A few months ago, I wrote in this space about the rise of AI chatbots like ChatGPT. Since then—like you, I imagine—I have been inundated with articles and YouTube videos and tweets about the still fairly new Open AI chatbot. We are seeing an understandable amount of handwringing among the academic community as administrators and teachers everywhere worry about academic integrity, about “the end of writing,” and even about their jobs. As with every sudden technological innovation, this one is unsettling at best and perhaps terrifying at worst. I have read a lot of the jeremiads and the end-of-the-world-as-we-have-known-it scenarios, and while I am sympathetic, I am at least for the time being inclined less to a “the sky is falling” stance and more to a cautious, careful look at how we and our students can work productively, and ethically, with this new tool. If the slide rule and the calculator didn’t bring the world to a halt, if television did not destroy education, then it seems unlikely that ChatGPT will do so. A recent New York Times piece takes this position. Author Kevin Roose recognizes legitimate fears about plagiarism and other ethical issues but goes on argue that “schools should thoughtfully embrace ChatGPT as a teaching aid—one that could unlock student creativity, offer personalized tutoring, and better prepare students to work alongside A.I. systems as adults.” He makes this argument for three main reasons: 1) that ignoring or trying to keep such AI tools away from students simply will not work: they are here and here to stay; 2) that ChatGPT can be an “effective teaching tool,” giving the example of a teacher whose students use the chatbot to create outlines for essays they are working on—and then go on to write stronger and more engaging essays as a result, or using the tool as an out of class tutor or a debate sparring partner or “starting point for in-class exercises"; and 3) that ChatGPT helps teach students about the world they live in, one full to bursting with AI technologies they will need to “know their way around . . . their strengths and weaknesses, their hallmarks and blind spots—in order to work alongside them.” I found Roose’s argument thoughtful and even-handed and his examples compelling. Still for me, in these fairly early days, I find that ChatGPT and tools like it seem most perfectly suited for play, for the ludic possibilities of rhetoric—as the example of students using ChatGPT to compose satiric love notes and poems demonstrates. But play, remember, is not “mere” play but a crucial part of learning and cognitive development. “Playing around” with language and other symbols is fundamental to growth. So my inclination is to encourage students to play with this new tool, pushing it to its limits, using it to entertain and amuse, all the while using such activities to learn about its strengths and weaknesses, the “blind spots” Roose mentions, and always testing it against their own creativity, ingenuity, and knowledge. We teachers of writing will have a lot to learn from such play!   Image by Jonathan Kemper reproduced under the Unsplash license.   ... View more

As my eight-month leave of absence began to wane, I wondered about what processes from my own writing practice might be useful for students. Then, a week before the beginning of school, I made ephemeral art. Ephemeral art does not last a long time and disappears shortly after the artist creates it. The best definition I found online was from the Tate Modern website, “a work that occurs only once…and cannot be embodied in a museum or gallery.” Recently I took a sculpture class offered for free in a joint project with our local center for older adults and a nearby museum. We worked with clay and plaster, but one of the most memorable activities was the day we were introduced to ephemeral art.  First, our group looked at ephemeral art in the museum’s outdoor sculpture garden. It was raining hard, and the group looked at the garden through the windows. The teaching artist invited the group to reflect on changes in the weather and the cycle of season might create changes in the garden, and to especially consider the ephemerality of shadow and light provided by the trees, their leaves growing and shedding.  Nothing lasts forever, and the trees serve as a reminder of ephemerality and transformation. At times, the changes are subtle and barely perceptible; in other moments, the changes can be dramatic and even frightening, like a tree split by a tornado.   To practice ephemeral art, our group worked with calligraphy practice paper, black bottled ink, and calligraphy brushes. Shortly after we made our pictures, the pictures began to fade away. At 1:31 pm, I made a short video of the process of painting the word “trees” (see link). When I watch the video now, I can see that my brush was saturated with ink. As a result, I was constantly revising how I painted the letters, especially the two “e”s. By 1:34 pm, the least saturated parts of the letters were beginning to disappear. The word “trees” painted on gray calligraphy practice paper with black ink. The top of the T, the top of the second E, and the  top of the S are beginning to fade away. Photo by Susan Bernstein, January 19, 2023. I was fascinated by the disappearing ink. Creating ephemeral art felt so much like the writing process: I write a lot, but not all of the drafts survive, and pieces of the draft are deleted and disappear into the ether.  Less than a month later, I was reading exit slips on the homebound train and it seemed that the opportunity to teach ephemerality had arrived. While ephemeral art seemed more about the process than the product, the students were rightly concerned about the product. The exit slips mentioned the need for soft deadlines and sample student papers. These tools were buried in the original slideshow explaining the assignment for Writing Project 1. I knew that I would need to condense the slideshow so that these tools would be more accessible for the students. I also considered how the class could spend more time freewriting about the reading for the first writing project. If writing is a recursive process, so is, according to two CCCC position statements, the process of reading and “the process of acquiring academic literacies” for second language and multilingual writers. Nevertheless, often these processes are presented as linear steps to be completed one at a time. I had tried to do this with the assignment, and soon realized the problem. The steps themselves were overlapping. Students would need to reread the material and respond to questions in their journals not just once or twice, but throughout the process of creating Writing Project 1. How to explain this? I assumed that students asked for steps because the linear process was familiar, and I respect the students’ comfort with familiarity. The issue was how to offer students more ephemeral experiences with writing, to create writing they might or might not include in completed writing projects. I suspected that freewriting on questions generated in class would help, and that creating an opening to move off-topic also would help. Going off-topic is the ephemeral art of the writing process. It allows for imagination even if writers don’t end up saving what they write. At the same time, I needed to know if students were okay with in-class freewriting as a means of approaching the writing process for WP 1. I invited students to participate in a Google doc anonymous Q&A to respond to the following question: What do you think about doing so much free writing and journaling before beginning rough drafts? Before discussing Introduction/body/conclusion? Does it make sense to do it this way? Why or why not? Another way to frame this question is– why you think I might be approaching this writing process this way? Using the immediate feedback from the Q&A, I responded to questions about going off-topic and using creativity as part of freewriting. I said, “Imagination is important, and necessary outside this classroom. If you are an engineer or a computer scientist, what happens if you follow the usual steps of a process, but the process stops working? Do you still follow the same steps? Or do you think outside the box to solve the problem?” I, too, need to think outside the box to figure out what steps are no longer relevant, and to work with students to address their needs. This process is both the challenge and the benefit of coming back to in-person classes. The work is constantly changing because nothing lasts forever. At times the changes are imperceptible, and at other times are as dramatic as returning to a classroom in the wake of a global pandemic and pushing through the discomforts of anxiety. Because of these never-ending transformations, teaching and learning remain the most ephemeral of arts. ... View more

I write this sentence tentatively: This semester, finally, my in-person classrooms have started to hum with a pre-pandemic vibrancy. I bet yours are bouncing back too. It’s not just that our classroom numbers have started to rebound; more significantly, many students (not all, certainly) have emerged from the pandemic anxiety that seemed to be their default setting, even last fall. I’m making the most of the energy from in-class conversations. I want students to understand how much we can learn from one another in real time, when our body language and tone of voice can move us in unexpected directions. This sometimes means changing our minds about big ideas—and this is not easy. Writing classrooms are a perfect place for instructors to model what this looks like, and show that empathy can make change possible. Andrea Lunsford’s recent post recognizes the work that writing teachers do “to build an ethos of trust and empathy in their classrooms in order to support respectful listening and openness to learning, even from those with differing perspectives—perhaps especially from those with differing perspectives.” Teaching writing is about teaching critical thinking, about slowing down our judgments and spending time to work out respectfully the significance of different perspectives. Consequently, critical thinking requires humility, recognizing what we don’t yet know, and changing our minds when we learn more. What does this look like in writing classrooms? My students have been tackling challenging texts: Ibram X Kendi’s work on anti-racism and Robin DiAngelo’s analysis of perceptions of race. In early class conversations, it was clear some students were struggling, understandably, with how these writers’ ideas challenged what they were accustomed to thinking about race as a biological category and success as a matter mainly of personal gumption. You could feel the tension in some conversations as students described contrasting and difficult experiences based on perceptions of their race. I could read in the body language—tightly crossed arms, pressed lips—that this was hard for some students to take in. So, I redesigned a class period to make generous space for a class brainstorm on why it can be so difficult to change our minds about big ideas. Students chalked up the board with an instructive list that included: Influence of family (respect for elders); Religion (longtime beliefs, held in faith/feeling rather than logic); Unfamiliarity with a topic; Never considered the consequences/effects of an idea; Not meeting many people with different life experiences; and, Ego (hard to admit when we learn we were wrong). That final one, ego, is a biggie, and one that Carol Dweck helps us understand with her insights on “fixed” and “growth” mindsets. Education, after all, should change us, and that means recognizing that we need humility if we hope to grow. I have written before about the power of modeling “slow thinking” with our students. This includes being ready to say, “Thank you; I hadn’t thought of that before.” Or even, “I’ll have to think about that some more.” Our classrooms are places students can learn to listen to people with different life experiences, and to practice being open to changing their minds. However, this practice is reciprocal: students need to see us making those moves, too. When was the last time you changed your mind right in front of your own students? What words do you offer when a student’s perspective moves you in a fresh direction? Your humility, empathy, and enthusiasm for continued growth models skills your students will need their whole lives. February’s Black History Month programming on your campus or in sources such as the New York Times offers an opportunity to practice empathy, humility, and active listening in your writing classroom. While we all have “student learning outcomes” for our class, what are your “instructor learning outcomes”? I certainly expect that I will change something about my understanding of our shared world, based on what I learn from my students, by the time tulips bloom in Indiana.   Photo by Shane Rounce (2018), used under the Unsplash License. ... 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.   I am learning that I make my best pedagogical discoveries through forgetting things—this time, it was my copy of Gilgamesh. I had hoped to do a dramatic reading of part of Tablet 6, and I wanted all my students to be able to follow along with their own copies, so I couldn’t ask to borrow one of theirs. Luckily, I had an idea. For my online, asynchronous classes, I pre-record lectures for students to watch. On that day, the fateful day I forgot my copy of Gilgamesh, I chose to play my pre-recorded reading of Tablet 6 for my in-person students. Once I got over the uncanniness of there being two of me at the front of the classroom, I realized that I had stumbled upon something of value. I have found that it is, in fact, useful to play short, pre-recorded video lectures even (and especially) in in-person classroom spaces. The first benefit of this practice is closed-captioning. Having a multisensory lecture experience is helpful for students with auditory impairments, and multisensory input (closed captioning, instructors’ facial language and audio) can help all students understand the content of lecture. This is the reason why some of us watch Netflix in English with English subtitles, even if we are native English speakers. It certainly helps keep my brain focused! I know what you may be thinking. A flipped classroom model would have students watch the pre-recorded video in advance so that the classroom can convert to a critical thinking space. Why not do that? I contend that teacher presence for short pre-recorded video lectures actually can be very helpful to students. In my experience, students have been much more likely to say “can you pause that for a second?” or “can you go back”? It’s lower stakes than “can you say what you just said all over again?” Not only can I pause or rewind, I can clarify right on the spot with greater ease. Furthermore, I can pause my own face when I notice I’ve said something bizarre. Maybe I’ve said Hatshepsut rather than Nefertiti. Maybe I’ve said Isis when I meant Ishtar. These mistakes don’t happen often, but when they do, they can throw a student off, and I may not even know about it. I am a firm believer that these mistakes happen because there is a lot to juggle when a professor is at the front of the classroom (or anyone is in front of an audience, for that matter). Maybe I need to talk about something and write something on the board simultaneously. Maybe I need to think about what I’m saying next but get distracted by giving a handout to a late student. Maybe I notice that students are looking at their phones, and I am trying to shift to a group activity for greater engagement while also finishing the explanation of a complicated lecture idea. The layer of performance is removed when watching the pre-recorded lecture with students. In a sense, I become my own TA, guiding students through what the professor was talking about. The only difference is I’m also the professor. A final benefit of the short, pre-recorded lecture in class is that it’s very easy to assign group activities as the need arises and pause the video for this group work. I no longer feel exhausted by pivoting from the type of focus needed to deliver a lecture to the type of focus required to facilitate group work. Sharing pre-recorded video lectures with in-person students requires time to record the lecture, and the ability to be vulnerable, but ultimately it has helped me connect more with students; it has facilitated meaningful student connections through group work, and it has helped students better understand the content of my courses. ... View more

  We can spend days analyzing President Joe Biden’s January 7, 2023, State of the Union address to the joint houses of Congress. Given the response the speech has received, students of speech and rhetoric will likely be studying it for years to come. Although this State of the Union address has been rated as the most confrontational address ever, this address also illustrates the importance of audience awareness and the pursuit of common ground.  The key example of audience awareness that no one can stop talking about is how President Biden got the two parties to come to a consensus, right there on the floor of the chamber, on Social Security and Medicare. He was cautious in how he broached the subject. He referred to how some of his Republican colleagues have proposed sunsetting Social Security. Knowing that Republicans would oppose this statement, President Biden came prepared to support his statement by promising to send Rick Scott a copy of his written proposal which outlined the facts.   It was a guessing game throughout the speech at what points Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy would signal to his Republican colleagues that they should stand by standing himself. They were actually in the embarrassing position of NOT standing in support of such generally popular ideas as better pay for teachers and aid to Ukraine. When it came to Social Security and Medicare, the majority of Republicans were eager to distance themselves from Rick Scott in his desire to cut these popular entitlement programs. They leaped to their feet to applaud America’s seniors, and once they were there, Biden pointed out that it seemed everyone agreed that we cannot do away with Social Security and Medicare. Common ground is often the starting point for moving two opposing sides toward agreement. By getting Democrats and Republicans to agree to support what is best for the elderly he seemed to decrease by a tiny degree the schism in the room. Presidents have long brought into the chamber for the State of the Union special guests who like, in this case, Tyree Nichols’s mother and stepfather, have experienced terrible and widely publicized tragedy. Biden was respectful of the couple’s loss and actually used the difference between their experience and that of his family to illustrate the racism that still exists in America. Biden recalled that he never had to warn his sons that if they were pulled over by the police, they should turn on the inside car light, put both hands on the wheel, and make no sudden moves. The common ground, of course, is that no parent should have to. When addressing an audience with polarizing views, speakers need to be aware of how easily their message can be skewed, be strategic about how they get their message across, and bolster their supporting data against loopholes. As President Biden demonstrated in his State of the Union address, sometimes finding common ground is the simplest way to ensure that the purpose of the message is heard.    "Joe Biden"  by GPA Photo Archive is licensed under CC BY 2.0 ... View more

The last time I remember technology and composition in such apparent conflict was in the early 1990s, when my colleagues and I wondered if the grammar and spell check tools provided by Word and WordPerfect gave students with access to these programs an unfair advantage over their less tech-savvy peers. Of course, using software to correct subject-verb agreement errors seems positively quaint in comparison with what students can accomplish using Open AI’s ChatGPT, and the many AI-driven programs that are sure to follow in its wake. Not surprisingly, the response to artificial intelligence as a generator of text—among both teachers and media commentators—has been overwhelming. In December, novelist Stephen Marche declared “The College Essay Is Dead,” while high school teacher Daniel Herman concluded that ChapGPT signaled “The End of High-School English.” Some Twitter users were downright apocalyptic, and even Open AI’s own CEO, Sam Altman, acknowledged, “The bad case—and I think this is important to say—is, like, lights out for all of us.” Initially, I didn’t think these doomsayers were far from wrong. One evening, a colleague and I sat down with our computers and tried to stump ChatGPT. Could AI perform a rhetorical analysis on an article she assigns each semester? It could. The grade? “This is an early assignment in the semester, so I’d say at least a ‘B.’” But how would AI do when faced with personal writing? After all, a computer program doesn’t have any life experiences to draw on, so I asked ChatGPT to write a thousand-word essay on the biggest challenge it had ever faced and what it had learned from that challenge. A couple of minutes later, I learned that AI’s biggest challenge had been the death of its mother from cancer when AI was a young teenager. The lessons learned were hardly earth-shattering—the preciousness of life, the need to stand on one’s own two (virtual) feet—but they were the sort of responses one might expect from the prompt I had posed. Right away, my friend and I wondered: If a computer program can respond effectively to assignments like those we gave it, should those assignments be changed? Maybe our first attempts were flawed. However, as we worked variations on standard first-year essay prompts, ChatGPT kept responding in what we admitted was an “acceptable” fashion. Granted, AI was lousy when it came to documentation, and it tended to come up with the most obvious responses to our questions, but the reasoning was sound more often than not, and sentence-level errors were generally absent.  Clearly, we didn’t want to dive headlong into what a special session at CCCC calls “crisis-speak.” Philosophy professor Lawrence Shapiro argues that “the cheaters are only hurting themselves—unless we respond to them by removing writing assignments from the syllabus.” Focusing solely on plagiarism runs the risk of depriving students of the writing practice many of them so desperately need. Moreover, as Chris Gilliard and Peter Rorabaugh write in Slate: Although plagiarism is an easy target and certainly on the minds of teachers and professors when thinking about this technology, there are deeper questions we need to engage, questions that are erased when the focus is on branding students as cheaters and urging on an A.I. bakeoff between students and teachers. Questions like: What are the implications of using a technology trained on some of the worst texts on the internet? And: What does it mean when we cede creation and creativity to a machine? Nevertheless, pretending that AI doesn’t exist and carrying on as before is not a realistic option. Therefore, in the months to come, I’ll be looking at some of the many ways instructors are responding to one of the biggest pedagogical curveballs most writing teachers have ever faced. ... View more

“New forms of media have always caused moral panics.” So begins a 2010 op-ed Steven Pinker wrote in response to concerns about potential negative impacts of digital technologies on habits of reading and thinking.  I began assigning that essay, along with Nicholas Carr’s point-by-point response, in my FYC courses in 2011, but by 2017, their argument appeared to have lost its relevance. My students engaged, instead, in discussions of influencers, fake news, fact checkers, Tik Tok, social media regulations, Elon Musk, and Twitter.   But this past fall, I started to hear rumors of something new, something different, and something that might herald the demise of writing instruction (or even higher education) as we know it. This apocalyptic AI tool is called ChatGPT.  Since it was made publicly available in November of 2022, we have seen a steady stream of essays, blogs, Tweets, chats, webinars, and podcasts addressing the perils and possibilities of the chatbot (as in the growing collection of resources here).  At my department’s faculty meeting last month, we got a quick demonstration, followed by suggestions for policies and syllabus statements.      At that January meeting, with deadlines looming and a new semester about to begin, some of us were thinking, “What is this? I do not have time to deal with yet another disruption to my syllabus and pedagogy! Is it really such a big deal?”     And as I looked at my blog schedule for this semester, I considered asking ChatGPT to compose this post for me—knowing I could then meet the deadline and make a point (even though I wasn’t sure what the point should be).  Instead, I asked for a title. Here’s what it generated: "Navigating the Boundaries: The Perils and Promise of ChatGPT in College Writing Classrooms.” It sounds catchy enough.     The best way to learn about ChatGPT is to try it for yourself.  Take just a few minutes (it’s fast!) and give it one or more of your writing prompts or exam questions. Query the program about a research project or request a title for your next blog post. Or you can just ask it how it works:     Once you’ve played with the program a bit, compare experiences with colleagues and friends.  I’ve found colleagues and family members using ChatGPT as search engines (“How can I teach semicolons creatively?” “What’s a good sermon illustration on overcoming anxiety?”), study and preparation (“What sorts of job interview questions should I expect based on this job description?” “Give me some practice sentences to transcribe in IPA, along with the answers”), or writing models (“Write a thank-you note as a follow-up to my job interview”).  I’ve had colleagues who have asked for definitions, outlines, or group activities.       Within a short time of exploration, you will probably encounter the program’s accuracy problem. AI experts call this hallucination:  at times, the program will simply make things up—sources, quotes, or statistics.  I recently gave the program a discussion board prompt I use in my FYC class.  Here’s what it generated:       Unfortunately, the quoted sentence does not actually appear in Alexie’s essay.  So, I pointed this out to ChatGPT:       Yet again, the quoted sentence does not actually appear in the essay, although it is certainly related to the theme of the essay.   After a second “confrontation,” ChatGPT stated that it had “misunderstood the prompt,” something my students have said before, too!   With that in mind, I’ve invited students to explore the technology with me this semester. They will find the “hallucinations,” and we’ll discuss privacy and integrity. My students will be assessing an essay generated by the chatbot, and they will experiment with ChatGPT as a brainstorming tool (considering if and how to cite the results). We will also ask the program to provide feedback on a draft and compare its feedback with our own. We’ll ask some tough questions: how does the technology support our thinking—and how might it limit our thinking?     And perhaps I’ll ask students to re-visit the Pinker/Carr debate. After all, our technological tools can exert a profound influence on the way we interact with the world and the way we think. Pinker closed his celebration of digital technologies this way:   The new media have caught on for a reason. Knowledge is increasing exponentially; human brainpower and waking hours are not. Fortunately, the Internet and information technologies are helping us manage, search and retrieve our collective intellectual output at different scales, from Twitter and previews to e-books and online encyclopedias. Far from making us stupid, these technologies are the only things that will keep us smart.   In the age of ChatGPT, I wonder if my colleagues and students will agree.  I’m still thinking about it.    What about you?  If you have insights or classroom ideas, please share! ... View more

 First-day selfie   Note: These journal entries are adapted from my teaching journal. The original entries are handwritten on the blank pages of my lesson plan book.   Day 1: January 26, 2023 writing on the train after class.  Today was my first day of teaching in person since March 10, 2020, and I am thinking of IT glitches and how they were solved. At the time, those glitches seemed significant because our face-to-face class was paperless. Until the glitches were fixed, I wondered how to find alternative access to the twenty-first century tech I used throughout the long months of remote learning, and had intended to use in person, too.  Yes, I thought, it would be possible to teach without a monitor and a smartboard. We could all just use our personal electronic devices to log into the course management system and walk through the syllabus that way, just like we did on Zoom. As I said, the glitch was soon fixed, and we returned to our post-remote world. “This is not how I intended to begin,” I told the students. The room was small and the desks were crowded closely together. I covered the key points of the syllabus, and showed the welcome video and the video to introduce our reading from James Baldwin. On the way home, on the train, I am taking notes that skim the surface. Although we made nameplates with crayons, name tags, and paper, and although we introduced ourselves to each other, the class felt too much like teaching on Zoom. This feeling is hard to admit, but I need to consider not so much why it felt that way, but what I can do to take advantage of in-person affordances. In-person affordances included the arrangement of the physical objects in the room (desks crowded together, monitor, smartboard) and the room temperature (too warm). Those were the most obvious features. The emotions gathered together in that room were less obvious. How did the students feel about being in this room and what did they think about taking this writing class? We were using the tools of remote learning in an in-person classroom. We were face-to-face and literally elbow-to-elbow in a room filled with people who were strangers to each other, and who had, perhaps, become accustomed to engaging more with devices than with people. At least this is my perception after the first day. I feel exhilarated as well, nevermind the glitches. Or, perhaps the glitches are exactly the point. What would I have done if I could not access the monitor and the smartboard? What did I do before monitors, smartboards, and functional wifi?   Day 2: January 31, 2023 writing in class while students work on their journals.  On the way to school on the train, I had an idea for how to explain an early-term assignment. I found two sticky notes and a pen and scratched down my thoughts. The train was nearing a transfer point and I would have to move quickly. When I arrived on campus, I wrote the explanation on the board while simultaneously revising. I revised for a third time when I composed an announcement for the students on the course management system. I remembered that I used to revise lesson plans like this all the time–kinesthetically, on the go, from brain to handwriting, to catching trains and buses to campus, to writing on the board, to transferring ideas to make them visible online. I remembered that I learned best kinesthetically, and that staying still could be very difficult. I remembered the tactile impressions of fingers against pen, and pen against paper. So I decided to reverse the lesson plan. Rather than beginning with the newly revised assignment, we would begin and end with handwriting. I would use Ask Me Anything (a beginning-of-semester activity I learned about and implemented long before the pandemic) to unpack the syllabus and the course, and exit tickets to help plan the lesson for the next class. I blogged about these activities years ago. Ask Me Anything invited students to ask anonymous questions for me to answer in front of the class. Often students asked different versions of the same question, and I could respond in more depth as needed. Exit tickets, adapted from Stephen Brookfield, offered students an opportunity to write about what was most helpful in class, and what was most confusing. The exit tickets also were anonymous, and I promised that I would not read them until I was on the train. The questions for Ask Me Anything, I explained, help me understand more about where students need to grow as writers. If more than one student asks the same question, then I know I need to clarify my intentions and our coursework. In an environment where students are rightly concerned about speaking in front of class, both activities create opportunities for conversation and feedback about the course, and also to participate in shaping subsequent lessons. My responses can be long, and, in that case, a best practice is to check in with students to see if my answer fits what they are asking. On day two, I received an Ask-Me-Anything question that appeared to require a longer response, and also seemed more personal. The question on the slip of paper asked: What are your pet peeves?  This room, I thought. That it's so small and that we’re all crammed together. That we don’t have HVAC ventilation, and that the room is overheated with a window that barely opens. That adults were unprepared for remote learning during quarantine, and that students, then and now, have to deal with the consequences. As adults, we need to do better. Then, after a quick realization, I paused for a moment. “Oh wait,” I said. “Do you mean my pet peeves as an English teacher? It’s five-paragraph essays. It’s hard to fully grow your ideas in five paragraphs, and important ideas might get lost in the process. We'll practice writing to expand on ideas and to create a longer essay. But that’s my English teacher pet peeve, five paragraph essays.” Growing as a writer, for students and teachers alike, can be immensely challenging, and transitions are never easy. As a neurodivergent teacher away from in-person teaching for nearly three years, I considered the costs and benefits of returning. Anxiety became a language without words, and the feelings were difficult to communicate. At the same time, experiencing the difficulties of communicating also draws me back to the classroom. In unexpected moments, the classroom can become a place to bear witness to  people attempting to communicate in circumstances that would seem to mitigate against communication.  Writing remains one means of bearing witness to journeys toward teaching and learning, with  many detours encountered on those journeys. Back in the classroom, the journey continues, and the journey is just beginning. ... View more

Today's Tiny Teaching Story is by Stuart Barbier, a Professor of English at Delta College. Partly Veiled Validation I returned to mask-to-mask teaching after three semesters asynchronously online. About half of our college's students elected to return, too. Yet, the hallways were oddly quiet, and I only saw a few colleagues. I'd always speak, even if just a quick hello. One colleague barely acknowledged my greeting the first time, and then was silent all the others, not even looking my way when I added his name. Might as well have been online with my camera off. In contrast, my students acknowledged my presence with their eyes, words, and only partly veiled validation.   Submit your own Tiny Teaching Story to tinyteachingstories@macmillan.com! See the Tiny Teaching Stories Launch for submission details and guidelines. ... View more

The storm of media attention circling the recent death of Lisa Marie Presley is something more than the usual hoo-hah surrounding the passing of a pop culture star. Indeed, if we compare the phalanx of stories involving Ms. Presley to those reporting on the death of David Crosby—a far more successful and influential pop star—we can see just how much more significant, in a cultural semiotic sense, the Presley coverage is. For as Crosby fades away from the front pages, Presley’s story continues, with a Graceland memorial event still to come as I write these words. The semiotic question then becomes, “what does all this avid attention to Lisa Marie Presley tell us?” To answer this question, it will be useful to go back to Paul Simon’s Grammy Award winning album Graceland, which used Elvis Presley’s famed mansion as a platform for exploring the uneasy state of America in the 1980s. We saw something similar with Simon’s song “Mrs. Robinson” which invoked the image of Joe Dimaggio as a lost symbol of American unity while America was being torn apart in the 1960s by the Vietnam War and the cultural revolution.  Indeed, in the title song from the album (“Graceland”), Simon gets quite specific about his hopes—what he calls his belief—that he could find in his pilgrimage to Presley’s legendary estate a place not only for the restoration of his own personal sense of dislocation and loss but also a unifying haven for all Americans.  At a time of social, political, and cultural division that surpasses anything this country has seen since the Civil War, “Graceland” is more powerful than ever. What is evident, in the massive media attention to the death of Elvis Presley’s only child, is a kind of desperate nostalgia for a long-lost era when Elvis ruled as “the King” of rock-and-roll. There are many ironies in this nostalgia, of course.  For one thing, the rise of Elvis in the 1950s accompanied (and even facilitated) the suppression of the Black pioneers of rock music, which was hardly a demonstration of cultural unity (one could say that Graceland was segregated). And as the British Invasion and the Summer of Love changed the narrative on rock-and-roll in the 1960s, establishing it as the background music for the cultural revolution, Presley’s place in the pantheon shifted. No longer “the King” of a single rock-and-roll nation, Presley became something of a joke in the emerging zeitgeist—an aging Vegas act courted by the likes of Richard Nixon. For now there were two nations: the pop cultural musical mainstream in which the King had been dethroned, and the generally rural America where Elvis is revered to this day, an icon of a larger movement that can be called the counter-cultural-revolution. This takes us back to Lisa Marie Presley. For her entire life, she was thrust into the role of a princess bearing forth the banner of her father the King. But the kingdom had changed even before the King’s death, and Lisa Marie’s role was always an awkward one. So now, in her death, nostalgia and, perhaps, a little guilt, floods the mass media in a ritual of memory not only for a person but ultimately for a time of American unity—of a common culture—that never was. Photo by Emrecan Arik (2019), used under the Unsplash License. ... View more

  Richard Weissbourd, who directs the Making Caring Common Project at Harvard, notes the difficulty of encouraging or teaching empathy today: “It’s hard to have a shared morality when you don’t have a shared reality,” he says. But for that very reason, Weissbourd and his colleagues see a more-than-ever urgency in trying to do so. And they are convinced we can succeed: “I think learning empathy is like playing an instrument or learning a sport. It’s a lot about practice.” These are heartening words to teachers of writing, who strive to build an ethos of trust and empathy in their classrooms in order to support respectful listening and openness to learning, even from those with differing perspectives—perhaps especially from those with differing perspectives. But teachers know, too, that practicing empathy doesn’t mean always agreeing with everyone, or always being agreeable. As one of my students put it, “I feel for someone I know who is into conspiracy theories that have been proven false and dangerous. But I don’t ‘feel’ for those theories or his argument about them.” In short, being empathetic doesn’t mean simply going along with any old thing. We can—and often need to—state our disagreements very strongly; but we can do so without rejecting the humanity of with whom we disagree. Students probably know empathy when they see it, but in my experience, they have some difficulty in defining it. If you are working to build and practice empathy in your classroom, a little definitional assignment can be one place to begin. Scholars often speak of three kinds or aspects of empathy: cognitive empathy, which attempts to understand other people’s points of view—and why they hold them; emotional empathy, which is the ability and willingness to “walk in the shoes” of another person, to try to experience what they are experiencing; and ethical empathy, which is having compassion and concern for another person. Weissbourd argues that true empathy calls for all three.  The Making Caring Common Project aims to help parents teach their children this three-part empathy, partly by talking openly about feelings and emotions, helping them understand what other people feel (with lots of examples drawn from their own experience), and addressing issues of bias and stereotypes in themselves as well as in others. These are all practices that teachers of writing can and do employ. Earlier in my teaching career, I tended to take empathy for granted, just assuming that my students and I were empathetic by nature. But by the time I had taught for several years, I met students who seemed to be without empathy or the capacity for it. And I began to question my own capacity for empathy as well, noting times in my teaching and in my life when I was anything but “naturally” empathetic. And so I began, slowly, to bring definitions and examples and discussions of empathy into my classes, to ask students to explore the concept with me and to keep a personal log or journal where they could record instances of empathy or its lack in themselves as well as in others. It was very slow going at first, but usually a little beyond midterm, most students were gaining valuable insights into themselves and their behavior toward others. Not all, certainly. But most. We began to look for contributions to our “found empathy” project, bringing in examples of empathy at work in the world around us and writing and talking about it.  I can’t say that I have learned how to “teach” empathy, even now, but I have learned to identify it (and the lack of it) and to define and exemplify and discuss it with students in everyday language. I have learned to spot my own lack of empathy—or misplaced or mistaken empathy, and tried to learn from them. I have encouraged and challenged students to do the same, and to consciously practice empathy.  In these times of deep division—of white supremacy and unbridled racism, of hate speech and deliberate misinformation campaigns—we need to teach critical thinking and critical language awareness. But we also need to teach empathy.   Image by Toa Heftiba reproduced under the Unsplash license. ... View more

Photo by April Lidinsky, 2023  Before heading off on winter break, I read an inspiring post by writer Rebecca Solnit in which she rhapsodized about a Portland hotel that, years ago, held a monthly silent reading hour to encourage the habit of reading for pleasure. She recalled the delight of passing handwritten drink orders to a server so that the only sound in the plush lobby was the turning of pages. I shared the idea on my own social media page, and a tsunami of introverted bookworms responded that this would be a dream come true. What could be better than enjoying community without the pressure of talking, all while nurturing a habit many of us have neglected — uninterrupted immersion in reading? It took very little effort to organize monthly meet-ups that we’re calling “The Reading Hour - South Bend.” Other cities have organized Silent Book Clubs with the same concept, which was covered by NPR. Our first local gathering was last week in the soaring sky-lighted atrium of a hotel. Thirty readers showed up with books and Kindles, smiling and nodding at one another, and dropped into chairs for an hour of silent reading. I noticed that the positive modeling of other readers kept me from reaching for my phone, a habit I fight at home, even when I’m reading for pleasure. Bolstered by my peers, with only the whisper of turning pages around me, I let myself enter the flow of my book, and was astonished by how quickly the hour flashed by. Why is this kind of focused engagement such a rare experience? And what can it tell us about our own students’ relationship to distracting devices when we are struggling to get them to focus in our physical or virtual classrooms? My silent “Reading Hour” book was James M. Lang’s Distracted: Why Students Can’t Focus and What You Can Do About It. Lang quickly skewers any standard grumbling about students who “can’t stay off their phones in class” by offering us “A Brief History of Distraction,” shored up by neuroscience. Once we are reminded that humans have survived in part because of our ability to be distracted from hyper-attention to pay attention to predators (or, in today’s world, pings on our devices), it’s harder to be judgy towards our students.  And after you enjoy Lang’s galloping history of pedagogical distraction — from Aristotle noticing that flute playing in the distance distracts students from boring lessons, to no less than Augustine confessing that his mind wanders to fly-catching lizards when he’s supposed to be praying — we can appreciate that any fist-shaking about screens in the classroom is just part of the ongoing story of being distractedly human. And yet Lang doesn’t urge us to give up. Instead, he suggests a perspective-shift by inviting us to consider what happens when any of us are immersed in a “flow.” I find this in pleasure-reading, or while intent on gardening, but for others, the flow might be found in hours of game-play, or a creative hobby. The key is that when flow happens, our attention is focused. For instructors, Lang argues, we’d do well to stop complaining about what’s distracting our students, and start creating more learning situations that will hold our students’ attention. Here’s a question for all of us: When your students are really engaged and their attention is focused on a task, what exactly is going on? What dynamics, arrangements, or tasks have you set up so they are actively working through material, on their own or with one another?  In our book, From Inquiry to Academic Writing, fifth edition, co-authored with Stuart Greene, every reading begins with a headnote that suggests close engagement strategies students could do on their own or in groups. For example, in the headnote for a timely essay by Robin DiAngelo on “The Perception of Race,” students are invited to mark and respond to redefinitions of terms such as “race,” “racism,” “prejudice” and “discrimination,” to launch their own reflections on these concepts and practices.  After every reading, we also offer prompts for “Reading as a Writer: Analyzing Rhetorical Choices.” These activities guide students back into the texts for a variety of close engagement, from reverse-outlining to illuminate structural decisions, to marking examples or quotations in a reading to spark conversations about how and when skillful writers employ these techniques, to looking up more about concepts, terms, or authors. We find that when students are immersed in these methods of paying attention, especially in pairs or small groups, the hum in the classroom is of readers and writers in a communal flow, and rarely do we see the furtive use of phones, unless students are looking up a word, a fact, or a concept (as we all do many times a day). Lang reminds us that the Latin roots of “dis-traction” mean to “drag something apart” (29).  What do you do — in your in-person or virtual classroom spaces — to hold your students together as a community of learners? What captures their attention, keeps them in the flow of scholarly activity, and how might we all do this more? ... View more

Today's Tiny Teaching Story is by John Hansen. John Hansen received a BA in English from the University of Iowa and an MA in English literature from Oklahoma State University. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Summerset Review, One Sentence Poems, The Dillydoun Review, Schuylkill Valley Journal, Eunoia Review, Litro Magazine, Wild Roof Journal, The Banyan Review, Drunk Monkeys, and elsewhere. He has presented on a variety of topics at The National Institute for Staff and Organizational Development (NISOD), The Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC—Regional), The American Comparative Literature Association, The Midwest Conference on British Studies, and others. He is an English Department faculty member at Mohave Community College in Arizona. Read more at johnphansen.com.   Unknown Impacts: Be Kind Early in the Fall 2020 semester, I sent e-mails to several students who stopped participating in our developmental English course. Ben responded two days later apologizing. Hours later, I answered the phone - it was Ben. Small talk quickly turned to him revealing a recent divorce, eviction, and layoff (due to COVID-19). I chatted with Ben weekly. He became one of the better writers in class. Days before the semester ended, Ben sent an e-mail about how he would have ended his life if he didn't have someone to talk with that day. I've reflected on this and Ben every semester.   Submit your own Tiny Teaching Story to tinyteachingstories@macmillan.com! See the Tiny Teaching Stories Launch for submission details and guidelines. ... View more

I always look forward to learning what major dictionaries have found to be the most “looked up” or asked about word of the year, or the word they think most captures their readers’ interests. Often I can guess or come close to what those words must be. But as I began to think about 2022, I was pretty much at sea: so many words seemed to have emerged as lightning rods that I just didn’t know what to choose. So it was with great interest that I started tracking reports coming out from dictionaries. The first one I saw came from Merriam Webster, and they chose a word that I had actually thought of: gaslighting. In their announcement, Merriam Webster noted that gaslighting, “a driver of disorientation and mistrust,” is “the act or practice of grossly misleading someone especially for one’s own advantage,” and went on to report that during 2022, lookups for gaslighting increased by 1,740 percent. Indeed, I’m pretty sure I looked up the word at least once though perhaps earlier than 2022. But given the events of 2022—and the beginning of 2023—I’d say this was a pretty appropriate choice for word of the year. Dictionary.com took me completely by surprise in choosing—wait for it!—WOMAN—as their word of the year. I was also surprised to learn that lookups for that word increased 1400 percent after Republican Marsha Blackburn asked Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson to define “woman” during her confirmation hearing. Jackson said, “No, I can’t.” At any rate, in announcing their word of the year, Dictionary.com noted that “Our selection of woman … reflects how the intersection of gender, identity and language dominates the current cultural conversation and shapes much of our work as a dictionary.” I would like to hear more about just how that shaping is at work! Wordle apparently led the Cambridge Dictionary to choose homer as word of the year after over 65,000 people rushed to the dictionary to look up this five-letter word that they were not familiar with. This informal American English word evoked what the dictionary called “the Wordle effect.”  Over at Collins, the WOTY is permacrisis, about as far a cry from homer as we could hope. In their announcement, Collins defines permacrisis as “an extended period of instability and insecurity.” This isn’t a familiar word to me, but it is one, according to Collins, that captures the sense of ongoing crisis felt in the UK and around the world. It’s interesting to note, too, that the word permacrisis is new this year to Collins Dictionary.  But the most surprising word of the year to me comes from Oxford, who has chosen goblin mode. For the first time in its history, Oxford opened the choice up—and over 300,000 people answered the call. And goblin mode won out! According to Oxford, their WOTY is “a word or expression reflecting the ethos, mood, or preoccupations of the past twelve months, one that has potential as a term of lasting cultural significance.” This slang term for a lazy, laid-back, self-indulgent way of being first appeared, according to Oxford, on Twitter in 2009, but “went viral on social media in February 2022," before rising in popularity over the following months as COVID lockdown restrictions continued to ease. "Seemingly, it captured the prevailing mood of individuals who rejected the idea of returning to ‘normal life,' or rebelled against the increasingly unattainable aesthetic standards and unsustainable lifestyles exhibited on social media.” Casper Grathwohl, president of Oxford Languages, notes that “People are embracing their inner goblin, and voters choosing ‘goblin mode’ as the Word of the Year tells us the concept is likely here to stay.”  This seems to me to be the widest spread of word of the year choices in some time, perhaps ever, and that in itself says something about the difficulty of “summing up” the year we have just been through. Perhaps that’s why the New York Times, in a “Student Opinion” piece by Natalie Proulx, offered an assignment based on word of the year. Students who are 13 and older in the US and 16 and older in the UK are invited to read Proulx’s article and then write an article announcing their own word of the year and responding to several questions Proulx poses about the words chosen by prominent dictionaries this year.  You might want to adapt this assignment for your classes: it would be a particularly effective way to start a class, because it would surely reveal how students are feeling about the world they live in today.   Image by Brett Jordan reproduced under the Unsplash license. ... View more

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