky. Text at top says "Hostos Unido Jamas Sera Vencido."

I’ve been collecting materials about the college to use in my developmental and first-year writing courses, largely because I’m interested in learning more, but also because the issues raised by those who established this campus remain pertinent today (educational apartheid, poverty endemic to the South Bronx). And, for that matter, students love learning this bit of history.  So many arrive at Hostos largely because of proximity and affordability, so when they learn that they just so happen to be at a school whose mission relates directly to their own educational goals, and when they identify with the reasons for which people founded the school in the first place, this knowledge ignites a spark.

Below, I’m compiling a list of articles and resources for future reference, and because I think everyone can benefit from learning more about this particular history. It’s a tale that documents the power of grassroots organizing, the importance of the Young Lords and other 1960s radical movements, and the educational obstacles endemic to historically oppressed communities.

Hostos History Resources:

From the New York Times:

From the Hostos Website:

Miscellaneous:

Community College, Research, Teaching, Writing

End of Semester Reflections

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I finished my second year as an assistant professor of English at Hostos a few weeks ago, and while I was tidying the end-of-semester detritus in my office, I took a picture of the fastidious four-month wall calendar I maintained since the term:Photo of the 4-month calendar—February through May—on the wall of my office. All the dates are crossed out. You can make out all daily events.

For a full time, 4-5 position, this was a relatively “light” term thanks to both what CUNY calls “junior faculty release time” (which relieves profs in their first five years from 24 hours of teaching) and my service as a faculty advisor to our writing center. It took me nearly a year to fully grok how “hours” work for full-time staff, but here’s the short of it (in case any of my friends in wealthy R1 institutions want to know what they’re missing out on, and in case any of my friends on the ever-lasting job market are contemplating a career at a community college): full-time CUNY instructors at the 2-year colleges teach 27 hours per year, meaning 5 then 4 three-hour courses each semester, respectively. (Getting assigned to 6-hour developmental courses reduces the total number of courses you teach each semester, but it still amounts to a lot of hours in the classroom. ) You’re also required to hold a few office hours a week in addition to your service. I didn’t formally learn much about “service” in grad school, but a large part of “service” translates to “many, many meetings.” In short, this Spring I managed to secure myself a schedule in which I taught only one course (!) and thus was ostensibly responsible for coming in twice a week to teach it.

Or so I thought. That sounded great, right? Like, damn I have to come in twice a week? Imagine all the articles I’ll finish! Imagine the book proposal coming together! The conference talks! But look at that calendar. This is the thing: I  still had to attend all those meetings and events and trainings. I had to lead PDs for Writing Center tutors on various Fridays. FRIDAYS!? (The former high school teacher in me is shaking her head at my precious new standard for daily life, of course.)

All this busyness, for which the idea of a light schedule had ill-prepared me, meant that I discovered a weird axiom that is probably applicable to many jobs in service- and teaching-heavy institutions:

No matter how many hours you think you’ve secured for writing and research, meetings will take up all the space anyway.

No one can “see” you working alone on your book, deleting, suffering, rewriting, suffering, ILL-ing books from CUNY libraries in other boroughs (FYI I have been told by our circulation librarian I’m the second-highest user of their services of all the faculty), suffering, and doing all that reading that goes along with it. So that invisible labor—which, to be clear, is also required of CUNY 2-year college professors for tenure (though many community colleges don’t have this requirement)—doesn’t seem to count quite as much in the short term because it’s invisible. Saying “no” to committee invitations and professional development events is extremely difficult.

Down the road, I’ve been assured and counseled, the end result of putting effort into writing and research actually counts more heavily toward tenure and promotion than the fact that you’ve attended 63 meetings in a semester. But the daily work of protecting that time, and the superficial cost of doing so, make it difficult. I’m realizing that as someone who is passionate about research and writing, the work of protecting that time while developing a meaningful relationship to the daily life of my extremely vibrant college is going to be the serious work I have to do for myself in this position.

So this has been the main lesson of my second year, made visual by this white-board calendar. I will conclude this post by zooming into my favorite event of every Spring:

Calendar depicting May 1-4 with the notation

Accessibility, Community College, Teaching

On making students use calendars

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I’ve been thinking about an adage that one of my education grad-school professors would repeat (I got a Master’s in Teaching Adolescent English from Fordham in 2006). It went something like this: a good pedagogical practice will work as well in a pre-school as it does in a college classroom. Good pedagogy is sound, no matter what the level of instruction. It doesn’t sound as deep as I remember it sounding at the time—I think the professor phrased it better somehow—but I think about it when a college instructor criticizes what I do (sometimes implicitly) as “baby-sitting.” For instance, I require that students use calendars to organize themselves, and I give them a few points every once in a while for maintaining it. I know that this doesn’t sound as deep as analyzing Socrates or whatever, but students appreciate the training. If a student doesn’t have their own calendar, I give them what I call “Milsom’s Bootleg Calendar.” It’s just a Word document I’ve made with a blank calendar on it. The calendar includes all the important semester dates (the last day to withdraw, for instance). I now have a couple students who find me at the beginning of the semester requesting copies of the Bootleg Calendar, so I always make extra copies. When I taught high school, I would identify the students who liked to draw, and I’d get them to illustrate the Bootleg Calendars before I made copies. I hope to do something like this again.

Screenshot of calendar with heading "Assignment Calendar-Spring 2019" at the top and the days of the week listed below with January dates

I say all this because making college accessible to my students—people who have been “historically excluded” from higher education—means training them how to organize their time. Most of them work full-time, many have families to care for, and yet they also are balancing a full course load in order to remain eligible for financial aid. Few use calendars to arrange their busy lives, so getting students to develop the habit of self-organization can make a huge difference.

When I was in fifth grade, each student in our class received an old-fashioned, spiral-bound student planner which we were forced to use. My teacher Miss Smith would draw a replica of it on the board—very fastidious—and would show us what and how to write in it. My school provided these calendars for all of us through eighth grade. They were a part of the curriculum, in a sense. When we got to high school, I remember that a few of my classmates still would purchase them on their own because they loved them so much. I can’t remember a year of my life, since fifth grade, that I haven’t used some sort of planner. My elementary middle school teachers were very deliberate in how they trained us to make use of planners. Their support meant that by the time we entered high school, planning was a habit.

The fact that many of my students—whose average age is 27—have not been trained to manage their time means that they start out with a disadvantage. The fact that they gotten this far in their education without that skill in the first place is a testament to their gumption and dedication.

Teaching, Theory, Writing

What are we actually grading?

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I have spent a lot of time this semester, and while preparing to teach freshman writing composition this semester, thinking about assessment. I’m experimenting with not grading essays, “ungrading,” and questioning the feedback I provide to students about their writing. I also am trying to figure out ways to make the students’ essays feel more public to them, creating an audience of actual readers for them to write for, and wondering how other people do this in their classes. I’ll report back later on what I’ve found out in this experimental semester.

Meanwhile, outside my own classroom bubble, a lot of people have been prompted to discuss assessment in the wake of Professor Asao B. Inoue’s recent speech at the CCCC conference in Pittsburgh. I’ve been re-reading that speech, and don’t want to comment on that here. But after reading it, I came across a post on a grad-school friend’s Facebook wall, asking how we grade students’ vernacular. Like, do we take off points if a student doesn’t use proper Standard American English?

I think my response encapsulated my current feelings on this matter, and I just want to preserve it here for posterity:

Ah! I have been wondering this as well for a while and have spent the past year realizing there is a whole field of people who study this stuff deeply. First, check out Asao Inoue’s Presidential speech from this year’s CCCC conference (the MLA of Rhet-Comp world). It was an indictment: https://docs.google.com/…/11ACklcUmqGvTzCMPlETC…/edit…. Next, you can read his book “Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies,” which goes into depth about this: https://wac.colostate.edu/books/inoue/ecologies.pdf. There are other people who talk about this stuff really well. Alfie Kohn (https://www.alfiekohn.org/) is a good place to start.

Here’s the short of it: I hear a lot of people say: “You have to teach them how to write SAE in order to give them access to blahblahblah cultural capital blahblahblah.” First, this is racist because it presupposes that people don’t know how to register switch. Second, no, that’s not true. Third, good writing is about communication and meaning. Frankly, I’d take Cardi B on politics any day over Trump. She’s a former stripper from Highbridge and Trump has his Ivy League credibility, yet her ad hoc political statements have more substance than he’s capable of regurgitating from a teleprompter. People are surprised by her depth because we are racist: we’re conditioned to look down on people like her. So what are we looking for in communication? Substance? or things that tag a speaker as having “cultural capital” aka “white”? I like to take a direct approach in the classroom about this: we discuss register switching, the whiteness of academic English, and racism. My experience is that my students have already internalized a lot of racist rhetoric about their vernaculars and are relieved to discuss these things openly.

I would also like to state, for the record, that there technically is no “Standard American English.” Some countries do have an official language of record (France, for instance), which is why it is noteworthy that we do not have one. I try to muster the courage to say this once in a while in official settings, but I’m often met with disbelief and frustration. If we are to accept that there is no standard, then what, in fact, are we experts of after all? And how do we maintain our hierarchical position above students if we have no “standard” on which we lean to support our claims of superiority? (Bad mixed metaphor, I know.)

I did not spend ten years as a graduate student just learning about grammar, after all. I did study a lot of history, and most of it (history) is a record of a world without dictionaries. Even Shakespeare himself spelled his name differently on different occasions.