The Beijing Olympics has, of course, been in the headlines for much of February. With an event so large, there are inevitably many controversies to consider as examples of argumentation. Many claims about the Olympics will take the form of claims of value about individual athletes or teams because as we watch them, we are making value judgments just as surely as the judges are although theirs are judgments based on years of experience and training. When politics enters in, we move largely into the realm of claims of policy. After the 2014 Sochi Olympics, Russia was technically banned from competing in the next three Olympics because of doping. Russian athletes are still allowed to compete, however, under the “Russian Olympic Committee” instead of competing for their country. That in itself, of course, is controversial. It seems to be a distinction without a difference. Then the world of Olympic figure skating was rocked by the revelation that one of the skaters who led the ROC to team gold had tested positive for a banned substance: trimetazidine, a drug used primarily for heart patients but one that increases blood flow and stamina and thus can enhance athletic performance. The name of the athlete should not have been released because she is a minor, but the fact that there was only one minor on the gold-medal team made it obvious that the guilty party was Kamila Valieva, favored to win the women’s individual gold as well. One reason for her high scores is her ability to complete the quadruple jump--the first woman to ever land one in Olympic competition--and she landed two! The logical conclusion that many drew was that Valieva should be suspended and that her team should not receive the team gold. In fact, the medal ceremony for the team competition was suddenly scrapped when the drug test results were revealed. To complicate matters, though, the drug test was administered on December 25th, and the results were not reported until February 8th. Negative drug tests indicated that Valieva did not have trimetazidine in her system at the Olympics, but she did when she qualified. Technically she is classified as a “protected person” because of her age, and many, including former winners of Olympic figure skating medals, like Katarina Witt, blame Valieva’s coaches, not Valieva herself. Witt claims, “What they knowingly did to her, if true, cannot be surpassed in inhumanity.”  What seemed like a fairly clear case that Valieva should be suspended from competition is thus complicated by the time lag since the positive test and her age—complicated enough, in fact, that the Court of Arbitration for Sport made the decision not to suspend her, stating that to do so would cause Valieva “irreparable harm.” Juliet Macur and Andrew Keh of the New York Times report, “The panel ruled on a narrow question: Did Russia act improperly when it lifted a suspension of Valieva last week only one day after imposing it? That decision effectively cleared the path for Valieva to compete in the singles event, but three organizations—the International Olympic Committee, the World Anti-Doping Agency, and skating’s global governing body—immediately challenged it in appeals to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, the highest legal authority in global sports.” The court of public opinion may not be as forgiving. And the gold-medal podium may be a very lonely place for a fifteen-year-old. Photo: “Olympic Rings”  by Paul R. is licensed under CC BY 2.0 ... View more

Today's Tiny Teaching Story is by Pamela Childers, a lifelong secondary, undergraduate and graduate school educator, writer, editor, and consultant. She enjoys collaborating with colleagues and students.   Student Teaching “Go wash your mouth out with soap!” And he did. The 8th grader returned to our grammar lesson in progress, raised his hand, and bubbled out the next answer. In Biology class, I distributed apples and asked, “Who can identify the internal parts you just dissected?” And they all did, delighted to eat their half apples. Rushing to my senior English class to discuss the Romantic poets, I passed a student at his open locker pulling out a knife. “May I have that, please?” And he handed it to me. Things were much different in 1965, I have learned.    Submit your own Tiny Teaching Story to tinyteachingstories@macmillan.com! See the Tiny Teaching Stories Launch for submission details and guidelines.   ... View more

Twitter is a mystery to me. I cannot manage the flow of information; I feel inundated and overwhelmed by the threads that appear (despite the fact that I have carefully limited the number of people I follow). Nonetheless, I am delighted at times by snippets of wisdom or encouragement, as well as by trends that prod my own thinking about pedagogy. One recent trend involves a photo or concept accompanied by a question—and then the phrase “wrong answers only.” This thread, for example, interrogated the notion of Gricean maxims, a standard in the pragmatics section of any introductory linguistics textbook. While most answers were just fun (the Gricean Maxims are an indie band or perhaps a type of hair coloring), others challenged the maxims with a healthy dose of sarcasm for their so-called “neutrality” as a framework for analyzing discourse. The “wrong answers only” thread starter invites participants to have some fun, yes, but also to define via the negative or to confront assumptions and points of confusion. Such an activity, to me, seems ideally suited to a college classroom: I am wondering if others have used that as a discussion starter or writing assignment in their classes.  I plan to try a couple of “wrong answers only” activities in the next couple of weeks. As a mid-term exercise in a course I’m teaching on second language/multilingual (L2/Lx) writing, I am going to have students revisit some of the key questions we asked at the beginning of the term: who is an L2/Lx writer? What does L2/Lx writing look like? Where does L2/Lx writing occur? What sorts of pedagogies promote L2/Lx writing development? I am going to ask the students to consider these—and some of the assumptions we’ve already uncovered—by having them give me “wrong-answers” only. We’ll start that discussion in a synchronous Zoom session, and we’ll shift it to the asynchronous discussion board after that.  I will also try this as a class-closing exercise in my first-year/corequisite writing course: we’ll take a concept—thesis, introduction, paragraph, sentence, organization, source, etc.—and I’ll ask students to post a definition or example, anonymously, “wrong answers only.” Their responses can serve as a basis for reflection or discussion in subsequent classes—and a way to see how their perception of key concepts can evolve over the course of the semester. Have you used “wrong answers only” (or a variation thereof) in your composition courses? What happened? I’d love to hear from you.   ... View more

bell hooks, by Cmongirl, is available to use in the public domain.    In the fall of 1994, at the beginning of my second year of teaching at a two-year college in a large mid-Atlantic city, I found bell hooks Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom at a local bookstore. I flipped through the book, eventually landing on the essay “Embracing Change: Teaching in a Multicultural World.” In 2022, we would reframe “multiculturalism” as diversity, equity, and inclusion, and nearly thirty years later hooks’ words feel as moving and as relevant to me as that afternoon in the bookstore.    “Embracing Change” begins:  Despite the contemporary focus on multiculturalism in our society, particularly in education, there is not nearly enough practical discussion of ways classroom settings can be transformed so that the learning experience if inclusive. If the effort to respect and honor the social reality and experiences of groups in this society who are nonwhite is to be reflected inn a pedagogical process, then as teachers– on all levels, from elementary to university settings– we must acknowledge that our style  of teaching may need to change (p. 35).   These opening sentences were thrilling to me, and gave insight into my own teaching and learning about multiculturalism in graduate school in the late 1980s and early 1990s. At that time, “multiculturalism,” in practice, often meant changing the syllabus to include writers of color, women, and working class folks. While these changes, in theory, seemed significant to me at the time, changing the sources alone did not lead, in practice, to antiracist classrooms.     For example, as a TA and instructor of record for first-year-writing courses, I taught texts by James Baldwin and Martin Luther King, Jr. to demonstrate how they used rhetorical appeals to structure their arguments. However, in the pedagogical approach introduced in our teaching practicum, teaching the rhetorical situation of audience, purpose, and occasion did not include  historical conditions of racism and white supremacy faced by Baldwin and King as writers and rhetors, and that necessitated antiracist arguments in the first place.     The attention to racism and white supremacy was the gap that bell hooks’ work filled in my education as a teacher. Rather than presenting a generic one-size-fits-all pedagogy, Teaching to Transgress included both theory and practice through a Black feminist intersectional lens.  In other words, hooks suggests why “we must acknowledge that our style of teaching may need to change” ( and offers concrete suggestions for how teachers might approach changing our style.    Years later, in revising Teaching Developmental Writing 4e, my editor and I agreed that “Embracing Change: Teaching in a Multicultural World.” seemed as pertinent as ever. The revision took shape in the aftermath of Occupy Wall Street, and the killing of Trayvon Martin, a young seventeen-year-old Black man, shot to death by George Zimmerman in Sanford, Florida, In 2013, George Zimmerman’s acquittal of all charges in Trayvon Martin’s killing was the catalyst for the beginning of #BlackLivesMatter  as conceived by Alicia Garza, Patrisee Cullors, and Opal Tometi.    For 2022 readers, hooks’ work in “Embracing Change” presents a means of activating diversity, equity, and inclusion beyond adding a few more sources to the class reading list. hooks’  description of the major tenets of a multicultural classroom include:   “To recognize the value of each individual voice” through keeping journals and writing paragraphs in class to one another (p. 40) To learn from our students, and in order to gain an openness toward “different ways of knowing” (p. 41) To study, understand, and discuss whiteness (p.  43). This does not mean recentering whiteness, but instead gaining a deeper sense of historical and cultural perspectives on coming to be seen as white, and such perspectives inform racism and antiracism    While these pedagogical tenents might be seen as commonplaces in 2022, in 1994, hooks’ work felt revelatory.  When I finished graduate school in a decidedly rural setting, I moved from a well-funded Research 1 flagship institution to an urban two-year college that was one of the most poorly funded post-secondary institutions in the same state. The contrast in institutional resource was a deeply troubling introduction to the material and economic realities of neoliberalism.    In light of these stark inequities, Teaching to Transgress opened my mind to reframing  teaching, as hooks suggests, as the practice of freedom, and to comprehending the work of this work teaching beyond the surface level. In other words, given the economic disparities so prevalent in funding for public higher education, it would not be enough to merely restate that all students are capable of learning and growing. Instead, as a teacher,  if the world was ever going to change for the better, I would also need to remain capable of  learning and growing from and alongside my students. Nearly thirty years later, I am grateful to bell hooks for sharing this wisdom, and for the opportunity to recommend her work to a new generation of readers.     Keywords: bell hooks; diversity, equity, and inclusion; first-year writing; professional development ... View more

This week I stumbled across a familiar 1994 essay of Peter Elbow’s called "Ranking, Evaluating, Liking: Sorting Out Three Forms of Judgment,” published in College English. Finding the essay again was like finding an old friend. Peter Elbow is actually an old friend, and a treasured one, but this essay in particular stuck with me over the decades for its focus on liking, and the importance of liking to improvement in writing. After discussing and dismissing ranking as completely unhelpful, and discussing, critiquing, and then offering a revised model of evaluating, Elbow turns to the concept most attractive to me in this essay, and sums up his argument about liking here: It's not improvement that leads to liking, but rather liking that leads to improvement. It's the mark of good writers to like their writing. Liking is not same as evaluating. We can often criticize something better when we like it. We learn to like our writing when we have a respected reader who likes it. Therefore, it's the mark of good teachers to like students and their writing. (13) Elbow concludes his essay not by rejecting evaluation out of hand but by asking that teachers of writing “learn to be better likers: liking our own and our students’ writing, and realizing that liking need not get in the way of clear-eyed evaluation.” I think I remember this article so clearly also because Elbow talks about what happens when we don’t like our own or our students’ writing, or ultimately when we don’t like students. I have had numerous colleagues who didn’t like students and were proud of it—and I have seen the effects such attitudes have over time. On the other hand, I’ve seen and felt what it means to like students and their writing—or to love it and them in the way bell hooks describes in Teaching to Transgress. As I reread and rethink Elbow’s article, however, I find myself concentrating not so much on teachers but more on how to engage students in being better “likers” of their own writing, and even more important, of doing the hard work of understanding where that liking comes from. So I find myself rethinking the questions I ask students to address with every draft they give me: When did I start writing this piece, and how long did it take me to get a draft? What is still worrying me about this draft, and why ? If I were starting over completely new, what would I do differently and why? What sentence or passage in this draft do I like best—and why? I’d now add to that last question, “What do I like about my writing?” And then, “Where does that liking come from? What influences in your life have led you to like some things about your writing—your parents and teachers? School in general? Your friends? Writers you admire? What else?” In other words, I’d like students to probe what they like, to figure out why they like it and especially whether they “like” something in their writing because they’ve been told, explicitly or much more likely implicitly, by someone or something that it’s good and worthy of being liked. This kind of exercise is hard to do—so students need to work with it several times before they may begin to uncover the sources of their own likes and dislikes in their writing. And they probably will be surprised to find that those likes and dislikes have developed, often unconsciously, from societal cues and reinforcements, and especially from what schools and other institutions (religious ones, for example) have taught them to like and value. At that point, they can begin to ask whether they question any of those likes or values—and why. And then, they may be in a position to reconsider what they like (and dislike) and to make plans for improving or changing their writing accordingly. And, I hope, to like it even more. In the meantime, thanks to Peter Elbow for prompting me to think about the role that liking plays in writing and writing development. Image Credit: Photo 216 by rawpixel.com, used under a Public Domain license ... View more

Today's Tiny Teaching Story is by Michelle Graber, Instructor of English and Communications at Mitchell Technical College.   Superheroes Students sit six feet apart – eyes beaming up at me expectantly, masks askew. I’ve never noticed so many of my students’ eyes: shades of blue, brown, green, and hazel. I wonder what the rest of their faces look like, this sea of superheroes tolerating the mandated masking of their identities for the sake of public approval. Wow. I’m teaching superheroes. I face the class during the pandemic peak and push them through their studies. One student raises his hand to ask a question, and I find myself contemplating Charlie Brown’s problems understanding his teacher. She must’ve been wearing a mask, too. “A little louder, please,” I say, trying to resist leaning forward to hear better as I meet the grass-green orbs of the student whose name I can’t associate with a face and whose words I cannot hear.    Submit your own Tiny Teaching Story to tinyteachingstories@macmillan.com! See the Tiny Teaching Stories Launch for submission details and guidelines. ... View more

As the new year approaches (just two more days!), I am thinking of teachers of writing, of all our students, and of the world we inhabit. In my long life, I can remember some very fraught ends-of-years, but perhaps none as perilous as this one. The ongoing deadly pandemic. Social chaos. Factionalism and extremism on the rise. Threats to democracy from within. An inability, or refusal, to distinguish facts and truth from misinformation, crippling conspiracy theories, and lies. A planet teetering on the brink. And yet. We are still here. We are still teaching. We are still helping students learn to think and act for themselves—and for others. We are still creating small acts of kindness, small pockets of hope, small gestures of grace every single day. Resilience. Persistence. Perseverance. What my granny called Stick-to-it-ivity. We have all that, and more. So here’s to you and yours, with wishes for good fun, good food, and good friendship in the new year, along with safety and good health. And most of all, happy teaching. Andrea Image Credit: "Fireworks, New Years Eve, V&A Waterfront" by Derek Keats, used under a CC BY 2.0 license ... View more

Today's Tiny Teaching Story is by Stuart Barbier, a Professor of English at Delta College.   Pension “Your Internet connection is unstable,” warned my computer during yet another Zoom. That’s not the only thing that’s unstable, I thought, unable to separate non-work life (gardening and PBS period dramas) from work life (freshman composition and workplace drama). Face-to-face, I taught all students at the same time, answering questions within the class well enough that students rarely contacted me otherwise. Online? Endless emails, texts, phone calls, and videos, assignments trickling in like water torture, twenty-four/seven, as I turn my computer on when I get up and off when I go to bed. Retire, a friend suggested. Alas, too young.     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 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 “Protest music has always been an essential form of political expression in the US. And at times of political and social unrest, it becomes a crucial refuge — both for musicians, as a release valve for their frustrations and convictions, and for listeners in need of a rallying cry.” – Bridgett Henwood, “The History of American Protest Music, from ‘Yankee Doodle’ to Kendrick Lamar”   One of the courses I teach is an American Literature survey course that provides opportunities to explore a broad range of texts and genres. As we study these texts, I do my best to teach strong interpretive reading strategies and to incorporate multimodal texts and representative visual composition. I work to expand students’ definition of literature and encourage them to practice critical reading strategies to interpret cultural and historical texts and contexts along with traditional texts. This assignment does all of these things, and so I think it can work for a composition course as well as a literature course. Music and lyrics are a popular form of literature that students easily connect to through their lives. I have talked about the ways I have used music in my classes in previous posts (see Music and Class Playlists), but in this assignment, I ask students to look specifically at protest music as a genre. Although protest songs are in their repertoire, students are often unaware of their historical and cultural significance and the ways they have initiated social change. As referenced in the article “The History of American Protest Music, from ‘Yankee Doodle’ to Kendrick Lamar,” “Protest music has been around for centuries: As long as people have been getting fed up with the status quo, they’ve been singing about it. And because music styles, human emotions and social issues are so wide ranging, protest songs are too.” This assignment immerses students in the history and variety of protest music and asks them to interpret particular protest songs. They also work collaboratively with others to read across the examples and present them in a multimodal slide show.   Resources The St. Martin’s Handbook – Ch. 9, Reading Critically The Everyday Writer (also available with Exercises) – Ch. 7, Critical Reading EasyWriter (also available with Exercises) – Ch. 8, Reading and Listening Analytically, Critically, and Respectfully   Steps to the Assignment Historical Context and Genre Examples - Introduce students to the genre of the protest song. I take students through an exploration of protest music and have them read a couple of sources that show the span of the genre. I like the article “The History of American Protest Music, from ‘Yankee Doodle’ to Kendrick Lamar” by Bridgett Henwood, along with some aggregate resources such as Rolling Stone’s Top Protest Songs, Best Protest Songs in History, and a protest song playlist on Spotify. I also show them the brief video “The Evolution of American Protest Music” and guide them to the Spotify playlist (both linked in the Henwood article), which provide an overview with examples. Individual Protest Song Interpretation – Each student will focus on a protest song and search to find lyrics and a video link of an example of music as protest literature or social awareness. I ask them to think about issues and ideas that are important to them and focus on the ways the song creates awareness. They should choose something that has meaning for them—one that has specific cultural, social, or historical implications in which they might be interested. Students then write a short summary that provides artist information (name, year, title, etc.) and an analysis of how and what the song is protesting, including several significant passages from the song that speak to their claims. Have them include the link to the video, and look for them to forge a strong, substantiated interpretation. Like any literature with controversial content, I urge students to be sensitive in their choices and the ways they frame their discussions. Teachers can decide to let students include explicit lyrics or edited versions of the songs based on their own classroom contexts. Individual Slide – Each student then creates an accompanying Google Slide in which they include the song title and artist, a representative image, a meaningful passage from the song, a statement of protest, and a link to the song. Collaborative Slideshow – Students work in teams for this next part and add their individual slides to a Google team slideshow. They review and listen to their teammates’ songs. As a team, they shape the collaborative slideshow to include: An original, engaging title Team number and member names Team members’ individual slides A collaborative slide for takeaways—They should read across all the songs to look for patterns, connections, larger meanings, and meaningful ideas. References Presentation – Each team presents their slideshow to the class (both individual and collaborative takeaways and connections). This allows students to discuss the range of possibilities and artists and the ways these songs affect social change and awareness. It also introduces students to songs they might not have heard before to consider for future analysis (and listening pleasure). I encourage them to take notes along the way to select songs to which they might want to return. Students then post their team slideshows to a common space (Google Drive or a course LMS). Review and Listen – Students review and listen to at least 5 unfamiliar songs from other teams' protest music collections. They post a bulleted list of their choices along with a sentence or two comment about something they considered for each song. Playlist – As a fun addition to the assignment, teachers can compile a class playlist to share with students for their own music libraries. Check out the Protest Song Playlist from my Fall 2021 class.   Reflections on the Activity The assignment draws on many multimodal components: music, representative visuals, digital representation, and collaborative digital composing. Students enjoy this assignment because it helps them appreciate the ways their critical reading skills can be applied to cultural artifacts and to their lives. And . . . almost everyone loves music! Students focused on songs that protested issues such as: Unity, peace, and strength War involvement and political change Government corruption and abuse of power Civil and human rights Violence Media influence and distortion Gender identity and empowerment Many students said that they heard these songs before but did not stop to consider their meaning or the impact they might have on social awareness and change. I always find it interesting to hear new songs and themes they select and add to my own playlist as they share their work. ... View more

2019’s word was “they,” when searches in dictionaries for that word skyrocketed. 2020 was predictable: “pandemic,” as the whole world tried to take in the full havoc and tragedy the coronavirus was having everywhere—nearly five and a half million dead from the virus as I write this post. Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that Merriam Webster’s Word of the Year for 2021 is “vaccine,” a word people searched the dictionary 601% more often this year than in 2020. In announcing its word of the year, Merriam Webster noted that the word partially symbolizes hope for a return to our normal lives, hopes that are being severely tested by the arrival of the Omicron variant. But Merriam Webster also notes that the word “vaccine” was “also at the center of debates about personal choice, political affiliation, professional regulations, school safety, healthcare inequality, and so much more.” Its choice, then, perfectly captures the confusion and strife we are experiencing—as hope viewed with skepticism and rejection (often based on misinformation). A complex set of associations for a complex time. The Oxford English Dictionary, while giving a nod to “jab” and “Fauci ouchie,” chose a short form of vaccine—“vax”—for its word of the year. Referring to it as “jaunty,” a senior editor for the OED reported that the word “surged dramatically, occurring more than 72 times as frequently” as it did in 2020. Oxford Languages senior editor Fiona McPherson explained that other vaccine-related words increased as well, but “nothing like vax”; “It’s a short, punchy, attention-grabbing word.” The Cambridge Dictionary took a different approach, naming “perseverance” its word of the year: We can officially announce that the Cambridge Dictionary #WordoftheYear2021 is... 🥁 perseverance (noun): continued effort to do or achieve something, even when this is difficult or takes a long time Find out more here: http://ow.ly/e33L50GO1qg   #CambridgeWOTY According to the dictionary’s press release, people around the world have looked up “resilience” 243,000 times in 2021, in large part because of attempts to cope with the pandemic but also because of NASA’s Perseverance rover, which launched in February and is now sending back reports on microbial life from the red planet. I always look forward to seeing what the American Dialect Society chooses as its word of the year, but they are always later in announcing than the dictionaries so we will have to wait for that one. In the meantime, I wonder what our students would choose as word of the year, and I always think this makes a great classroom activity or writing assignment. For months, I was favoring “slog,” which is what I’ve felt I’ve been doing for the last two years. Or perhaps “one-foot-in-front-of-the-other.” “On hold” would work too, if not for word of year then perhaps feeling of the year. At least that’s better than “despair,” which I and millions of others have also been feeling as we wait, and long for, the waning of this pandemic. In the meantime, I think I’ll go with “resilience” and continue to hope. Image Credit: "Yellowed pages from a dictionary" by Horia Varlan, used under a CC BY 2.0 license ... View more

Black Panther: The Ancestral Plane NOTE: The photo is from Unsplash and is free to use under the Unsplash license. On the last day of face-to-face teaching and learning in March 2020, my first-year writing classes watched the first hour of the film Black Panther. This time, we had taken great care to investigate such historical contexts as the Black Panther Party and the 1992 civil unrest in Los Angeles, examining an early scene in the film for visual references. Students added their expertise in the work of Marvel Studios, as we laid the groundwork for self-selected topics for the second writing project.  It was Tuesday. “See you Thursday for Black Panther Part 2,” I said at the end of class. The train at rush hour was unusually empty. More commuters were wearing masks. I wrote in my journal throughout the long ride. On Twitter several hours later I saw the announcement that our university was closing down.  In the ten weeks of lockdown and confusion that followed, there was no Black Panther Part 2. Some students had already seen the film or had access to streaming services and chose to write about Black Panther anyway. But not everyone had access to the film, much less access to wifi. In April, as my city became the epicenter of the pandemic, I watched the film by myself. Although I love Black Panther, I could not bear watching the film again after that, and especially not after Chadwick Boseman died. There were too many reminders of a world that now felt lost and beyond repair. But a few weeks before the 2021 Thanksgiving holiday, we began work on writing project 3, the research paper. Students had worked on Civil Rights Movement writing for most of the semester. For the third writing project, they would need to interrogate their own learning and investigate a research question of their own choosing related to Civil Rights writing. I showed an excerpt from Stanley Nelson’s Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution.  Then, something long-sleeping stirred in my thoughts. I asked: Would you like to watch Black Panther the week of Thanksgiving? The Marvel film? The film would be an optional source for the research paper. Later that week I sent out a follow-up survey. Based on the response, there would be two watch parties, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. We would watch my copy of Black Panther together on Zoom. I envisioned the watch party as self care for students and for me as a community of writers, and as a mental health day that would allow us to keep the routine of the Zoom class. In the past, I used to set aside the week of Thanksgiving as a mental health day for all of us, students and teacher alike. My own mental health days pre-pandemic generally consisted of sleeping late, staying off the internet, and reading a book with the cat curled in my lap. This year, I would instead spend the day on Zoom watching a film that evoked painful memories of the involuntary transition from face-to-face to remote teaching and learning. What was I thinking?   I was thinking about self care as framed by Black lesbian warrior poet Audre Lorde in her book A Burst of Light. In a quote often repeated, and very often misunderstood, Lorde writes: “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” Lorde’s conception of self care is NOT the individualized self-care of bubble baths and essential oils, but self care as enacted by BiPOC women, a care of self that involves activism, community, and joy. Drawing on Lorde’s work, queer feminist critical race theorist Sara Ahmed  suggests, “We reassemble ourselves through the ordinary, everyday and often painstaking work of looking after ourselves; looking after each other.” I reflected once more on what self care might mean in an extended time of uncertainty and grief. Black Panther ‘s plot turns on contested ideas of self care as care for the community. Wakanda’s relationship to the rest of the world is embroiled in constant conflict, and the conflict intersects with questions from a first-year writing course focused on Civil Rights writing. In times of sorrow, exhaustion and loss, what does it mean to bear witness? To break silence? To reckon with history? Black Panther offers multiple challenges to these questions, and ends in Black joy, the joy that rests in self care and the affirmations of community.        ... View more

Today's Tiny Teaching Story is by Heidi Rosenberg, a Senior Lecturer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Wisconsin Business School.   Teaching in the Time of COVID Shana says she’s all right. How can I help? Each student is a square within a square I hold. She nearly pulled her finger off—it got caught so typing is one-fingered. She moved to her own place. She was pregnant, then not. The father of the never-born-baby smacks. I email, it’s her birthday—“happy birthday.” I am the only one who said that.  Her family—This is why I moved out. I say, You didn’t move far enough. She has a scholarship, job, apartment. We come to terms. One thing she asks: how do I stay when there’s nothing?     Submit your own Tiny Teaching Story to tinyteachingstories@macmillan.com! See the Tiny Teaching Stories Launch for submission details and guidelines. ... View more

My recent thinking about this year’s new emojis, how they are used/abused, and especially the role they play in so much online communication led me eventually to several intriguing discussions of tone indicators, a letter or letters placed after a forward slash at the end of a phrase or sentence to indicate the tone (or feelings) intended. Also known as “tone tags,” such indicators are helpful in written communication, where body language or facial expressions can’t help convey tone and feeling. They have been especially useful for neurodivergent people who may not always understand tone or nuances of meaning. As you might expect (or know), they are widely used on social media like Twitter and TikTok. I was interested to look through a few “master lists” of tone indicators, only a couple of which I knew (my absolute favorite is /c for copypasta—look it up!). Here are some examples: /j = joking /hj = half joking /s or /sarc = sarcastic / sarcasm /srs = serious /nsrs = not serious /lh = light hearted As I thought about these “indicators,” I realized that they are not completely new. I knew, for instance, that Jonathan Swift had used special marks in the margins of his text, and that at one point an upside-down question mark had indicated a rhetorical question. (The illustrious British printer Henry Denham seems to have been the inventor of that one.). And I learned that a 17th century British philosopher, John Wilkins, used upside-down exclamation marks to signal irony. But the number and ubiquity of tone indicators in use today surprised me. While tone indicators are typically used at the end of a sentence, etiquette seems to call for including them at the beginning as well as at the end of a sentence when possible, and for never using them as a joke. Writing in Screen Shot, Malavika Pradeen says that [T]one indicators can be used anywhere over text be it personal chats, social media or even emails—absolutely anywhere the tone is ambiguous and hard to pick up on. But one disclaimer is to avoid using them as a joke. It defeats their entire purpose and strips a safe space from neurodivergent people.  So just what are these tone indicators? They're paralinguistic, certainly, but are they like punctuation marks? Or not just “like” punctuation marks but actual punctuation marks? How do our students understand their use—and how and when do they choose to use them? These sound to me like some very good research questions students might like to take on /srs. Image Credit: "Lighted Keyboard 1" by sfxeric, used under a CC BY 2.0 license ... 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 In my classes, I have always recognized the importance of observation and inference as students move back and forth between narration and exposition as they write. This is even more important for digital writers as they learn to read and render situations through multimodal composing. Observation and inference are generally practiced in scientific or social science settings to understand evidence, predict behavior, and generate conclusions, but students benefit from this understanding in composition classes as well. Click to view Observation and Inference Activity slide show.According to Key Differences, observation is “the act of carefully watching a person or object when something is happening.” Observation generally involves the senses and objective perceptions of what is presented. It is hands-on, in-the-present and requires “[attentive] monitoring of the subject under study.” Inference making is “termed as an act of deriving rational conclusion from known facts or circumstances.” It is generally subjective and involves making assumptions based on observations and often involves secondhand information. This is where we theorize, guess, and make connections. Since inference making is subjective, we often find that we can make many inferences based on a single observation. In a common example, we can observe that the grass is wet (senses) but we can make multiple inferences such as: it rained, sprinklers were on, it is in a flood zone, or a dog recently stopped by (among others). Or, we might notice that someone has a lot of food in their refrigerator and make the inference that they are a good cook or preparing for a vacation or that they are really hungry. Basically, these assumptions could all theoretically be true based on what we observe in front of us but could also generate alternate inferences that could be considered true too. In this assignment, I ask students to understand and apply the concepts of observation and inference and immerse themselves in a place where they take images of their observations and generate plausible inferences. They set up a visual, double-entry journal of sorts in which they include their images (observations) along with inferences to make meaningful connections. We then create a collaborative slide show to share their ideas through multimodal examples.   Resources The St. Martin’s Handbook – Ch. 9g, Thinking Critically about Visual Texts The Everyday Writer (also available with Exercises) – Ch.7f, Think Critically about Visual Texts EasyWriter (also available with Exercises) – Ch. 8, Reading and Listening Analytically, Critically, and Respectfully   Steps to the Assignment Help students define the terms observation and inference (see Key Differences article as a starting place). Once I have shared working definitions, I show the class a collection of my own images for an observation and inference making activity in which they call out inferences to practice this cognitive process. I encourage multiple responses to demonstrate the theoretical nature of inference making and ask students to cite evidence from their observations that lead to their conclusions. Next, I challenge students to find a location (outside of class on their own) to collect observations in the form of images (usually around 20). I encourage them to use their senses and get specific as they take pictures of objects, landmarks, people, buildings, landscapes, and other things that involve sensory observation. Then they choose 10 images and create a page in which they include the image (observation) and a short paragraph describing their inferences (meaning, assumption, idea). I also ask them to include an overview statement in which they speak to some of their connections and ideas (observations and inferences).   Once back in class together, each student chooses a strong example from their collection and submits the image and an explanation of their inference to a collaborative Google slide show. (This should just take a few minutes if they are prepared ahead of time.) We share and review them as a class and talk about examples.   Reflections on the Activity A humorous example of how inferences can change with context.I use this activity to get students to understand that the concepts of observation and inference- making are forever present in our lives and in processing our worlds. As digital storytellers, content creators, and writers, we recreate these experiences for our audiences through moving back and forth between observation and inference. I generally have students complete this activity early in the term as it creates a foundation for curation and creation in all the projects throughout the semester and sets the tone for critical reading, writing, and multimodal composition. ... View more

A term that we are starting to see used in reference to COVID-19 in countries like Portugal is the term endemic. A basic definition from the Mayo Clinic suggests at first glance that the difference between pandemic and endemic is the geographic location of outbreaks of the disease. Dr. Pritish Tosh, an infectious disease specialist at the Clinic, explains, “In epidemiologic terms, an outbreak refers to a number of cases that exceeds what would be expected. A pandemic is when there is an outbreak that affects most of the world.” The World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic on March 11, 2020. Since then, the term has become integrated into the public lexicon.   However, Tosh explains, “We use the term endemic when there is an infection within a geographic area that is existing perpetually.” Unfortunately, there is the prospect that COVID could become endemic in most of the world. A closer look at what Tosh means by the words existing perpetually reveals what the future may hold. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (the CDC), “The amount of a particular disease that is usually present in a community is referred to as the baseline or endemic level of the disease. This level is not necessarily the desired level, which may in fact be zero, but rather is the observed level. In the absence of intervention and assuming that the level is not high enough to deplete the pool of susceptible persons, the disease may continue to occur at this level indefinitely. Thus, the baseline level is often regarded as the expected level of the disease.” This definition suggests a level of consistency of infection in a particular area, instead of the spikes in cases involved in an outbreak. Yonatan Grad, Harvard’s Melvin J. and Geraldine L. Glimcher Associate Professor of Immunology and Infectious Diseases, reports, “The expectation that COVID-19 will become endemic essentially means that the pandemic will not end with the virus disappearing; instead, the optimistic view is that enough people will gain immune protection from vaccination and from natural infection such that there will be less transmission and much less COVID-19-related hospitalization and death, even as the virus continues to circulate.” Grad adds that with both the first round of SARS in 2003 and with Ebola in 2014, public health measures stopped the spread and brought the outbreaks to an end. It can be discouraging to think about a level of COVID that is expected. Remember the CDC’s caveats: “In the absence of intervention and assuming that the level is not high enough to deplete the pool of susceptible persons, the disease may continue to occur at this level indefinitely.” Also remember Grad’s report: “the optimistic view is that enough people will gain immune protection from vaccination and from natural infection such that there will be less transmission and much less COVID-19-related hospitalization and death, even as the virus continues to circulate.” We have lived with this reality with the flu for quite some time. Many Americans accept that receiving flu shot each fall is the best protection against the flu, which still kills thousands every year. The flu vaccines do not provide guaranteed protection against the flu because there are different variants of the flu, as there are with COVID. The flu vaccine is formulated annually based on scientists’ best guess as to what variants will be widespread in the coming year. Regardless, both the CDC’s and Grad’s statements remind us that we have some control over how the baseline or endemic level ends up being defined. Communities have the means to intervene through increased vaccination rates, which will affect the extent to which the disease continues to circulate. Historically, Americans have seldom been vocal or argumentative about whether or not they choose to be vaccinated against the flu. Nevertheless, government mandates and peer pressure have made vaccination against COVID a heated political issue. To an extent that many of us never expected, the resistance to a life-saving vaccine is helping to ensure that COVID will exist perpetually.   Image Credit: Health checks in India by Gwydion M. Williams is licensed under CC by 2.0. ... View more