Today's Tiny Teaching Story is by Eileen Curran-Kondrad, Teaching Lecturer, English, at Plymouth State University. Eileen has written her story as a poem.   About the Course   No birdies, no eagles no long drives I slink off the course after the ninth   On the terrace outside the clubhouse college tournament players mill around. I browse the tables brimming with golf swag.   A voice calls out a young man approaches. Remember me? I took your class last year. We read five books that semester. You turned me into a reader. I went on to read  David Copperfield. I just had to tell you.   I roll my clubs to the car chuckle to myself. Did I just get a hole in one?   Submit your own Tiny Teaching Story to tinyteachingstories@macmillan.com! See the Tiny Teaching Stories Launch for submission details and guidelines. ... View more

Today's Tiny Teaching Story is by Kyle McIntosh, an Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Writing at the University of Tampa where he teaches in the Academic Writing and TESOL Certificate programs.   Mirror “The professor always provides such useful feedback. I don’t know how he has time to read each paper so carefully,” wrote a student on my course evaluation last fall. “He never gives us any feedback,” wrote another. “He doesn’t care about students at all.” Suddenly, I wondered: “Are there two versions of me – one good teacher and one bad – who appear to different students in the same class at different moments on different days? And which one is the me who is reading these comments now?” Just to be safe, I shave off my goatee.   Submit your own Tiny Teaching Story to tinyteachingstories@macmillan.com! See the Tiny Teaching Stories Launch for submission details and guidelines. ... View more

Today's Tiny Teaching Story is by Dr. Chris M. Anson. Chris is a Distinguished University Professor at North Carolina State University, where he is also the Director of the Campus Writing & Speaking Program.   The Big Reveal On the last day of the semester, the elderly bearded gentleman in my 200-student course on English language and linguistics approached me, smiling. “I have thoroughly enjoyed this class,” he said. “You’re clearly a dedicated and student-centered teacher.” As a newly-minted professor, I took his words as high praise. “You see, I’m retired,” he continued, “but I take one course each semester to keep learning.” “That’s awesome!” I said. “What sort of work did you do?” He smiled. “Until last year, I was the provost here.” Stunned, I realized that his gift was more than his praise; it was waiting until the end to disclose.   Submit your own Tiny Teaching Story to tinyteachingstories@macmillan.com! See the Tiny Teaching Stories Launch for submission details and guidelines. ... View more

A recent wintery visit to my home state Colorado reminded me that, while the cacophony of fall foliage has its delights, the subtlety of winter’s colors can draw a person into deep contemplation. This blue spruce against a clear blue sky stopped me on a frosty walk with my father. The nuanced play of azure on blue-gray-green needles held my gaze, inviting me to consider the array of tones I would have missed with a bolder contrast of colors. Because most of my brain these days is consumed with student drafts (yours, too?), this encounter with nature reminded me of the many conversations I’m having in the margins of my students’ writing about the value of nuance in scholarly arguments. New college writers tend turn the dial to 11 (thanks, This is Spinal Tap!) when it comes to constructing arguments. Perhaps this is because of the bombastic models of “argument” we so often hear on political talk shows, where speakers launch arguments like bombs: absolute, totalizing, and designed to demolish the opposition. So, it can be a challenge for students to see nuance and humility in scholarly arguments as a strength rather than a weakness.  Andrea Lunsford reminds us that humility is essential to listening in academic conversations. I have written before, too, about humility as a strength in scholarly ethos. I understand, though, why nervous students might try to over-perform confidence, and bolster their ethos, with outsized claims. You’ve seen these totalizing claims in drafts, too, I’m sure: “College sports are destructive to students;” “Social media is driving adolescents into despair;” “Students want majors that lead directly to jobs.” Without nuance, qualification, or complexity, all these claims remain fundamentally open to critique. In From Inquiry to Academic Writing: A Text and Reader, my co-author Stuart Greene and I offer a chapter on building responsible scholarly arguments. Among the guidelines are: Acknowledging points of view that differ from the writer’s own, reflecting the complexity of an issue and, Demonstrating an awareness of the readers’ assumptions and anticipating possible counterarguments. (164) These practices signal to readers that the writer is taking on an issue with nuance and humility, rather than bludgeoning the reader with simplistic bombast. We also provide steps for students to develop a nuanced ethos in their appeals to readers, since cultivating this presence on the page is essential to making effective academic arguments: Steps to Appealing to Ethos: Establish that you have good judgment. Identify an issue your readers will agree is worth addressing, and demonstrate that you are fair minded and have the best interests of your readers in mind when you address it. Convey to readers that you are knowledgeable. Support your claims with credible evidence that shows you have read widely on, thought about, and understand the issue. Show that you understand the complexity of the issue. Demonstrate that you understand the variety of viewpoints your readers may bring—or may not be able to bring—to the issue. (289) All of these habits of mind and practices on the page take time to establish, of course. I’m still honing these skills, myself. What has worked best in your classes as you guide students toward the nuance and humility we value in scholarly conversations?   Photo by April Lidinsky (2022) ... View more

Elizabeth Catanese is an Associate Professor of English and Humanities at Community College of Philadelphia. Trained in mindfulness-based stress reduction, Elizabeth has enjoyed incorporating mindfulness activities into her college classroom for over ten years. Elizabeth works to deepen her mindful awareness through writing children's books, cartooning and parenting her energetic twin toddlers, Dylan and Escher. Around this time in the semester, I find myself telling students that we’re almost at the finish line. The race metaphor is used by many professors in these final weeks, I think. It’s my way of cheering for my students in addition to cheering for myself, as I’m super tired too. But wanting something to be over doesn’t help anyone embrace the end of the semester. Over the years, I’ve devised some metaphorical energy drinks for students as they approach the end of our time together. One way to promote student engagement at exam time is to create a lot of classroom games. These games are high engagement on the part of students and low prep time for me. This week in my Humanities 101 class, students devised educational games based on what they learned about medieval England and The Canterbury Tales. Students brainstormed themes in The Canterbury Tales, and then I put a variety of objects on a table in the front of the room. Students used the objects to create games based on a theme or themes on the board. Some objects were the usual suspects: index cards, canvas boards (for board game designers), and game pieces (from other games). Others were a bit bizarre (play doh, stickers, some forks, and a toothbrush for comedic effect). Students opted to either read the rules of the game to the class or to have their classmates play the game for a few minutes while the class observed. The point value of this activity existed, but it was low. If students didn’t participate, it did not impact their grade much at all. I also enjoy having students generate jeopardy questions, which they write on index cards and post up with tape on the board. Sometimes I repurpose a game created for preschoolers called Snail’s Pace Race, where players move snail-shaped game pieces across a racetrack gameboard. I ask students to move their assigned snail forward one place when they get a question correct, but they also get to roll a color dice to see which random snail they will have to move forward. This game is funny because one can get nothing correct and somehow still win the game. One of the very important aspects of games played toward the end of the semester is that they must happen completely in the classroom. Imagine being at the end of a race. You are focused and ready to finish, and you approach a detour sign. It turns out that instead of running 26.2 miles, you’re actually going to have to run 30. Your morale might tank. Minimizing new take-home assignments at the end of the semester, while gamifying final in-class study days, helps maintain student energy by keeping up morale. A second way of helping students maintain their energy at the end of the semester is by reassuring them that you have their best interests at heart and desire their success. I let students know well in advance that I’m not trying to trick them. One way to avoid tricking students is not to create traps on exams; I work hard not to make any multiple-choice questions geared toward fooling students into getting the wrong answer. I also let students create some exam questions. It’s also helpful, of course, if the mode of final assessment is similar to the mode or modes of assessment all along. Many of us know this, but when it comes time for exams, I sometimes find myself wanting to do something different! Now is not the time to think wouldn’t it be fun if I asked my students to do an interpretive dance based on Gilgamesh?! I actually do have these ideas from time to time, but what matters is I do not act on them, at least not at the end of the semester. I have also learned to nurture students during exam week by including reflective questions before exams occur and especially as exam questions. I want to know from students how the end of the semester feels for them. What do they wish they had studied? What did they expect to learn in the class, and were those expectations met? What, if anything, did they learn about themselves as human beings through studying ancient cultures or through completing course assignments? When I first started teaching, I saw these forms of reflection as relevant but separate from assessment, and now I see them as more important than any fact-based question; reflection is the ultimate kind of formative assessment—while answering reflective questions, one forms the self. The points I assign reflect how much I value these questions. What we need to remember to keep evolving as human beings is not the social structure of ancient Egypt, but rather the structure of our minds and the meaning only we can make of our experiences. By encouraging students to engage playfully, trust my transparency, and reflect meaningfully as part of their final assessment, I give my students metaphorical Gatorade as they approach the finish line. ... View more

The following interview with professors Jami Blaauw-Hara of North Central Michigan College and Mark Blauuw-Hara of the University of Toronto-Mississauga was conducted via email in August of 2022. This is the fourth of four parts. David Starkey: My wife, Sandy, and I were colleagues for many years at Santa Barbara City College. That wasn’t always great when we brought home the tensions and traumas of the job, but overall I felt having the chance to discuss everything from big-picture pedagogy to the minutiae of a writing prompt really helped me become a better English teacher. What’s been your experience of being a married couple in the same profession? Mark Blaauw-Hara: We loved being colleagues, and one of the things I miss most at my new job is not having her around. It helps that Jami is a top-notch teacher, so if I was struggling with how to address something in my classes, I could just walk down the hall to her office and ask her how she’d do it, and that would help me a lot. Jami’s right that it’s sometimes hard to remind people that we’re not the same person, though, and that colleagues should treat us as individuals rather than asking us what the other person might think or say. Jami Blaauw-Hara: We met at Michigan State University’s Writing Center when I was a brand new graduate student and Mark was at the very end of his undergraduate career. Thus, our relationship started out with a recognition of our interest in writing pedagogy. I even brought an article about hypertext to our first date, which I’m a little embarrassed about now! I would say that it’s mostly been a natural pleasure to work together, and I miss him in my department now. One challenge was convincing the campus community that we were separate individuals with different opinions and strengths. I was often asked if Mark was available to do something or if I knew when or where he was teaching. My response was always “You’ll have to ask him!” DS: I’d like to end our conversation by discussing an issue that I don’t think receives the attention it should at the college level, and that’s teacher burnout. We hear a lot these days about “quiet quitting,” but I think for many of us dedicated to teaching composition students, that’s not really an option. For me, once that first set of essays comes in the job basically becomes seven days a week until after I’ve turned in my final grades. Our long vacations are a blessing, to be sure, but those weeks in the trenches reading and responding to student prose can be really draining, no matter how much we want to help our students become better writers. Any thoughts about how our colleagues deep into their careers, as well as those just beginning, can avoid becoming casualties of too much work? JBH: I struggle with this at this stage in my career, especially when my current institution is going through some administrative changes that are challenging. When I focus on my students and the importance of human relationships, I am buoyed. Human relationships are important to me, and even though they can tire me, as an introvert, they are what ultimately bring me the most satisfaction in my job. I focus on getting to know my classes, to try to reach out and really connect to the humans who spend a semester with me. Specifically, I use grading conferences for essays where I read and grade papers in conversation with students. It has been a game-changer for me. It decreases the dreaded stack of papers to grade, and it helps me stay connected to my students as people. MBH: I can totally relate, David, and I bet a lot of other writing faculty can as well. One thing I’d recommend is cultivating some things outside of the job. For me, one of those major things I did was really dive into the larger scholarly community. Heading off to conferences or working with colleagues at other institutions on ALP not only gave me great ideas, but it buoyed me up. It’s just good to know that other people are in similar situations, in those same trenches. Another thing I did–and I know you share this, David–is lean into other passions that have nothing to do with the classroom, which for me is music. I’ve played live music in various bands for my whole career, and whether it was being in an official band, just jamming, or even going to see live shows, that helped me interact with lots of other people who were outside of education and just kept me fresh. I’m the kind of person who needs lots of different things to be going on–I don’t do too well if I focus too hard on any one thing. (I’m jealous of people who can really dig into one area and be happy for their entire lives!) DS: Well, it’s been an enlightening conversation. Thanks to both of you! MBH: It’s been really fun for us as well, David. Thank you so much for asking us to be a part of this conversation! And good luck with the book! ... View more

Today's Tiny Teaching Story is by Kelle Alden, an Assistant Professor of English and Director of the Writing Center at the University of Tennessee at Martin.   Every Year, I Flunk a Decent Person During our conference, I showed my student the math. Regardless of his excellent attendance and participation, without his missing homework and essays, he would fail English. My student looked sheepish, gave excuses, promised to catch up. I no longer take it personally when students lie to me. I try to teach in the moment, to appreciate how my student smiles and greets me every day. Seeing the whole of him will help after finals, when I have to deliver my most difficult lesson. I will still smile for him next semester, even if he cannot return the gesture right away.   Submit your own Tiny Teaching Story to tinyteachingstories@macmillan.com! See the Tiny Teaching Stories Launch for submission details and guidelines. ... View more

Today's Tiny Teaching Story is by Dr. Leslie Werden, a Professor of English & Rhetoric and Department Head of Humanities at Morningside University in Sioux City, Iowa. She teaches Persuasive Writing, Small Group Communication, Literary Theory & Analysis, British Literature, Page to Stage, and more.    Blaming Binaries The large post-it note, halved with a line down the middle separating a list of binaries, was left behind in the classroom. On one side: white, power, strength, leader, good. On the other: black, no control, weakness, follower, bad. The lone black student arrived in the classroom and cocked her head, glaring at the list, brows furrowed, lips tightly pressed together. “What. Is. This?” she asked her professor. A discussion about three different stories from the class before. “Thank God,” the student said. The binaries left behind, assume too much and remain misunderstood.   Submit your own Tiny Teaching Story to tinyteachingstories@macmillan.com! See the Tiny Teaching Stories Launch for submission details and guidelines. ... View more

Content alert for sexist language, white supremacy, racist violence, and suicide.  If you are having thoughts of suicide, you are not alone. A mental health professional can help. Call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988, or visit https://www.speakingofsuicide.com/resources/    This week I am reading Heather Clark’s Red Comet, a recent biography of Sylvia Plath, poet and author of the novel The Bell Jar. I was fascinated to learn that Plath once taught as an adjunct at her alma mater, Smith College, in 1957-58. Plath had a temporary, renewable one-year appointment, and in the fall semester she taught three sections of first-year English. Plath quit this position after her first year because it was, she discovered, untenable with her life’s work as a writer. In a letter to her brother Warren in the fall of 1957, Plath reveals: . . . the sacrifice of energy and life blood I’m making for this job is all out of proportion to the good I am doing in it. . . I am sacrificing my energy, writing, & versatile intellectual life for grubbing over 66 Hawthorne papers a week and trying to be articulate in front of a rough class of spoiled bitches. (Clark 509) The excerpt of this letter, with its dated, sexist language, may be shocking to some, and Plath  probably did not intend for the public to read it. All the same, the sentiments Plath expresses are unsurprising. Teaching first-year English was new to Plath, and she had recently returned to the United States from England, where she had finished a second bachelor’s degree at Cambridge University. Plath had survived rigorous academics, severe mental illness, a suicide attempt, shock treatment, and incarceration in a mental hospital in Massachusetts. As a twenty-five year old neurodivergent woman, Plath was used to fighting her way back to the fragile equilibrium of the intellectual life that she craved. Adjuncting, as suggested in her letter to Warren, used up too much of her time and energy  to maintain a clear focus on her own writing (Clark 509). In the late 1950s, the first semester of first-year English at Smith was focused on literature written in English, especially Romantic and Modernist writers whose predominance was beginning to fade for the younger generation. Five years later, James Baldwin (eight years older than Plath) wrote “As Much Truth as One Can Bear.” This 1962 essay considers the emergence of younger post-World War II writers, and especially those writers who approach their work from a very different sensibility: We are the generation that must throw everything into the endeavor to remake America into what we say we want it to be. Without this endeavor, we will perish. However immoral or subversive this may sound to some, it is the writer who must always remember that morality, if it is to remain or become morality, must be perpetually examined, cracked, changed, made new. (Baldwin 50) For Baldwin, writers have a special responsibility to examine, dismantle, and “remake” America, not in the service of perpetuating a fantasy, but for forging new ground for the greater good, beyond individual writing lives. Indeed, in this essay, the reader can find one of Baldwin’s most well-known adages, a quote that reinforces his point about the urgent necessity of social transformation: “Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” The fact that Baldwin and Plath wrote as near contemporaries in the late 1950s and early 1960s is interesting to me. Even as Clark contextualizes Plath’s life and work with details from post-World War II history, any consciousness of the Civil Rights Movement appears to be absent. In this way, Plath’s concerns might be seen through the lens of what Koa Beck identifies as White Feminism (also see Mathew and Hariharan).Baldwin, who was Black and grew up in Harlem, left the United States for exile in France in the late 1940s. His hope was to discover his vocation as a writer away from white supremacy in America. But in 1957, as the Civil Rights Movement continued to unfold, Baldwin returned to the United States to bear witness, to engage with writing and activism (See I Am Not Your Negro by Raoul Peck and James Baldwin: A Biography by David Leeming). I link Baldwin and Plath through the year 1957: Plath’s year as a struggling adjunct, and Baldwin’s return to the United States. In fall of 1957, nine Little Rock, Arkansas teenagers (known as the Little Rock Nine) became the first Black students to attend Little Rock’s Central High School. The Arkansas governor called in the National Guard to prevent the students from entering the school. White supremacist riots ensued to keep the Little Rock Nine out of Central High School, and eventually President Eisenhower sent the Army’s 101st Airborne Division to quell the rioting and to escort the Little Rock Nine students to school (also see Warriors Don’t Cry by Melba Patillo Beals).  Photo credit: The U.S. Army At a sixty-five year distance, it seems peculiar that the author of Plath’s biography, although making use of Plath’s copiously written journals and letters, makes no mention of these national events in Red Comet. I am puzzled by this absence, until I consider white supremacy, white privilege, and the overwhelmingly white poets of Plath’s acquaintance. What turns might American Literature have taken if that generation of poets followed Baldwin’s call to reckon with the truth? What might Sylvia Plath have contributed to this reckoning, as a struggling adjunct “sacrificing her energy”?  Work/life balance, Plath suggested in 1957, was an impossible fantasy. In 2022, life as an adjunct often feels critically unbalanced and extremely isolating. Yet, in a subsequent lecture, Baldwin advocates  that his audience must “engage in the struggle, which is universal and daily, of all human beings on the face of this globe to get to become human beings” (63). That is, even as people appear to inhabit different worlds or spheres of influence, these worlds touch each other, intersect and collide. Struggle is a means of survival, and Baldwin reiterates that his  audience must take action if change is to occur. For Baldwin, struggle for the greater good offers “artistic integrity” and is often “our only hope” (67). For adjuncts, contingent work remains destabilizing and often, as Sylvia Plath discovered, debilitating. Even so, as the struggle of the Little Rock Nine affirms, history unfurls in and out of classrooms. Participating in, and acknowledging and bearing witness to struggle might serve as a means of connection for students and teachers. In the face of formidable challenges, even acknowledgment might seem painful and exhausting, but no less necessary, in troubling times.   Works Cited Baldwin, James. “As Much Truth As One Can Bear.” The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings, edited by Randall Kenan, Pantheon Books, 2010, pp. 50-57. Baldwin, James. “The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity.” The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings, edited by Randall Kenan, Pantheon Books, 2010, pp. 63-70. Clark, Heather. Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath. Penguin Random House, 2021. ... View more

I’ve been following the work of Kaitlyn Tiffany and Kate Lindsey, largely in The Atlantic, on what they call “the Millennial Internet era” and its gradual demise, at least as they see it. And thinking about millennials got me thinking even more about the names or labels for such “generations” in twentieth and twenty first-century America. As my grandmother would have said, it’s a puzzlement. Millennials supposedly include those born roughly between 1981 and 1995, and this group falls fifth among the American “generations” usually acknowledged:  The Greatest Generation (1901-27) The Silent Generation (1928-45) Baby Boomers (1946-64) Generation X (1965-80) Millennials (1981-95) Generation Z (1996-2010) Generation Alpha (2011-25) According to this lore, I am part of the Silent Generation, though when I was coming of age in the sixties, I thought I was part of the Beat Generation, or the Civil Rights Generation: I don’t remember ever hearing “silent” applied to my cohort in those days and wouldn’t have recognized the label if I had. (I’m wondering which of these cohorts you belong to and what your own perceptions were and are of the accuracy of that label.) At any rate, Tiffany and Lindsey see the millennial view of the world and especially their experience of the Internet either “slipping away” or becoming cringe-worthy, relegating them to technological has-beens who must adapt to new ways of doing things or become obsolescent, and very quickly. As proof, Tiffany writes that the early file format “GIF is on its deathbed,” largely because “GIFs have gotten way overused” and are no longer reflective of creativity or innovation. And because Gen Z associates them with millennials. More proof comes from the prominence of the “millennial pause” (waiting a split second after hitting “record” before starting to speak), no longer necessary in the age of Tik Tok, and from the decline of Instagram and Facebook. The solution lies, the authors say, in learning to give up old ways of interacting and adapting—quickly! Of course we all have lived with shifting technologies all our lives, and many have become fairly agile at adapting to them—cross-generational adaptations, if you will. But I am still interested in and puzzled by the names of these generations and of how such titles tend not only to characterize people in a particular era, but stereotype them. In this regard, a writing assignment based on this concept of “generations” seems like a potentially useful one for students today. They might begin by interviewing grandparents (or great grandparents) and parents and asking them what they think about the “generation” their birthdates group them into. They can choose one of these “generations” and do research on it, finding out how it got its name, what its supposed characteristics are, major events that occurred during its span, and so on. Or they might do the same for their own “generation,” investigating its label and asking how well they feel that they fit, or don’t fit, into it. They can probe who is included in these “generations” and who is not: as I read about the “silent” generation, for example, it seems to me to include primarily white people, thus missing a huge and important segment of the population born during those years. Finally, students might compose a piece of oral history based on their conversations with family members or friends. They might write proposals for alternative labels for one or more generations, along with evidence and examples to support them. Or they might write arguments for or against the whole tradition of naming generations. And even if you do not want to engage students in such a formal assignment, the concept of “generations,” their titles, their inclusions and exclusions, and their alternatives can make for lively class discussion followed by a short writing on a focused question.  As to the “end of the millennial Internet era,” I’d love to hear what students in your classes right now think of that!   The image in this post, "Gen Z" by EpicTop10.com, is licensed under CC BY 2.0. ... View more

Throughout all the editions of Elements of Argument, the concept of the warrant has been the most difficult to teach. In fact, we recently started using the term assumption because it was a more familiar term. Instead of discussing what warrant underlies an argument, we speak in terms of what assumption you must accept in order to accept the evidence offered in support of a claim. The more examples we can draw from headlines, the easier it will be for students to find the assumptions that underlie the arguments they hear and read about in the media and to analyze the critical relationships among claim, support, and assumption. Identifying the underlying assumptions held by opposing sides in an argument can also help students see why it is so difficult to find a common ground. Look at how the terms can be applied to this argument: Claim: Abortion after sixteen weeks of pregnancy should not be allowed in our state for any reason. Support: Killing an unborn child after sixteen weeks is murder. Underlying assumption: A fetus of sixteen weeks is a person with the same protection under the law as any other person.   In order to accept the support as proof of the claim, you must first be able to accept the underlying assumption. On the other hand, anyone who cannot accept the underlying assumption will not be able to accept the claim. Consider these statements: Claim: It should be legal to terminate a pregnancy if the fetus is not viable. Support: A non-viable fetus can never develop into a child that can survive outside of the womb. Underlying assumption: It should be legal to terminate a pregnancy that cannot produce a child that can survive outside the womb. This type of analysis can be applied to an argument on any subject. Claim: Voting by mail should not be allowed in our state. Support: Voting by mail increases the possibility of voter fraud. Underlying assumption: Forms of voting that increase voter fraud should not be allowed. There is nothing wrong with the form of this last argument, but of course, the support offered must be verifiable for the argument to be valid. The writer or speaker would have to offer convincing evidence that mail-in voting increases the possibility of voter fraud. So far, there seems to be little evidence to support that assertion of widespread fraud. Over sixty court cases have failed to prove fraud in the last presidential election. In a recent interview with Jon Stewart, Arkansas Attorney General Leslie Rutledge, who is currently running for Lieutenant Governor, defended her state’s decision to ban gender-affirming care for transgender youth. Trans reporter and MSNBC Opinion Columnist Katelyn Burns writes, “In the interview, Stewart grounded his questions in fact, asking Rutledge what basis she had to overrule all of the major medical associations that have designed standards of care for trans minors over the last several decades. In the face of Stewart’s gentle pushback, Rutledge dissembled, remarking that she ‘wasn’t prepared to have a Supreme Court argument’ with Stewart at that particular time. The interview was notable because Stewart called out the attorney general’s arguments in real-time, such as when she tried to claim that 98% of all youth with gender dysphoria eventually grow out of it. ‘That is an incredibly made-up figure,’ Stewart replied, as Rutledge failed to name a single source for her claims.” When Rutledge does face the Supreme Court, she must be prepared to provide evidence to back up her claim and the assumptions on which she bases her argument. This is an important lesson about argumentation that we hope all of our students will learn. "Newspaper Collection, Three Headlines, July 2016"  by Daniel X. O'Neil is licensed under CC BY 2.0 ... View more

Today's Tiny Teaching Story is by Lauri Mattenson. Lauri is a Lecturer with UCLA Writing programs.   Holding Zoom Space She’s sitting in her empty bathtub, laptop propped up on a stack of towels, because there’s no room anywhere else in the apartment. He’s in his garage using his neighbor’s wifi. She’s on academic probation and never submitted a draft. They are using a laptop with seven missing keys and a cracked screen. He hasn’t had a good night’s sleep in two weeks. She’s taking care of three little sisters during class. He’s the only Covid-negative person in a household of six. They are working 25 hours a week while going to school full-time. We’re weary, but we’re all here.    Submit your own Tiny Teaching Story to tinyteachingstories@macmillan.com! See the Tiny Teaching Stories Launch for submission details and guidelines. ... View more

Today's Tiny Teaching Story is by Jennifer Smith Daniel, Director of Writing Center and Writing Across the Curriculum Programs at Queens University of Charlotte.   Restoring Your Tongue... Earlier in the Center, you’d encouraged a first-year with her assignment. Then sat in the comfy red chair of my office as essential oils penetrated our masks to cry out your anger at the professor who commented on your writing with his elitist, prescriptive perspective. He never learned the story of how your family stopped speaking Spanish at home because you didn’t get registered for preschool after migrating from Mexico. Later, I stood in the front our class as another white women teacher and offered you Anzaldúa. You found restoration in the new word - Chicana.   Submit your own Tiny Teaching Story to tinyteachingstories@macmillan.com! See the Tiny Teaching Stories Launch for submission details and guidelines. ... View more

**Content alerts for racist violence and sexual violence.**    On a recent Saturday in September, I attended a neighborhood street fair in Queens, New York. Since it was the day before the beginning of Banned Books Week, my local bookstore offered a table to support and sell banned books. The table included a selection of the most frequently banned books, postcards to support the authors and publishers of banned books, and a tablet with a link to the  PEN America's Index of School Book Bans (July 1, 2021 - June 30, 2022). There are 2,435 titles on Pen America’s list, beginning with Ace of Spades by Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé and ending with Grandpa Cacao: A Tale of Chocolate, from Farm to Family by  Elizabeth Zunon. The books are banned, challenged, and being investigated in schools and libraries across the United States.     In scanning the list, as well as the American Library Association’s lists of Top Ten Most Challenged Books, I found books I remembered very well. There were books I taught in my  first-year writing and literature classes, books I had given as birthday gifts to young relatives assigned by my high school teachers, and books I read for my doctoral comprehensive exams. The list also offered my memories of my first encounters with some of the books in question. At the street fair, I offered my first memory of realizing that book bans existed back in junior high in the early 1970s at my town’s public library in suburban Chicago.   One afternoon, I brought my books to the library’s front desk to be stamped with the due date, only to be met with resistance. “You can’t check those books out,” the librarian said. “Why not?” I asked. “Because these are adult books and children are not allowed to check out books from the adult stacks.” Again I asked why, but the explanation was vague and dismissive. I left without the books. But a few weeks later, I discovered them back on the shelves, and for many visits afterward I found cozy and secluded sections of the adult stacks, and I read the books I wasn’t allowed to read.    I could not stop asking why. Why did the library not allow a tween or young teen to check out books from the adult stacks? The books I wanted to read had no provocative pictures, no offensive language. Mostly I wanted to read history. There were gaps in the school curriculum that needed filling. For instance, there were no lessons about race, class, or gender, and no indication that our textbooks contained contradictory information.    For instance, I learned U.S. history from the perspective of colonizers, not the colonized. After the Civil War, the textbooks said, carpetbaggers and other outsiders from the North tried to change the way of life in the South, but ultimately the carpetbaggers weren’t successful. However, there was no mention that Northerners tried to eliminate a way of life that included lynching, convict leasing, and other forms of de facto slavery. My reading in the adult stacks was a revelation, and having to hide this reading from the librarians was deeply disconcerting.     In high school, there were limited changes, but still more censorship. The sex education classes focused on menstruation (for girls only), reproduction, and sexually transmitted diseases. The complexities of gender, and the basics of sexual assault, rape, consent, birth control, and abortion, if addressed at all, were perfunctory and confusing. But there were other means of discovering information, and this happened through several books that are now on the Pen America list. This discovery begins with Brave New World, an assigned reading for my first-year high school English class. I did not yet have enough background to fully comprehend Aldous Huxley’s dystopia, and the links between the disturbing images in the book, and the disturbances unfolding in the early 1970s. Because of this disconnect, I could not find a way to process the messages of the book.    However, another dystopian world was unraveling below my desk. Someone in the class had procured a copy of another banned book, Go Ask Alice: A Real Diary.  We carefully passed the text back and forth among students, underneath the desks and beneath the teacher’s line of vision. Alice’s diary dealt with sex and sexual violence, drug addiction, and rebelling against parental authority. Even as Alice’s diary turned out to be fake, the topics it addressed were deeply intriguing to me and, before the internet, scant information about them was available to me through my health classes, my family, or the public library. Our Bodies, Ourselves, yet another banned book in print at this time, addressed all these topics and more; . however, I was unaware of its existence until my sophomore year of college.    A few years after Go Ask Alice, I encountered I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings in the high school library. I still remember the front cover of that book. Showing through the clear protective plastic against a red-orange background was a blackbird soaring upward from the sun. Finding this book in the library was life changing, as it was the first book I ever encountered that centered Black lives. Angelou was part of the same generation as my parents and many of my teachers. Yet Angelou’s first memoir of racism, poverty, sexual assault, segregation, Black community, and Black joy was never listed as a text or acknowledged throughout the entirety of my schooling. I bought my own paperback copy and reread it often, even as the book is yet another entry on the Pen America list.   Destiny, an orange tabby cat, sits next to a paperback copy of a banned book: Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Photo by Susan Bernstein.   The lesson I learn from the experiences of reading all of these books, then and now, is that I could not rely on school for my education, because the parameters of what was acceptable, or what counted as literature, were narrow and opaque. Even as white privilege shapes my view, the current book bans, although not supported by a majority of people, attempt to replicate perspectives of everyday life that are as insufficient and constricted as the views I encountered in and out of school half a century ago. The banned books that lifted me out of that restricted thinking changed my world, and allowed me to understand two contradictory ideas: First, I was not the first young girl in history to suffer the tribulations of coming of age. Second, I needed and still need to interrogate my own privileges as I continue the lifelong work of building beloved community.   Read banned books, teach them, and absorb what they have to offer. The lessons might not seem immediately clear, but processing them over time and distance can open the heart and the imagination to new possibilities.   ... View more

Today’s guest blogger is Kim Haimes-Korn, a Professor of English and Digital Writing at Kennesaw State University. Kim’s teaching philosophy encourages dynamic learning and critical digital literacies and focuses on students’ powers to create their own knowledge through language and various “acts of composition.” She likes to have fun every day, return to nature when things get too crazy, and think deeply about way too many things. She loves teaching. It has helped her understand the value of amazing relationships and boundless creativity. You can reach Kim at khaimesk@kennesaw.edu or visit her website: Acts of Composition Overview [Generational] cohorts give researchers a tool to analyze changes in views over time; they can provide a way to understand how different formative experiences interact with the life-cycle and aging process to shape people’s view of the world. (Pew Research 2020) This post is the first in a three-part series through which I detail a rather expansive Generation Project with multimodal components and sub-projects. I broke down the project into concurrent parts that can also be used as stand-alone activities. Stay tuned as I present these assignments over the next couple of posts. In this first post, I present the project overview and the historical context, the second post I detail the popular culture component and the third is the collaborative presentations. These assignments are easily modified for all teaching modalities (online, f2f, and hybrid). Image of timeline between 1962 and 1966 with events placed This series demonstrates that we can integrate multimodal composition in thoughtful ways throughout assignments and processes and is not just about end products. In designing this project, I imagined something that involved students in deep research – both individual and collaborative – on a subject that is interesting and current. I wanted to offer opportunities throughout the project to engage in multimodal work – both the analysis and composition of multimodal artifacts. Students house the project on individual websites created through Google Sites to allow for composing and sharing of interactive and visual content. Generation Project Overview This generation project helps students move beyond their insular views and challenges them to understand the perspectives of others by immersing themselves in generational research. We live in a society with polarized discourse and this project will help students engage with ideas outside of their generational space. These ideas motivated me to design this generation project in which students work together to research one of the five living generations: The Silent Generation (born 1928–1945) Baby Boomers (born 1946–1964) Generation X (born 1965–1980) Millennials (born 1981–1995) Generation Z (born 1996–2010) Students research both primary and secondary sources to define and create a portrait of their assigned generation. The purpose is to understand the historical context, popular culture artifacts, values, and cultural ideologies. Each student will individually research a couple of focus years within the generation and then contribute to a collaborative project in which they overview and interpret the generation. Sources: Students will locate and analyze the following scholarly and popular sources: Historical context (timelines, historical portraits, economy, values, important figures, oral stories, theoretical perspectives, etc.) Media and Popular culture artifacts (images, music, advertisements, literature, film, fashion, food, etc.) Defining Moments (Headlines, Articles) Ideologies, ideas, behaviors, and values of the time Anything else that might be meaningful Steps to the Assignment This first part of the assignment orients students towards generational research and introduces them to definitions of the five living generations. 1. Background Resources: Understanding Generational Research It is important for students to understand the nature of generational research and gain a general overview of the generations. This helps them understand the ways generations are constructed and the trends that affect them. I allow students to choose the generation research group they want to join so these background readings help them make those choices. Generation Research Resources: The Whys and Hows of Generational Research Pew Research Center (2020) Generations Throughout History – Buzzfeed Video (2017) Fast Facts: American Generations – CNN (2022) Baby Boomers, Millennials, Gen X Labels: Necessary or Nonsense The Conversation (2020) 2. Online Discussion - Students engage in an online discussion in which they choose a passage, idea or related ideas from the generation readings. I encourage them to speak about the characteristics they observed along with assumptions and stereotypes they might have about the different generations. I require them to also post one representative image (from Creative Commons or other copyright free sources). 3. Choose a Generation and Focus Years – After the initial background work, students choose the generation that they want to research as part of a team. I try to make sure that the groups are evenly distributed to have the same number of members. Students assemble in their teams (online or f2f) and then choose a couple of focus years within their generations. The focus years give students responsibility for individual research that they will contribute to their research team to create a representative span of their generation years. 4. Research Historical Context: Students compose an Historical Overview of their focus years. They should include events, defining moments, trends, important figures and ideas, observations about politics, economy and values. I encourage them to go beyond just listing facts and interpret and synthesize their findings. They search for academic and popular articles and learn how to attribute their sources. 5. Interactive Feature Article: Students compose their historical overview of their focus years as an interactive document that includes specific references, purposeful embedded links, and captioned multimodal components (images, video clips, etc.) to tell their stories and contextualize their research. They create a page on their site to host the post. 6. Teamwork: Defining Moments: Students get together with their teams and share their research. Each team creates a Google doc in which they list the defining moments and significant events of their focus years. Together, they discuss the overlaps and the ways their focus years fit together to define their generation. 7. Interactive Timeline: Data Visualization: As a team, students select the most important defining moments from their extensive list and create a multimodal timeline. There are many open-source platforms for creating interactive and visual timelines. I give them some resources but allow them to choose their own. They will include the defining moments along with representative images for each entry on the timeline. They will also use this timeline as part of their collaborative presentation later in the project. Some timeline resources: Best Free Timeline Maker Tools for Students Timelines in Canva Adobe Timeline Creator Reflections on the Activities This generation project gives each student a research role and ways to contribute to the larger community knowledge on the subject. The level of individual responsibility creates genuine research teams that invite strong analysis and synthesis through collaboration. These activities engage students in a range of research, writing, and multimodal composition practices. I find that when students are asked to engage in meaningful curiosity and collaboration, they demonstrate a stronger sense of ownership and motivation. Stay tuned – next post – Part 2: Generations through Popular Culture ... View more